I'm going to upload some audio from Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge over the next couple of days.  The internet feed carrying the live audio stream was very intermittent and then failed completely after around 6 hours, so only those in The Archway will have heard what happened as the piece progressed.  

It's all about trains.

I'm delighted to announce that on Tuesday 21st June 2011 I will be playing the theremin under the Manhattan Bridge, in a 24 hour collaboration with the cyclists and pedestrians who cross the bridge on the longest day of the year.  Or in other words - I'm at it again.

This is part of Make Music New York, the annual festival that will see over 1000 free musical events take place throughout the city on June 21st, the longest day of the year, and I'm very pleased that they've invited me to be part of it.  I'll be writing up something a bit more in depth over the next day or two, and sorting out the live-streaming page too - yes, once again I'll be streaming all 24 hours of the audio live on t'internet.  And tweeting and everything.

I've just arrived in New York and made my first recce to the site.  I'd done plenty of work in advance so I was able to walk to it and around it without ever resorting to a map - there are so many online resources now (Google street view, Youtube, Flickr and so on) that you can do a pretty comprehensive recce without ever getting close to the place.  But they can't tell you what it actually feels like in the flesh.  What immediately struck me was the sheer scale of the bridge, and the vibrancy it was generating while I was there.  It feels so bigger than I was expecting, and was positively buzzing with life when I walked around it (11pm) which could pose a few interesting problems - as the trains go over the noise is incredible, bouncing off the local buildings so violently you can almost see the sound waves, so making subtle ambient music is going to be a challenge.  And the bridge really is bloody enormous - despite all my meticulous planning I did wonder if I'd brought long enough cables.  Look how far it is from the cycleway to the street level in the pictures below - I know it's about 100ft but it feels much more.

Here are some photos and videos I took.  The green glow shows The Archway, where I'm going set up, and the next one shows where I'm going to mount the sensors on the cycleway 100ft up.

Just to prove I don't only go diving in mud, here's a photo I took in clearer waters.  I've taken hundreds of underwater photos, this is the only one worth looking at.  But it is The Best Underwater Photo Ever Taken.  Ever, so that's ok.

I originally included this Cell 4 picture with my Pyestock 3 photos below but I prefer it on its own.  Très noir.  Did you know Nosferatu is public domain, a free download? Excellent music, not sure who by. 

Inside Cell 4 - from the Plenum Chamber along the pipes to the Exhaust Heat Diffuser.

It's a very well known shot of Pyestock this one, but we didn't stumble across the area it's in until the third visit - we'd always gone round the other way.  All the thrill seeing one of those world famous icons in the flesh for the first time, but unlike most of them, which grow large in the mind's eye and then turn out to be just tiny in real life - the Mona Lisa, the Laughing Cavalier, the White House, Mick Jagger - it was much bigger than I'd expected.  Huge, it is - that's me on the right.  Not the world's crispest photo, but it was taken before dawn so long exposure, post processing galore yadda yadda.