Starting in late December, 2012, I’ve been jamming weekly w/ my singer/songwriter/guitarist friend, Michael Glenwright.  The premise was to merge my drum machines and dj’ing with his guitar and synth act.  It took a few sessions to iron out the set up, going from a dj looper -based set-up to using Ableton Live as the glue to handle live looping of Mike’s guitar/bass/synth/ebow and sequencing/mixing my percussion via various drum machines.

I’ve added a dedicated page here on this site, and detailed info about the set-ups is included in the respective notes for each set/track on our Soundcloud and Mixcloud pages.

Happy listening!

André et Michèle is an eclectic collaboration between Andrew O’Malley and singer/songwriter, Michael Glenwright.

Combining an array of instruments, from retro synth sounds to booty-shaking club beats to soaring melodic guitars, Andre et Michele weave together real-time improvised soundscapes using live performance looping wizardry.

Whatever the vibe — chill lounging or dance floor storming — Andre et Michele provide the soundtrack for good times.

Tracks and performance excerpts can be previewed below via the Soundcloud player, while full jams are hosted on Mixcloud.

For booking inquiries, please use the contact form.

With a string of Adafruit LED pixels sitting on my workbench just waiting for a project, I felt a crafty urge to make an LED Christmas Tree, despite Adafruit’s aversion to such things

I wanted to limit the project to a single evening, so my idea for a laser-cut, acrylic tree would have to wait until next year . . . Luckily I had some 1/8″ MDF project board lying around, though I did have to buy a 31/64″ drill bit to accommodate the 12mm pixels:

The hole pattern was planned out by eye so it would be somewhat random and the MDF board was easily cut with a handsaw.  The 12mm pixels fit well enough in the 31/64″ holes with a bit of slack, yet snug enough to hold the pixels in place.

A single coat of acrylic paint made for a scratchy finish, perfect for a pine needle look:

Some scrap pine serves as the base and a hidden mounting bracket to connect the tree to the base and hide an Arduino to control the lights.

As exciting as it was watching the paint dry, I used that time to program a few simple animations before inserting the LED pixels:

Wow, those lights are bright!  At full brightness, the tree was pretty blinding so I’ve adjusted the settings so it doesn’t hurt when you look at it.

I imagine I’ll be adding to the animations over the holidays and will hopefully get some video of the tree in action.  In the meantime it’ll be accompanying me on my holiday traveling and visiting.

I’m happy w/ the crafty look of the tree as it reminds me of a wooden tree my mom made for me some years back with traditional incandescent string lights.  Next year I’ll start work earlier on some fancy laser-cut versions . . .

Update

Very tempted to try connecting my tree to the Cheerlights project . . .

Re-blogged by Adafruit here.

More pics and video here.

Below is a video showing the looping colour-fade mode (please pause the slideshow above if you experience trouble viewing the video):

Does your facade need an animated uplift?  Get in touch anytime to discuss your ideas!

The mix itself is mostly a random collection of recent music I’d bought, and was one of the few times I’ve just thrown a recorded mix together like this — usually I come up with a theme beforehand or record a live DJ set somewhere — so it seemed appropriate to have a cover that was somehow randomly generated.

My attention immediately turned to Processing since it’s the perfect platform for quickly exploring visual ideas like this.  At first I imagined some sort of grid of randomly coloured squares, but I then remembered I had an experiment in progress over at OpenProcessing (an on-line version of Processing for quick experiments or even putting together a portfolio of Processing sketches):

The above animation is a sequence of random ellipses, slightly offset by a small random amount from the centre of the sketch, drawing atop of each other, while slowly erasing the previous the ellipses; it was attempt to recreate the effect of this album cover that I discovered while previewing some new tunes, solely has an exercise of interest.

For contrast, this is the same sketch except that the previous ellipses are erased ten times more slowly:

After revisiting the sketch, the aesthetic of this bunch of random traces (or tracks!) seemed a perfect fit for a mix based on a random collection of music tracks, so I enlarged the animation, inverted the colours, and grabbed a screenshot of the resulting animation:

In this review, I’ve realized how closely my mix cover resembles the original cover art inspiration, but I’d like to think that I arrived there in a roundabout way, as opposed to literally copying it. This is something I love about Processing: starting out w/ an initial idea and then plugging away with various revisions and tweaks on a theme; simply experimenting to come up w/ something appealing or interesting . . .

I’ll certainly be using Processing to generate more cover art in the future.

And if you haven’t already, please enjoy the mix!

Maybe one day I’ll dig up those old sites.  In the meantime, though, you can peep the article below (click to expand), or open it as a PDF.  It provides a nice overview of my artistic practice.

Community Channel initial sketch

Community Channel is a permanent lighting installation for the entrance-way roof of the Bronson Centre (Ottawa, ON).

The installation comprises a group of larger-than-life, illuminated silhouettes of various community members (men, women, and children), each individually illuminated from within, programmed with seasonally shifting colour palettes that in the short term gradually fade in and out of phase with one another. When the colours are out of phase, the sculpture broadcasts ideas of diversity, while once in phase, the sculpture illuminates in unity.

Community Channel scale maquette

Press + Info

Bronson Avenue Renewal Project info

Ottawa Citizen shortlist announcement

Ottawa Citizen photo and video reviews of the public consultation: 1 + 2

EMC West review of the public consultation (PDF)

Modal Mom blog post about the public consultation

Ottawa Citizen art blog’s announcement of winners

City of Ottawa commission summary

Centretown News coverage of winning projects

EMC West coverage of winning proposals

Tomek Sysak profiles the “political” side of Community Channel’s figures

More info to come . . . Follow my blog posts about the project here.

ARTIST / TRACK
Azari & Iii / Into The Night (Nicolas Jaar Remix)
Clyde, Los Lopez / Are You A Lesbian (Dc Salas Remix)
Lee Curtiss / Body Twitch (Feat. Debbie Rennalds)
Catz ‘N Dogz, Monty Luke / They Frontin Feat. Monty Luke
Hiem / Freaky Nights (Tim Paris Remix)
Ambivalent / Snowblind
Benoit & Sergio / New Ships
Marc Romboy & Stephan Bodzin / Atlas
Roman Fluegel / Cookie Dust (AO Edit)
Dexter Ford / Our Sun
Thugfucker, Tale Of Us, Life And Death / Morgana
Wolf + Lamb / Holding Her And Loving You
Mlle Caro, Franck Garcia / Far Away (Jennifer Cardini & Shonky Remix)

Mostly a random sampling of recent Beatport purchases, based on this chart.

Aside from Ambivalent’s techno stormer, Snowblind, it’s a pretty chill blend, going from 120bpm up to 125 then winding down again.

Here’s a blog post about how the cover art was created.

Great Big Smalls VIII @ Cube Gallery, Ottawa, December 4-30th 2012

Opening party: Thursday December 6th, 6-9pm

Deb and I (as The Latest Artists) will have a few new light pieces in this group show.

More info here.