Other Niclas Tamas
Téli estéken 02

My vision for the Téli estéken suite (Winter evenings) was a question. How do I perform a piano or pianobased improvisation in Gestrument without touching the grid?

I started to work, experiment and practice on the settings in December 2013, right after the release of the orchestral piece The Daemons of Apel Street.

The Téli estéken suite is pure improvisation using only the controls in Gestrument. The grid is touched only once. To start playing.

Téli estéken 02
After the recording of Téli estéken 01 in February 2014 I ran into a dead end. The setting for Téli estéken 02 proved to be somewhat of a challenge. I wanted to do something in contrast to what Téli estéken 01 delivered and expand my use of Gestrument.

To take my vision one step ahead I teamed up Gestrument with Alchemy mobile. This way Gestrument filled two purposes. Firstly as a solo instrument. Secondly, by using Gestrument as a midi controller, it's accompanying itself. This way I could improvise with the two apps at the same time.

Including Alchemy opened up new possibilities and, at the same time, posed more questions and forced new ways of thinking. It turned out that connecting everything I needed to record using Audiobus did not work out as I expected. Alchemy eats memory for breakfast and I was suddenly and severly limited in what I wanted to accomplish.

I soon discovered there were things I couldn't do at all. Like using the tilt function in Alchemy for instance. I had to use only one patch instead of the intended four. To switch between the patches was impossible without audio noise and stuttering. The internal synth in Gestrument stopped working at random when recording after a certain point. To change any of the original settings in either Gestrument or Alchemy during a recording (by turning midi channels on and off for instance) was a straight road to a mayhem of audio stutter and me cursing within five minutes. So I ended up using Alchemy no way near my initial intentions. The technical constraints forced me to make three recordings, one for each movement. And I had to use WavePad on my MacBook to stitch the three recordings together.

When searching for the right patch in Alchemy I discovered "Intimate ensemble". And from the first moment that combination worked. In the evening of the 13th of March everything fell in place. All my test recordings, practise and experimentation with the setting variations for Téli estéken 02 came together.

The result is an 18 minute chamber music piece in three movements for Gestrument. I'm very pleased to present Téli estéken 02.

Uppsala 140322

First movement recorded in Uppsala 140315
Second movement recorded in Uppsala 140316
Third movement recorded in Uppsala 140314

• Gestrument 1.4
• Alchemy mobile 2.2.9 "Intimate ensemble"
• AUFX:Space 1.2
• Audiobus 1.0.2.6
• AudioShare 2.6
• Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones