February 6, 2008

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Bull-Man -- After a brief pause for Fat Tuesday, here is my second variation on Jay C Batzner's Mancala Theme.

February 4, 2008

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Man-Bull is a one minute variation on a theme of Unsafe Bull's Jay C. Batzner. He made this piece using samples from a Mancala game back in January and has been creating new variations ever since. Today he sent out this email challenge:

You may or may not know this, but I have a weekly podcast in which I compose a new electroacoustic piece. I'm coming up on my 1 year anniversary (end of February) and I was hoping to enlist your help.

While I have been doing self-contained weekly compositions, over the past few weeks I've started a "theme and variations" piece based on sounds from a mancala game board. Each week I'm writing a new variation and eventually I'll stop. Anyhow, I was hoping to get any and all of you to write "guest variations" to be plugged in to celebrate my year of podcasting.

My anniversary for the podcast is February 28. If you'd like, please go over to my website (http://thecollected.org/batzner) and check out the Mancala Samples page. Download all the files you want, make something out of them, and send that variation to me.

Today's is the first of two variations I plan to make. Tune in tomorrow for Bull-Man.

July 30, 2007

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Unsafe Bull is a tribute to Alvin Lucier's experimental classic, I Am Sitting In a Room. I used a short sample of composer Jay C Batzner saying "unsafe bull" (also the name of his podcast). This sample was compressed using QuickTime's Qualcomm PureVoice setting. The resulting file was compressed again in the same way. This process repeated 14 times, each version becoming more distorted. The different versions (original and 14 compressed) are heard in sequence.

If you haven't ever experienced I Am Sitting In a Room, you really should find a free hour and give it a listen. Also, check out Jay C Batzner's Unsafe Bull Podcast.