Kate Simko & Jeffrey Weeter: Lights Out

How do you make a different live music video every night? After a long history of static audiovisual collaboration, musician Kate Simko and video artist Jeffrey Weeter are exploring fluid mixing of sound and vision with the tour for Kate's forthcoming debut album, Lights Out. On the tour, Kate will be triggering both her music and Jeffrey's visuals from one Ableton Live set. Thanks to Max for Live, this complex and improvisational multimedia set can all be controlled by one performer, and from one machine.

"Jitter, audio and MIDI are all being used to control video," explains Jeffrey. Such a complicated set is kept in order through the use of color-coded clips - a process which allows Kate to communicate to Jeffrey which clips were most important to triggering larger or smaller changes. The custom Max for Live patch "works as a real time editor," says Jeffrey, "creating the film on the fly through movie and effect selection and manipulation based on Kate's performance." Beyond clips, further visual control is derived from a Max for Live patch that uses audio filters to gather information.

For Kate's part, performing with Live has been natural choice for many years, leading to the improvisational elements of the Lights Out tour. "You can really improvise with Live," she says, "and every performance will be unique."

For more information about Kate Simko and the "Lights Out" tour, see her website: www.katesimko.com