I got one idea for a way of collaboration – inspired by the work of Conrad Schnitzler. I had the idea to take one of his basic principles on which he has been working his whole life: in his early works in the seventies he started to work with several simple cassette players. Each one served like a track in a mixer. It was possible to influence two basic parameters: play/stop and volume. In his walking performances alone (as 3-track mixer) or together with another musician (another 3-track mixer) or with several musicians (each one playing one track), as you see in the stills from the videos:
He was working in producing 1000 different cassettes (= tracks) to be played in this way in a concert (but didn’t finish the 1000).
So my idea is to work (with digital means) in a similar way: produce 1000 tracks that can be played together. I did some work in Ableton and prepared 8 tracks, mixing them (with some more parameters than just play/stop and volume) and recording this mix:
It would be very easy to create a setup for a lot of tracks (basically this can be done in each sound editor who is able to handle multi tracks).
Love this idea. Let’s do it. 1000 elektrodomestika tracks. I am curious on the different ways we can play with polyphony with that amount of voices. Perhaps we can plan to have different networked performances at different stages of the production processes. Maybe every 50 or 100 tracks. Having some sort of incentives to reach specific number of tracks might be interesting. And of course, playing with the idea of using some system of categories and adding metadata to each track is something that we should explore. I am looking forward to this collab!