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58 Aliayta 25 06 20

Unlike Liam, I am drawn to melody. It is inherent to the role of my instrument in almost every context, and I am constantly working to improve the way that I create and hear harmony and background textures. Instead of challenging myself, like Liam, I gave into my natural inclinations, first playing his beautiful melody, then creating a short variation on it. Yes, I am afraid of harmony.

57 Liam 23 06 20

In the last little while I’ve been thinking about my relationship with melody. A lot of Paul’s art is very analogous to how I work with sound - we share a propensity for interlocking patterns and subtle gradients. A few months ago, @jaredmillermusic remarked with regards to an orchestral piece of mine that I’m good at generating interesting background textures, but could stand to include more foreground-type elements. In a subsequent conversation with @matthewaasen we discussed the possibility that, being primarily rhythm-section players, we tend to think more in terms of background textures when we compose. I’ve been thinking about these conversations when composing lately, and trying to figure out how melody fits into my aesthetic. Which is a very long winded way of saying: today I tried to write a melody.

56 Paul 12 06 20

55 Aliayta 10 06 20

54 Liam 09 06 20

I loved Paul’s invocation of slug time - it reminded me of the writings of Gerard Grisey in which he invokes notions of whale time and insect time in order to illustrate different scales of temporal perception. For this piece, I decided to try a reverse process to Paul’s. First, I recorded the first few bars of the C Minor Prelude from book one Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier two octaves lower than written, and at a very slow speed. I then experimented with both speeding up and slowing down the recording. Played two octaves higher than recorded (in other words at normal pitch), the sped up low piano notes sound strikingly reminiscent of a harpsichord.

53 Paul 06 06 20

I decided to base my submission almost entirely on those beautiful Banana Slug markings that I regrettably haven’t seen since moving to London. By slowing both the video and audio down substantially, I hoped to create a contemplative, sluggy universe that operates at a time scale completely unlike our own.

52 Aliayta 04 06 20

I was tempted to create accompanying material to Liam’s video that was either spooky or jokingly light - perhaps with a Scott Joplin twang. The musical direction I went in instead occupies more of a middle ground, fitting for the crucial ecological service these tireless slugs, worms, and snails provide.

51 Liam 02 06 20

Inspired by Paul’s post, I went looking for some real life creepy crawlers on my morning walk. As usual, Morrell Nature Sanctuary did not disappoint. This video stars a Harpaphe Haydeniana Millipede, several different Pacific Banana Slugs (Ariolimax columbianus), a snail eating a leaf, and a black slug and several ants eating a dead earthworm.

50 Paul 31 05 20

Luckily for me, our fiftieth(!) submission turned out to be my most straightforward. In continuing with the last couple of weeks’ “commercials” theme, I paired Liam and Aliayta’s music with a Creepy Crawlers commercial from 1993. Truth be told, I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it for some sort of art project for quite a while. One-part nostalgic throwback and two-parts systemic critique, I’m grateful that I’m not more of a mess than I already am given how boys were taught to socialize in the ‘90s! In any case, I simply coupled the music with the video footage without any other editing as the overall rhythm worked well on its own in my opinion.

49 Aliayta 27 05 20

30 minutes was not enough time to do Liam’s piece justice. As I got to the end of my first take recording it, I messed up, became frustrated, and re-recorded myself several times. I felt the effect of the overlaid recordings was interesting and left my mistakes in.

48 Liam 26 05 20

This piece is intended to be a sonic representation of Paul’s last post. The upper voice is the fidgeting animated fire, the middle voice is the static monochrome room, and the lower voice is the glitching and jumping frame. I must confess I spent a total of 35 minutes on this one; dynamics take time. Stepping back a bit, I have a strong suspicion that this is a rip-off of the 4th movement of #ruthcrawfordseeger’s String Quartet.

47 Paul 23 05 20

Similar to my last post, I decided to work with an image of a staged, contemporary domestic space. I wanted to match the eerie atmospheric vibe of the music without overpowering it by adding visuals that would have been overwhelming in their own right. The animated fireplace is actually the product of ripping and photographing paper, the subtleties of which have been more or less lost as the piece developed into its final form.

46 Aliayta 20 05 20

Liam’s use of material from commercials felt particularly relatable to me in a time where it is very easy to get lost in the digital world. I isolated phrases from Liam’s work that popped out to me, sang them (disclaimer: definitely not a vocalist), autotuned myself to add an element of mechanization to my voice, and added in some scratch sounds for extra ambience.

45 Liam 18 05 20

I really liked the idea of creating an idealized digital environment for some banal piece or pieces of found material. Continuing with the theme of commercials, I recorded another youtube ad, then extracted the pitches as midi information. At times it is unclear whether it sounds like a machine pretending to be human, or vice versa.

44 Paul 16 05 20

Despite knowing that the source material of Liam’s music came from youtube commercials, the final effect reminded me of the sound of flipping through channels before digital TV. As such, I decided to take my submission in a slightly nostalgic direction by saving photographs of people trying to sell their older TVs and cropping in to save only the screens themselves, usually with some sort of reflection from the room/photographer preserved.

43 Aliayta 14 05 20

In responding to Liam, I identified the patches of melodic content and expanded on them. I wanted to create a layer that was interwoven with the sound of Liam’s sliced youtube commercials, improvising with his content, not a separate entity.

42 Liam 12 05 20

This piece is assembled from lofi recordings of youtube commercials, manually sliced using the volume knob on my audio interface. Although static, Paul’s piece suggests undulating, perhaps uncanny motion. I imagine my piece as some kind of shambling golem, stitched together from shreds of internet detritus.

41 Paul 09 05 20

Artist Katharina Grosse once said that she prefers her art to be “thought-based” as opposed to “idea-based”. It may seem to be a semantical statement, though I think it succinctly gets around the problem that artists often have of trying to explain their work. A thought, according to Grosse’s logic, is something fleeting and illogical, a perhaps brief impulse that initiates the art-making process without dictating its outcome. I’m trying to be the artist whose work emerges into something meaningful in concrete terms as opposed to the illustration of a preconceived idea. In the spirit of this goal, my response to Aliayta’s piece is a photograph of a sculpture I made with a wine glass and torn construction paper held together with colourful paper clips.

40 Aliayta 04 05 20

I improvised freely over Liam’s piece until I felt the textures of our combined work had a cohesion I was satisfied with.

39 Liam 01 05 20

The horizontal bands of colour in Paul’s piece brought to mind the individual voices in a contrapuntal texture. I’ve been wanting to experiment more with using software synthesizers to play midi files created in notation software. This piece is a 4-voice canon based on a 6-note subject, played by four synths. In creating this, I rapidly realized that I do not have much of a grasp of how to use these particular instruments effectively, leading to the rather chaotic results.

38 Paul 29 04 20

Back in 2011-2012 I completed my BFA with a series of large paintings made from small linear marks. Albeit on a much smaller scale, this technique came in handy when simplifying Liam’s submission to just the staves: horizontal lines from left to right.

37 Liam 10 04 20

For a while I’ve been wanting to make a submission in one of my primary mediums: notation. I knew that writing by hand was time-consuming, but as can be seen, I still underestimated how long it would take to use all the instruments I laid out. The piece on the page is an adaptation of Aliayta’s last submission for string orchestra. I liked the multiple layers of microtonal bends, and as I’ve been revisiting some Ligeti scores recently, decided to make it into a canon.

36 Aliayta 31 03 20

Paul’s work reminded me of shattered glass. I threw my keys around my room and captured the sound of them hitting various surfaces. The act of throwing my keys felt symbolic during this time. I then improvised on top of the recorded sounds.

35 Paul 29 03 20

This week was a bit of a cheat. Instead of spending thirty minutes creating a submission, I spent nine hours working on an animation to accompany Aliayta’s 33 piece for a festival entry. If we’re successful you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the future, but until then, here’s a screenshot to wet your whistles.

34 Liam 27 03 20

Aliayta’s piece has a feeling of completeness about it, such that trying to add more layers would likely only detract from it. As a group we’ve recently been discussing wanting to expand our visual palette, so this piece is an attempt to do that. The footage is of our last group call, filming my phone with my laptop camera. I tried to apply similar principles to the video editing as I do to editing sound. The result is a little bit like a fever dream brought on by our new world of exclusively screen-based socializing. While it didn’t occur to me while I was making it, years of obsessively watching @timanderic Awesome Show Great Job have probably had a significant effect on my attempts at video editing. @eccopn Replica is probably in there somewhere too.

33 Aliayta 25 03 20

Not only was I completely taken by the sound world that Paul created with feedback loops, but phone calls currently occupy a particularly relevant place in these isolated times. I used Paul’s (and by default Liam’s) work without altering it, treating it as an instrumentalist I was improvising with.

32 Paul 22 03 20

Have you ever called someone sitting next to you and then put both phones on speaker? If there’s any lag in the signal (there’s always a lag in the signal) you can create an interesting if not creepy feedback loop between the two phones. For my submission this week, I did exactly this with two phones, placing them next to my computer speakers with Liam’s piece playing.

The accompanying visuals, on the other hand, were made by taping 3 different pens together and drawing absent-minded circular marks for 30 minutes. The final effect was achieved with aggressive in-phone editing, a technique that I hadn’t considered before #thirtyminutes but one that has become my calling card, apparently.

31 Liam 20 03 20

In an attempt to ‘burn’ something I had created, I recorded a short piano improvisation, then recorded it from my computer speakers into my phone. I then recorded this from my phone speakers back into my computer’s built-in microphone. In total I went through this process five times, winding up with a highly degraded version of the original. The piece starts with the original recording, which gradually fades out as the successively more degraded fade in and out one by one, ending with the most ‘burnt’.

30 Aliayta 16 03 20

I cut out paper trees from a notebook of to-do lists I’d made over the past two years, created a paper-tree forest with them, burned them, and then compiled the process into a video for which I created some audio (the sounds of me clapping and rubbing my hands together in an emulation of fire-building). Welcome to quarantine friends. Seems like we’re in it for the long haul. What better way to spend it than catching up on thirty minutes posts?

29 Paul 14 03 20

I chose to respond to Liam’s first entirely visual submission (!) by turning the layout of his collage into a comicstrip. I also wanted to carry forward the deforestation theme (as a Londoner from Vancouver Island the issue resonates with me as deeply as ever). To give credit where it’s due, thanks to @davidshrigley for the great work. I hope you’re staying healthy and will continue to provide a sense of clarity for this shaken world.

28 Liam 11 03 20

The shape and nature of Aliayta and Paul’s most recent submissions reminded me of slash piles (lumps of discarded plant-matter left in the wake of clear-cut logging). Lately I’ve been exploring the backcountry around my home in Nanaimo BC, and devastated areas populated only by a few lone trees and clumps of slash piles are a common sight. Initially I had hoped to assemble a visually chaotic pile in line with the last two submissions, but my total lack of skill in manipulating images put serious limits on that idea. My submission is a crude photo collage of pictures I’ve taken in the last year of logged areas in various stages of destruction and regrowth. Finding material for the collage proved somewhat challenging in spite of the ubiquity of the environments mentioned above, as usually when I’m taking pictures I’m semi-consciously trying to capture something beautiful, and clear-cut wastelands are anything but. Perhaps in future I’ll focus more on the uglier side of my surroundings. If you’re interested in learning more about how logging practices affect the environment and BC’s rapidly disappearing old-growth forests, check out @ancientforestalliance

PS: I’m also reading #thegoldenspruce by John Vaillant right now and it is an amazing book.

27 Aliayta 10 03 20

As soon as I saw Paul’s piece I wanted to somehow recreate it. I spent about ten minutes ripping a magazine generously donated by my flatmate (@clouddenke) into small pieces, and then used my remaining twenty minutes to edit the audio I recorded. The result is something very rough around the edges, both in the poor quality of the video, and the one dimensionality of the audio (only including samples from the video you see). The difference between the music I normally create versus Paul’s images, is the experience of time for the audience listening to a piece unfold rather than immediately taking in an image all at once. I was interested in reaching an end result (swipe left) as identical to Paul’s work as possible. But the roughness of the process which you see in the video contrasts the sleek and precise nature of Paul’s work.

26 Paul 07 03 20

For my response this week I wrote a few words suggested by Liam’s piece (Bach, Sprinklers, Noise) on differently coloured paper. I then ripped them up and piled them, followed by the usual iPhone photo and editing.

25 Liam 04 03 20

I decided to try to copy Aliayta’s methodology exactly. Thankfully I was able to unearth a recording of a sprinkler I made in 2014 on Woodley Island in Eureka, California. The sprinkler (plus some swallow song) is paired with a recording of me playing piano, incidentally also from 2014. An exciting prize (TBA) is being offered to the first person to guess what piece I’m playing! In light of a recent conversation that the three of us had, the finished collage is in sonata form. While it didn’t cross my mind while I was making it, the piece is vaguely reminiscent of some recent electronic works by David J. Foley (@finneganstake2).

24 Aliayta 02 03 20

Today I got home late after a concert with the @echeaquartet, and was therefore unable to record any original sounds for my submission. Having visited Nigel Henderson’s collage pieces at the @tate today while on a rehearsal break in Pimlico, I was interested in manifesting the same concept aurally. I used a field recording of a sprinkler in Patagonia (swipe left for footage of me sampling said sprinkler), and cannibalized recordings of myself I already had on my computer. I felt the live sample of the sprinkler, combined with recycled and manipulated material related to the contrast of the sunset, and leaping horse in Paul’s work.

23 Paul 01 03 20

In 2002, Canadian artist Kevin Schmidt made “Long Beach Led Zep”, a video piece in which he played the entirety of Stairway to Heaven on electric guitar at Long Beach, British Columbia, with the sun setting behind him. I appreciated his attempt to bring these over-sentimentalised, thought of as “cheesy” experiences together in order to find new ground. With Schmidt’s work in mind, I tackled the soaring, Pachebel’s Canon-y music that the three of us have been developing over the past week by pairing the silhouette of a leaping horse with an ocean sunset. Of course, I couldn’t help tweaking and cropping the new image to satisfy the inner formalist within me. Also, check out the book “Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste” by Carl Wilson (long live Celine Dion!).

22 Liam 26 02 20

That C major triad just won’t go away. In the interest of incorporating more playing into my submissions, I decided to try to recreate Aliayta’s piece as faithfully as I could using a synthesizer. The variety of changing timbres that Aliayta was able to conjure with the violin lent itself quite readily to working with a synthesizer. The result sounds like I’m trying to be #vangelis and I’m pretty ok with that.

21 Aliayta 24 02 20

I used the descending C major triad from Paul’s last piece, playing it on the violin, and transitioning between sul tasto and sul pont (bowing on the fingerboard, and bridge), to distort the sound. Overall, the story behind this piece is pretty vanilla (despite the global shortage) in its creation. But, to add a little spice to the story: the smell of miso gravy on the stove, while I was working on this, definitely contributed a comforting atmosphere that may have influenced the serene feeling of this week’s submission. I have been using a borrowed @shure SM59 mic that will need to be returned to its owner soon, and I am considering investing.

20 Paul 22 02 20

I’ve been visiting my wife’s grandparents this week and have had access to her Opa’s Yamaha keyboard. Given that Liam wanted to incorporate more playing into his submissions, I figured it was my chance to follow suit. Unlike with Liam’s work, however, I was less reliant on attempted synchronicity then I was on foggy memories from my childhood piano lessons.

19 Liam 19 02 20

Lately I’ve been wanting to try to include more ‘playing’ in my submissions; most of them so far have been heavily focused on assembling and editing audio files in a way that doesn’t engage performance skills. For this week, I loaded the altered violin sounds from my previous submission into a sampler so they could be played in real time. I treated Aliayta’s video as a visual score, trying to play two different sounds every time the picture changed. The two sounds do not synchronize perfectly with one another, and if the track were to be paired with the video, it would not be perfectly synchronous either - this is element of human inaccuracy is part of the point. Sadly I didn’t have time to sample any classic soul this time around.

18 Aliayta 16 02 20

When I saw Paul’s piece, my first instinct was to manifest the “start” and “stop” instructions by running around London for thirty minutes taking photos of stop signs. Unfortunately for my idea, but luckily for the hangover I was battling at the time, there seem to be no stop signs in London (can you tell us why @cityoflondon?). Instead, I created this. As I was working on it @diannaross and the @supremes were on my mind: “Stop! In the name of love.”

17 Paul 15 02 20

The most obvious difference between what I do (most of the time) and what Liam and Aliayta do (most of the time) is the issue of time. My practice isn’t ‘time-based’ in that my work doesn’t usually unfold to the viewer over a set duration as with film, theatre, or music. The closest my work comes to being ‘durational’ is when a drawing or collage clearly reveals its making to the viewer (think an entire episode of the Discovery Channel’s “How It’s Made” condensed into a single frame to be consumed in one glance). The concept of rhythm and groove, of course, is a completely different thing, so my set challenge this week was to take on the robotic groove from Liam’s 16 piece in one mouthful and to spit it out as a JPG. The outcome is a reverse paint-by-numbers drawing with the viewer left with the instructions rather than the final product. Also, instead of numbers, I’ve used the binary-esque instructions to either ‘Start’ or ‘Stop’. The source material is from a colouring book of designs by the National Trust’s socialist darling, William Morris, the man known for such quotes as “nothing should be made by man’s labour which is not worth making” and “if a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry, he had better shut up.” Good luck, and please send images of the completed drawing to 30thirtyminutes@gmail.com.

16 Liam 12 02 20

I couldn’t help but carry a celestial, dream-like feeling from Paul’s piece into working on this submission. What came out sounds like a strange echo of Aliayta’s piece, perhaps a computer dreaming about the music that has passed through it. This once again uses only sounds that Aliayta made; chopped, re-pitched, stretched etc.

15 Aliayta 10 02 20

Initially when I first saw Paul’s last piece, I felt there was something very dark - the barely visible hand, the closed window, and the dark and mysterious night sky. But today, when I revisited the image before beginning my thirty minutes, I felt completely different. The stars were inviting, the hand was opening the window, not trapping me inside, and I was mesmerized by the work’s beauty with a new found optimism in Paul’s work. I think the end result is something closer to a Disney film soundtrack than Paul’s piece, but hey @disney, we are taking commissions! The pizzicato and other percussive sounds were created by plucking and tapping a @zimt chocolate bar on the strings of my violin (zimt tastes and sounds delicious).

14 Paul 08 02 20

Here I am, back again with a submission after missing out on last week’s rotation. My lovely grandma, Betty Anderson, passed away on January 26, and my two fellow artists were left to pick up the slack in my absence. Though losing a loved one is always tough, her passing was also a life-affirming experience that has sustained me creatively over the past couple of weeks.

I felt a bit nostalgic upon listening to Liam’s 13 submission as it’s been some years since I’ve heard him integrate field recordings into his work. With many possible directions to travel in for my response, I chose to focus on the marriage of what sounds like a piano in a large room (inside) and what are clearly natural environmental sounds (outside). For my piece, I started by making a small paper box with holes cut in its sides (inside) and used my phone to photograph through it to capture the dusty computer screen beyond (outside). I’d like to share that the screen previously belonged to my grandma, a detail that’s obviously not typically available for the viewer, but something that was meaningful for me at the time of making.

13 Liam 05 02 20

I found the interaction of different layers and sources in Aliayta’s last piece to be particularly compelling; not just a graphic score/drawing, but in a notebook with a page removed, some writing on another page unreadable but faintly visible, tracings of flower petals, and the bright yellow petals themselves providing a frame along with the deep blue background. I started with a couple of piano improvisations made while trying to maintain a mental image of Aliayta’s work, then layered in various field recordings that seemed to fit with the setting and feeling of the piece.

12 Aliayta 02 02 20

Previously I have been treating Paul’s works as graphic scores for my improvisations. With the order shifted this week, I decided I would instead try to visually describe Liam’s piece. Having never attempted a graphic score before, I was unsatisfied with my ability to transcribe Liam’s piece onto a page. As I was working, a wind blew flowers and leaves from the tree I was working under in Buenos Aires onto my page. I felt the flowers and detritus added something to the score I was unable to articulate myself. When I was reaching the end of my 30 minutes, I asked @emilyeearl what she thought about the flowers. Prompted by our conversation traced the flowers onto the score.

11 Liam 22 01 20

This piece started out as an improvisation layered on top of Aliayta’s piece. Last week’s responses contained a lot of discrete attacks, and while Aliayta’s most recent did feature various breaks in the texture, it struck me as being overall much more sustained. Eventually I built up enough layers of sustained organ material that it began to seem like its own thing. The result is perhaps an unconscious tribute to early Tangerine Dream.

10 Aliayta 19 01 20

I’ve felt our chain of responses has become increasingly dark over the past few submissions. In Paul’s 09 work there is a clear sense of contrast between two components, both of which I feel are quite bleak. My thirtyminutes this week were completed in a steaming hot cabin in Patagonia, constantly interrupted by a plumber working out some kinks in a communal bathroom. The frustration I felt throughout the process is likely palpable in the piece.

09 Paul 18 01 20

Liam’s work is often about shimmering textures and nuanced grit, though I felt it particularly so in his 08 piece. Starting with an image of a spring, I traced it, cut it, stencilled it, cut it again, photographed it, uploaded it to photoshop and fiddled with the sliders.

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