It's been awhile since my last post and I wanted to catch everyone up on what I have been up to, which has been quite a lot.

Cotton grass fields outside our farmhouse at Gulllkistan in Laugarvatn, Iceland.

The summer residency at Gullkistan in Laugarvatn, Iceland, was an incredible rejuvenating and inspiring two months. I gathered thousands of photos and several hours of video as well as some great field audio recordings of south Iceland. These materials will be the building blocks for a number of upcoming projects.

I will definitely be returning to Iceland, and hopefully soon! NoiseFold and Trio Kaze just applied to the Punto y Raya Festival for 2014, which takes place in Reykjavik from Jan. 30th-Feb. 2nd. Here's hoping we get accepted.

Not long after returning, I went out to Denton, TX, to continue the new collaboration between NoiseFold and Trio Kaze. We had the incredible opportunity to work together for two weeks on sketches for a larger work that is being planned for 2014-15. A short 20-minute selection of the sketches were presented at the CEMIcircles festival in the Merril-Ellis Intermedia Theater in Denton, TX, and an evening length performance was given in Dallas at The MAC black-box theater for the 26th Dallas Video Festival. Below is an excerpt from the Dallas performance.

NoiseFold in collaboration with Trio KAZE present Zlatý Strom (The Golden Tree). The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together the live cinema and sound-art group, NoiseFold (USA) and acoustic instrumentalist, Trio KAZE (NL/DE), acclaimed musicians adept in medieval, renaissance, baroque and contemporary idioms. The Zlatý Strom performance seeks to illuminate a series of relational dialogues between diverse technologies, mediums and historical epochs by creating a visual-music hybrid that combines digital media, electronic music and interactive visualization technology with contemporary musical elements and instrumental techniques drawn from the 15th through 21st centuries. The music evokes a soundscape of elemental power wedded to a fluid abstract visual vocabulary emulating natural forces and bio-mimetic forms. Zlatý Strom is part of a larger work currently in progress that includes acoustic visualizations emulating fluid dynamics, virtual breathing vessels, crystallization of chaotic cellular structures, visual noise cloaking processes unlocked through performance of melodic decryption keys and other representations that evoke transformational (alchemical) metaphors. NoiseFold employ a custom audio-visual software system designed by the artists that generates or breeds a seemingly infinite array of virtual agents. These synthetic audio-visual forms result from the live mixing of a growing database of dynamic equations that are folded and recombined through a multi-threaded data feedback structure. The resulting sound is not a separate aural accompaniment but rather the direct sonification of the visual data itself. Thus the performers interact with autonomous visual forms to grow and sculpt the sonic content of the performance.

This exciting collaboration was NoiseFold's first opportunity to use our new modular software environment in a performance context and is also the first time we have ever "shared" a single screen space. The single screen approach was made possible in large part due to the generous donation of programming time by friend and programmer, John Westin, who made an OSC bridge application that allowed us to control a BlackMagic ATEM production switcher right out of our Max patch.

The ease and joy of working with Trio Kaze promises many more shows in the years to come!

Many thanks to David Stout, Trio Kaze, and John Westin for an amazing creative binge!