AMBIRE LINEARIS: FINALLY

On May 14th I joined my good friend Daniel Davis on stage for the first-ever live show of his musical project Carl Sagan's Ghost. I created some amazing visuals to go with the performance... They're a little blown out in the performance video but if you hit play on both videos below you can see the performance and the visuals at the same time...

Carl Sagan's Ghost | Live at SPACE - 05-14-2010 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

Carl Sagan's Ghost Live Visuals | Live at SPACE - 05-14-2010-01h.31m.48s.25f from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

SCHALLGUTnetlabel slideshow

Here's a glimpse at some of the artwork I have been creating for German netlabel Schallgut:

10 Seconds

I am now 18 days into my latest project; 10 Seconds. The plan is to take 10 seconds of video everyday for 365 days. My hope is to learn more about the process of filming and color grading/post production. I am using a Canon T1i DSLR as my main video capture device and Adobe After Effects CS3 for most of my post processing. I'm posting daily to my vimeo account. Here are a few of my favorite clips so far...

10 Seconds 2010-03-07 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

10 Seconds 2010-03-12 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

10 Seconds 2010-03-13 from Kurt Lorenz on Vimeo.

The General Analysis of Nature EP (2010)

I am proud to announce the release of my first official EP, "The General Analysis of Nature." This EP was conceived and recorded in 20 days as part of the RPM Challenge.  

Cover art by: Kurt Lorenz

CLICK DOWNLOAD in the player above for a free download of this album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire... 

Conceived and recorded between February 5, and February 25, 2010

Released by: Kurt Lorenz 

Release/catalogue number: KL|EP001 

Release date: Feb 25, 2010  
Cover art by: Kurt Lorenz

"The General Analysis of Nature" by Kurt Lorenz is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported


 

RPM Challenge 2010

This is The Challenge - Record an album in 28 days, just because you can. That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something."

www.rpmchallenge.com 

SCHALLGUTnetlabel Team Member

I am now the official Graphic Designer/Artist for SCHALLGUTnetlabel. The label is brand new (January 2010) and they are just celebrating their first release: #SLG001 | SOFA TUNES | WE GOT for which I created the artwork.

I am hard at work on the cover of the next release and it should be out around March 1, 2010.

I have started a set on my flickr page where I am storing images that their artists can browse through and pick out art for their releases...

USTREAM

Over the last 6 months or so I have really been struggling with putting my live set together. For me the problem is how to make an Ableton Live laptop set "live" enough to be entertaining. I'm trying to run visuals through VDMX while playing my Ableton set as well... What I really needed was a way to practice live, without an actual audience staring at me. So of course the internet is the answer. Enter USTREAM (http://www.ustream.tv/) 

USTREAM gives me the ability to stream my live set and (with some 3rd party software) visuals. I can also record my broadcast and view/embed it. 

Below is a recording of my first live streaming set on USTREAM, follow me there: http://www.ustream.tv/kurtlrnz

The Patience of a Saint I - by Carl Sagan's Ghost

Recording artist Daniel Davis, a.k.a. Carl Sagan's Ghost is a fellow electronic musician and Seattleite. We met on Twitter when I signed up for his MAAP: Excursion One (Multiple Artist Ambient Project). I was a few days too late to be included in the first round of that project but we hooked up in person for the Ghostly 10 Year show at Decibel Festival. I was invited by Daniel to participate in a (January 2010?) live performance of his forthcoming album At The End It All... featuring The Patience of a Saint I, II & III.

I have offered to compile some live visuals for the performance and below is one of my first layers...

Design Season

I have been really busy at work. It seems like fall is design season for me. We have been asked to reduce spending by 5% across the board so that means designing for grayscale. Luckily the web doesn't cost more if you use color graphics. Here are a few of my latest designs.

Hard at Work

I am currently working on two new tracks. I hope to have them completed in the next few weeks. I have also been digging deeper into some of the music apps that I have been collecting on my iPhone, specifically SunVox, JR Hexatone, 8Bitone and iSequence. These apps are very easy to purchase and play with, but sometimes I have a hard time slipping them into my Ableton Live workflow. I usually get so caught up in Ableton that the songs kind of finish themselves before I can even get to the iPhone. I guess I just need to start by capturing the output from the iPhone and building a song off of that.