julean simon - wax videos

Julean Simon has a background as a saxophonist in the early eightis and as a videoartist in the late eightis. Between 1989 and 2001 he worked in research and software-development for several companies in US and BRD. In 2001 he discovered the wind-midi-controller - an electronic wind instrument -and started to program voices for this instrument, to modify the hardware and to practice intensively to develop special playing techniques.

The videos in this list are sort of music-videos, documenting various projects. One reason to use video is to demonstrate, that all music was played live and to adress the irritation of the audience that e.g. piano-like or percussive sounds or an entire ensemble was indeed generated by a single wind instrument (today's electronic music is mainly produced in non-live studio-situations, more or less by technicians). Especially the newer videos dont have a distinguished character since usually a camera (without a cameraman) was positioned and recorded the session. The lean postproduction attempts only to find some form to transport the idea, with a minimum of effects.

nmi07 - Julean Simon spielt aus den Cellosuiten von Bach

DVD dv/pal 40min, 8 chapters simon.070626_Berlin
live auf dem Dach der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften/Berlin....bach>

mixnitzish8 (dv/pal, 40min, 8 chapters, simon.070417, Mixnitz/A)

j.simon (wax), ewald oberleitner (acoust.bass)
This 8th session of the mixnitzish-project (which finally resulted in 9 CDs) made it to a video-session...mixnitzish>

studies for electronic percussion (DVD dv/pal simon.070405_Mixnitz)

DVD 16min, 8 chapters
Percussive sounds are difficult to be played on a wind-instrument (counter-intuitive articulation of sound compared with wind-type sounds), therefore I practice them on a regular basis and put a lot of time into programming the voices and their behavior..

casals-10 ( simon.070307_Mixnitz)

DVD 15min, 10chapters
I read, casals once said that you need to be 60 to play the cellosuites. we have now about 50 years of electronic music, so i have another 10 years to improove this cello-voice. yet, the target is not imitation of sound, but variability and playability of the voice. This voice-programming led me to choose classical music for testing. Meanwhile playing the cellosuites is a continuous practice for me, to keep my electronic music-making in touch with music tradition and it is both an enjoyment and a challenge concerning interpretation and playing technique...bach>

the sintra session (dv/pal, 25min, 7chapters, simon.060218 Sintra/Portugal)

Ludger Lamers - mooves, Julean Simon - grooves
This was a spontaneous session with no practice, whatsoever. He attended a concert I had at the Goethe-Institute in Lissabon and talking afterwards, we decided to perform in this nice garden in Sintra... dance>

(dreizehn) Schauer (dv/pal, 27min, 13 chapters, simon.051217, Berlin)

Ingo Reulecke (dance), Julean Simon (music/video)
After projects with more dancers we did this duo-piece. Actually we planned for this performance an even smaller room (open cube), to intensify the confrontaion with the walls. "schauer" (shower) refers to the location we finally chose for this project, but it may refer also to the feeling this term denotes: clusters of sounds rieseln onto the shoulders of the dancer. At that time i have been in a phase of trying to adapt the piano-sound and -gestus to a wind-instrument (see also 33 short piano pieces and grand() for ARCO Madrid). This is mainly a challenge of specializing a tounging-technique, there is not much modulation you can do once the tone is generated. So I combined several voices to get something like a "prepared piano" voice-setup.The piece is also about tempo, which also correlated to a plan of Ingo to do a piece on Nancarrows music... dance>

pyramidale 2005 (dv/pal, 10min30, simon.05, Berlin)

Solo-Concert at the Pyramidale Festival in Berlin Hellersdorf for Contemporary Music.

grand() (dv/pal simon.051111_Berlin/Graz/Madrid)

DVD+CD 36pieces 50min, Installation (Neue Galerie Graz, ARCO06 Madrid)
signed, limited edition (1-99)
36 little pieces for "prepared piano". One of my favorite projects - I am glad it worked out so well on all levels, voice-programming, playing-technique, the composition...grand>

laborgras (dv/pal 050924_Berlin

laborGras/Berlin - tanz/musik performance... dance>

solo Weimarer Fruehjahrstage für zeitgenoessische Musik

(mpg prod: verantalter 050401_Weimar)

dom na litejnom (dv/pal simon.030812_Petersburg

Ich verwende Bild-Zeit-Spuren einerseits als strukturelle Partitur, sowie als visuelles Feedback in der Improvisation. Die Idee in der vorliegenden Arbeit besteht im wesentlichen in der Synchronisierung von audio-visuellen Ablaeufen und einer regelgesteuerten Mehrstimmigkeit (4 audio-tracks und 4 visuelle layers). Es handelt sich um eine Vorstudie eines mittels MAx/MSP/Jitter umgesetzten Live-settings. Dabei wird die relative Geschwindigkeit des aktuellen Spiels in Realzeit ermittelt und in relative Beschleunigung/Verlangsamung des gleichzeitig abgespielten Video-Materials uebersetzt und dient dem Spieler als Partitur/Feedback. Der Spieler kann Spurwechsel vornehmen und wird auf diese Weise mit bereits eingespieltem Material konfrontiert...dom>

cadett ballett (dv/pal, 6min, simon.030613, St.Petersburg)

(Alexandr Kopanev -voc / J. Simon -synth)
Music-video for...sto:let>

matti (dv/pal, 2min37, simon.030515, Berlin)

plastikmucke live at fiib, 15.5.03 berlin. Peter Moldauer being the first drummer in plastikmucke. matti is the 12th piece on the plastikmucke CD-ROM "aeloi"...plastikmucke>

DVD 7:40min video & music, 2002/3 Berlin
In this video Julean Simon plays a midi-wind-controler and he programmed a hyper-cello virtual instrument (physical modeling algorithms) to play from Bach's "Suites For Unaccompanied Cello" (here: BWV 1007, Courante). The recorded track has been used as source to be re-interpreted in real-time with a MAX/MSP program allowing live-sampling and several processes such as granular syntheses, looping, layering, etc. The video-track plays with the multiple-layered rhythmic structure and especially reinforces the hypnotic character inherent to the audio-track....bach>

ellipsis (dv/pal, 2min, simon.020526, Berlin)

Second pice from Elvers-trilogy. Space established by seven figures: aquaqueen-skin, pupp, doggy, mirror, observer, matschmann, elli. The seven scenes linked by ellipses. Soundpiece (ellipsis) played with breathcontroller. visual: from elvers-material playing with sorenson3 codec artefacts.

berlinsky (dv/pal, 1min, simon.020825, Berlin)

Blues based on a "guitar"-track that has been played on a breathcontroler, while staring at the alex from my backwindow

4b3at180 (dv/pal, 1min simon.020414 Berlin)

experimental track

Was zeigt das Bild dem Ton: Zur audio-visuellen Kopplung
(NMI 2007 Akademie d. Wissenschaften, Berlin)

selection for Ursula Blickle Archiv Kunsthalle Wien