Tony Memmel Recorded, Cassie is done!May 11th, 2010

It’s been a very eventful couple of weeks…
Cassie is now completely finished with Grad school!  Within the same week, she had her thesis show and a Graduate art show at a gallery in Chicago at 230 W. Superior.  She had a great turnout at both shows.

Look at that great looking family!

I also spent three days and close to 40 hours recording Tony Memmel and his wife, Lesleigh, several weeks ago.  It was a very busy weekend and I know that we are going to end up with a final product that we will all be incredibly proud of.

We also had the opportunity to see Cassie’s cousin, Alyssa Czisny ice skate in ‘Stars on Ice’.  She was amazing, and we wish her much more continued success in the future.

Alyssa on the right with the Grandparents

Cassie’s Art Show and OpeningApril 25th, 2010

It’s been a very eventful and busy month!  I attended several great art openings, including our friends Darren and Ann.  I also saw some great electronic music concerts including my friend and past-classmate Tim, and the Annex group concert:

To add to the excitement, Cassie just finished setting up her show today and it will be on display at gallery 214 on campus at NIU.  It is turning out to be a fantastic show!  (As if I would have expected any less)

The show features a dollhouse (shown in progress above), as well as drawings, gouache paintings and photographs.

She also has a simple new website up that I helped design:  www.cassiemarie.com

May is shaping up to be a very busy and eventful month, and Cassie is looking forward to finishing up her final semester of Grad school.  Great stuff is to come!

April ArrivesApril 6th, 2010

A new month begins, and so does the new quarter at the Institute of Art.  Additionally, my wife is hard at work preparing for her gallery show at the end of the month as she nears the end of Grad school.  Over the Easter weekend, I had a great time visiting friends in Madison and my parents and I even went golfing on a breezy but fun excursion.

Cassie has been showing her work at several galleries, including the ‘ARC’ gallery in Chicago, and the Graduate Art Association show at the Annex studio in Dekalb.

We also had the pleasure of seeing my friend Evan Merz perform his thesis electro-acoustic concert, as well as a show by our professor, Dr. James Phelps along with program alumni, Michael Taylor.  As you can see, they had a very loud and ‘rawkus’ setup going on:

I’m starting to get some work done on the Mix Methods site and am working on some new songs.  I am also looking forward to a new upcoming recording project with my good friend Tony Memmel.  We are also going to see our favorite musician, Josh Ritter, in Chicago and taking a weekend excursion to Galena in May.  All things considered, this should keep me out of trouble for quite a while.

Some New ProjectsMarch 13th, 2010

As my first quarter as instructor at the Institute of Art winds down, I have some new projects started that I am excited about.

I just started designing my new site at www.mixmethods.com.  This is going to be a very involved project with many YouTube videos.  My goal is to provide a place where people interested in home recording can learn the process in a simple and easy to understand way.  I’ll be starting serious work on it during the last week of March.

Also, I just recently finished a new song!  It’s a bit late for the season, but here it is:  Cold Winter

The dB OlympicsMarch 2nd, 2010

Forget Vancouver, the real action is at the Institute of Art in Schaumburg where students have been competing every week for great prizes such as microphones or a recording session with our academic director.

Some students put together a great promo radio spot for the event:

During the fierce competition, I went head-to-head against fellow instructor (known as Mr. Black), to see who could be victorious in a microphone set-up and tear-down speed competition.  Here is the nail-biting video:

More Recording in ClassFebruary 19th, 2010

Here’s a quick video of an in-class recording project we did last week:

We ended up recording a djembe, electric guitar and bass.
It is great to have amazing mics to work with, including earthworks, AKG and Sennheiser.  We ended up with a simple recording that was thrown together, but it gave us a lot of mixing possibilities and different ways to listen.  It’s a learning experience for everyone to get used to the studio, especially the SSL console.
We’re over halfway through the quarter and the students have just endured mid-terms… more fun to come!

The CHAT Digital Arts FestivalFebruary 12th, 2010

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my piece, ‘Opening/Unknowing’ is going to be played at the CHAT (Collaborations:  Humanities, Arts & Technology) Festival at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  The piece will be presented as part of a live music series called, ‘Festival on the Hill’ and will be played next Thursday night, February 18th at 5pm.

I am disappointed that I will not be attending the festival because there are many interesting workshops and performances on the schedule.  Here’s a few that caught my attention:

Carolina Performing Arts Presents STREB: Brave Collaborative Performance

From the CHAT Festival Website:

STREB’s virtuosic, daredevil performers combine extreme sports with dance. With backgrounds in ballet, modern dance, martial arts, acrobatics and circus skills, they use experimental technologies such as “smart” prostheses, personal robots and a human-sized yo-yo to create a new vocabulary of performance. In this performance, the collaborators will investigate physical concepts such as ways to occupy traditionally unoccupied surfaces—ceilings, walls and trusses; challenge gravity; and investigate high-speed vertical motion in the face of centrifugal force.

The Art and Culture of the DJ is a work for turntables and Latin ensemble from composer Raúl Yañez, to be performed by UNC’s Charanga Carolina and turntablist DJ Radar.

The February 18 performance in Gerrard Hall will be an open rehearsal, during which Yañez, DJ Radar and Charanga leader professor David Garcia will perform and discuss the piece.

Bathysphere is an underwater opera and an interactive game: a musical narrative in which the audience triggers events.

Imagine: you enter Gerrard Hall; you see an underwater world floating by and hear its gentle sounds. You also see a few real objects around you. Pick up a beach ball, and toss it. An octopus appears! You notice that as you move your beach ball, the octopus moves correspondingly, projected on three of the walls.

It is as if you are inside an aquarium. The octopus also has different musical phrases, depending its situation. Say that another person in Gerrard Hall picks up a fishing rod. It is re-projected as a school of fish, with its own musical phrases.

Wow, this is some REALLY cool stuff… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s much more to check out at the website:  www.chatfestival2010.com

Class in the StudioJanuary 29th, 2010

The other day, we did a class project using various stereo mic techniques in the recording studio at the Institute of Art.  It was a fun project and it was exciting to be using such fantastic gear.  I owe a big thanks to the guys in the class who helped with setup and tracking.  Check out some pics:

Jake and Geoff micing up Jeremy on the Acoustic Guitar

Dakota, Laurent and Jake behind the SSL Console

Tracking to Pro Tools

The New DecadeJanuary 22nd, 2010

Happy Holidays, New Year, New Decade, etc.  Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted, and a LOT has happened.  I’m glad to say that I accomplished my goal of completing Grad school with a perfect 4.0 GPA.

Receiving my diploma

Our holiday break was packed with family, food, and presents.  Cassie and I joked that we should film our travels and make a movie called “Five Christmases”.  It was great to spend time with all of our various families despite all of the rushing around.  We continued our tradition of visiting Milwaukee and hanging out downtown with my family.

Me, Cassie, my brother and his girlfriend with ‘The Fonz’ in Milwaukee!

Over the break, I was informed that my piece, ‘Opening/Unknowing’ was accepted to the University of North Carolina Digital Arts Festival this February!

My other major life change, other than Graduating, was starting a teaching position at the Institute of Art in Schaumburg.  I am teaching ‘Audio Technology II’ and ‘Listening and Analysis’.  It also doesn’t hurt that they just built a brand new multi-million dollar studio with an SSL console and the works.  In fact, I am lucky enough to teach one of the classes in the studio itself!

Andrew from Solid State Logic traning us on the console

Cassie has started her final semester at NIU and is working hard as usual.  She is teaching two classes as a Teaching Assistant this semester, so she has her hands very full.  She is also preparing for her Graduate show that will be coming up later in the semester.  She is currently showing some of her work at the Pleasant Street Gallery in Dekalb and we enjoyed going to the opening last night.

One of Cassie’s awesome paintings

As you might imagine, I am keeping myself out of trouble between my teaching position and the Bose store.  Cassie and I are excited to be on the path toward our goals and know that there’s a lot of excitement still to come.  My birthday is coming up this Sunday, and some friends are coming over to watch some football and have a good ‘ol time.  For now, in the words of Edward R. Murrow:  Good night and good luck.

Bobo being sneaky.  (stolen from Cassie’s blog)

Nowhere. - Now Posted Online!December 9th, 2009

I’m preparing to walk across the stage this Saturday and receive my Masters Degree!
In the meantime, I uploaded my thesis video. Check out the trailer:

And here’s the real deal: (Click the HD button to see it full-size)

Nowhere. from Nathan Edwards on Vimeo.

From the program notes:

Nowhere. is a high-definition video presentation filmed across seven states over the course of seven months. It is inspired by the filmmaking of Ron Fricke and Godfrey Reggio in its employment of non-narrative structure, use of time-lapse photography, and observational technique.

I saw this project as a personal challenge to create a film with production values that are as comparable as possible to the works of the filmmakers mentioned above, even with a limited amount of funding and equipment. The film was shot entirely on a Canon HV20 digital video camera and features music that was recorded and mixed on my home computer and in the computer music studio.

The resulting film seeks to uncover where we find the greatest wealth of beauty in our habitat by observing the way we live and the how we affect the land we inhabit. Through its poetic structure, the viewer is allowed to question both the aesthetics and meaning of our environmental impact and discover where the lines between garbage and grandeur are distorted or ultimately realized.