End of an era for Lyres of Lemniscate

Last night's Drone Ensemble gathering became a bit of a Lyres of Lemniscate debrief.



Unfortunately we do not have enough storage space to keep all the instruments, and so we had to dismantle the two lyres that were created specially for our Lyres of Lemniscate exhibition at Workplace Foundation. This action inevitably marked an end to the Lyres of Lemniscate 'project', which in turn lead to some discussions about future Drone Ensemble projects.

We have decided that, after the past few months of intense Drone Ensemble activity, we are going to have a bit of a break for a little while. But fear not! This is not the end of Drone Ensemble. We are going to give each other a little more time to focus on some of our individual projects. Also, rather than rushing into planning another gig with little time, we want to spend some time simply practicing and becoming more familiar with playing some of the instruments. This experimentation and rehearsal time is vital, and should lead to us developing some exciting new material for us to perform to an audience.

We have some tentative plans for performances next year, and so do keep your eyes peeled for these to be announced.

Working on the Lyres with Drone Ensemble

Last night Drone Ensemble had a studio visit from Paul from Workplace Gallery and Lee from TUSK. We showed them the lyres and talked through where we are at in terms of making the ceramic discs, the film and our plans for the curation of the exhibition.

Afterwards, we worked on getting the e-bow mechanism positioned correctly so that when it is in contact with the string, it is activated and makes a sound. 



Jamie showed us the system he is building that will enable manipulation of the signals going to each speaker. This introduces an aspect of interaction, and the audience will be able to use a joystick to control the vibrations of the different speakers.



We tested different ways in which the ceramic discs could be installed so that they vibrate over the speakers enough so as to make a sound and have the potential to fall off, but not too much so as to immediately fall off and smash. This is something that requires further thought and experimentation!