Autechre Three unique live recordings from Spec.Dev (Jeremy Bible & Jason Henry)

Collaboration Chronicles : Three unique live performances were recorded over the last year each differing stylistically.

A fourth set again unique in style and content was recorded 2007.10.13 during our performance on WRUW 91.1 in Cleveland. We are very excited about this latest direction and feel like it is what we were looking for all along. This will be our direction as we to retire into the studio for the winter season to record our debut studio album. This evolution in sound has also prompted us to reconsider our collaborative project stage name and have decided to simply go by "Jeremy Bible & Jason Henry".

Below are the three downloadable performance recordings that led up to the current state of our collaborative direction.

Date : 2007-12-08

Location : Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Arts : CLEVELAND, OHIO, USA

Description : Performing as Databasis Basics this was our first collaborative live performance. Stylistically this performance falls primarily within the vein of "minimal" techno. Neither of us having laptops at the time, the performance was done off of one single core computer running a single abelton live set displayed on two 19in flat panel monitors. For control we utilized several controllers between the two of us including a Novation X-Station, two Evolution UC-33s, an Evolution UC-16, an M-Audio Trigger Finger, and two custom painted usb qwerty keyboards. The soundsystem and monitoring situation was crap. It was an interesting learning experience to say the least.

Date : 2007-02-10

Location : High Tek Soul @ The View presented by Tek-Know? : CLEVELAND, OHIO, USA

Description : Performing as Databasis Basics again this was our second collaborative live performance. After our performance at MOCA in December we made a drastic stylitic shift almost without realizing it. We simply started playing with different ideas and went with the flow during our "jam sessions" and ended up with the following sound that combined several influences from Autechre style electronica mixed with some dubstep aspects. The day of we ran into many hiccups starting first thing in the morning. Being a cold winter static filled day two power sources on two different pc's went on the fritz. Jason had recently acquired a dual-core laptop and the plan was to play on two synced machines. After the hardware failures Jeremy went out, purchased a dual-core laptop that day, set it up and installed the necessary software. However with our desktop machines on the fritz I had no way to get my data off of my internal SATA drive. After calling some friends and local stores our final solution was to stop at my place of employment on the way to Cleveland and throw the drive into one of the SATA compatible desktops to retreive the data. It was crazy...we were tweeking the laptop, installing software, the whole ride up, and even at the venue we had to use their net access to get one more peice of software that slipped our minds. To our surprise we managed to get everything together to go through with our performance although when it came time to perform we had lost communication to one of our outboard synths requireing us to cut out a couple tracks we had hoped to perform. All in all another great learning experience. Sound was pretty good...our heavy low end parts had the place shaking.

Date : 2007-09-14

Location : Opening for Thomas Dolby @ The Tangier : AKRON, OHIO, USA

Description : Once again a shift in style further towards a more experimental electronica sound. Also a name change to Spec.Dev. This was actually the second time we had performed this set under the new guise. The first time being at Tek-Know's ReVision at the Lime Spider. However we only managed to record a short period of that set. A strange show indeed opening for Thomas Dolby and at an upscale joint. The sound was fantastic though...a fantastic acoustic space...the best we had played on yet.

NOW..........................

Date : 2007-10-13

Location : Live on WRUW 91.1 FM Case Western Reserve's radio station : CLEVELAND, OHIO, USA

Description : Our latest style shift has taken us even further into minimalistic experimental sounds utilizing an even larger amount of found sound field/phonography recordings due in part to our growing interest in the works of classical experimental and musique concrete pioneers such as Luc Ferrari, Pascal Comlade, Pierre Henry, Francois Bayle, Stockhausen along with modern experimental counterparts such as Alva Noto, Nurse With Wound, Daniel Menche, Richard Chartier, and many more. Out of all our performances this one by far was the most relaxed, rewarding, and natural feeling performance experience thus far. The monitoring situation was great and content wise we were very happy with the results of this new direction while listening to the recording during the car ride home.

We are not prepared to share this recording publicly yet as it will function as the basis of our studio album(s?). We will however be performing a very similar set on 2007-10-18 at The Grog shop in Cleveland opening for Digitalism. This will be our last performance for the season before focusing our attention towards strictly studio based efforts.

A crazy but educational first year working together.

|||||Additional download : Ableton Live Machine's used for the MOCA set.

dbbMachines.zip contains two ableton live .adg files.

These are the two main machines we built and used at the MOCA set.

dbbBassMachine.adg is a bass machine with a bunch of arps, note lengths, two instances of operator, and some fx to tweek and get some funky, crazy, and dissonant bass lines out of....its pretty diverse and tweekable. Toggle between different arps lengths, speeds, and note lenghts to get crazy variations on the same pattern.

dbbDrumMachine.adg is a crazy drum machine we built that has 8 or 9 impulses in a rack. Just build a kit into each impulse and use the pitch knob in intervals of 12 to dial between the drum kits. Then each kit has midi muters too. Just dig through the rack heirarchy to discover some crazy tweekability and control. The random function is nice for adding some breaks to the beat. With pitch you can offset your sounds at non multiple of 12 intervals for some interesting breaks as well. Excellent machine for live beat tweeking. You can turn a single midi drum pattern into several different beats and rhythms by just turning various knobs.

spec.dev.experimedia.net