Now
Updated July 2026, from Barreiro, Portugal.
My artistic practice
Since March, I've realised it's made of three distinct parts:
-
A monologue — improvised soundscapes from concrete
sounds, whether from archives or my own recordings.
-
A dialogue — playing with other musicians. Embodied
in Somitsu, a duo with drummer
Bruno Afonso:
his drums against my concrete sounds, dense and sparse (疎密). Second
collaboration after
Barreiro Improvised.
- An instrument — the Chaos Conductor.
Chaos Conductor
Finding the right interaction time constant: not too short (requires
high-level dexterity), not too long (autonomy, not an instrument).
Aiming at flow: practice hard enough to reward, easy enough to stay out
of its own way.
-
JUCE/C++ VST3 plugins in a backgrounded Reaper, driven by a bespoke
web dashboard over OSC — portable and DAW-agnostic.
-
The paper, "Building a Music Performance Software for a Wandering Mind
and Clumsy Hands," is accepted to
SMC 2026.
-
Small browser-based study tools: WebMIDI and WebAudio are capable
enough for real rehearsal in the browser.
On my mind
-
Expectation, pulse, structure.
-
The Conductor knows time only at the microscopic scale — Poisson
event distribution, Markov modelling. It misses memory,
expectation, something to deliver or withhold.
-
The opposition between structure (a sequencer) and randomness (the
early Conductor, fully decorrelated).
-
Drawn to footwork's deterministic drive — Jlin's
Dark Energy
and
Black Origami, a revelation — against my refusal to make the instrument a
sequencer.
-
Alienness, and Claude. Meeting Claude as a different
species, hard when it comes packaged as a tool with a function.
Rereading
Speaker for the Dead
for how Card works through otherness — also a fine novel.
-
Career transition from technical translation to
inventing on principle. My principle is human fuzziness.
Previously: March 2026.
This is a
now page.
