Void Femmes live at SIXNINEHAUS (Toronto, ON) - July 7th, 2024

I performed a show in a Toronto backyard on July 7th, 2024. For this set, I "played" a typewriter I found at an antique shop in a small town near Parry Sound, Ontario.

To lightly go over the setup, the typewriter is connected to a Mutable Instruments Ears module via a contact mic. Ears gives me a gate, envelope, and raw audio output that I'm using to control the rest of the synth. I don't want to get too bogged down in the details so the basic structure is that there are 4 main "voices" at play:

1. Mutable Instruments Rings getting excited by the raw contact mic audio. This is the main "melodic" instrument you're hearing.
2. A basic subtractive synth voice, with a hard sync from a second oscillator to give it strange upper partials.
3. A "noise" voice from the output of a self-oscillating delay (Dreadbox)
4. A field recording of some birds in the forest at Thingvellir National Park, Iceland. I made this recording in June of 2018.

All voices were run through a Befaco STMIX mixer, which I use performatively throughout.

The melodic progression is controlled by Mutable Instruments Marbles, which is taking the gate from Ears to advance the clock. There's a 50/50 coin toss happening which chooses whether the first or second voices get a new control voltage.

So, I forgot this video existed.

I remember this camera being set up and being asked if I was ok with being filmed (I was), but I had no idea the video had ever ended up online. It was such a lovely surprise to stumble across it this evening! I know that you typically should avoid youtube comment sections, but I did find it quite funny to see a couple people saying this was piano music, to some effect.

If you want to know what I was writing during this performance, you can hear the resulting text in Erin Corbett's set from the same show, where she did a cold-reading of it in an improvised song of her own.