mirrored heart by dani derks

improvisations with a soon-to-be-released norns script ('hills'), driving a SuperCollider synth for FM + sampling voices ('kildare').

tracks 1-4 were originally part of a performance video for cached.media, celebrating a triptych of releases from so many artists i deeply admire, including my collaboration with Zander Raymond ('qualia').

tracks 5-9 were performed live as part of luck dragon's *habitus* workshop on September 24 2022, opening for the beyond-sweet and absolutely brilliant Jonathan Snyder (author of a number of fantastic norns scripts including 'flora' and 'krill'). as is my personal tradition, these give tracks were all named by phrases taken from one of the participants' kiddos.

tracks 10-12 were performed live at BUSHEL Collective as part of Glockabelle's LoveFest on February 11, 2023, opening for Glockabelle and Yuka C. Honda (EUCADEMIX). DJ Marcus spun fantastic interstitial tunes to get everyone dancing, which made for an electric evening. these tracks were performed with two norns + grids -- one running 'hills', which fed into the other running 'cheat codes' (the WIP final version). 'hills' sequences were stepped through manually using a Keith McMillen BopPad. though externally illegible, my internal process was heavily inspired by the late Milford Graves.

track 13 was performed live at Diamond Hollow's Ramona's Den Reading Series, in support of Cisco Bradley's new book 'The Williamsburg Avant-Garde'. i set up four voices and four sequences, each advanced through kinetic gestures on a mesh snare head equipped with a Sensory Percussion sensor (v1). each voice had a handful of timbre-morphing presets, which i interpolated between over periods of 31-44 seconds as i played the snare.

dani is part of the day-to-day operations at monome. they iterate code through improvisation and collaborative learning, with the goal of building playful and exploratory music performance gestures.

dndrks.com