Alex Keller has performed or had works performed at the following other venues and festivals:
All the Transients
Arts-In-Nature Festival
Center for Contemporary Arts
Electromuse 2
Experience Music Project
In the Eye of the Ear
Investigations Into the Physical and Metaphorical Hole
Loop Dreams
Meet the Sonicabal!
Mixtaphonics
Nights of the Blue Rider
Nonsequitur's Short Circuits
Phoenix Festival
Resonant/Circuit
Seattle Art Museum
Sonicabal ArtsEdge Showcase
SoundCulture 96
The Show-off Gallery
The Sonic Circuits Music Festival of Toronto (1995)
ThomFariCraw's Loft Series (2003)
Waveforms: currents in sonic art
Yeast by Sweet Beast 2008
Rick Reed's Toneburst festival has showcased some of the most interesting people in Austin's sound/music scene. I was very flattered to be asked to perform at Toneburst 3.
Since I arrived in Austin, I'd struggled to make good recordings of the Mexican freetailed bat colony underneath the Congress Street bridge. Part of the problem was the distance between the closest access to the underside of the bridge; the other problem was the sounds of passer-by asking what I was doing, the bane of field recordists everywhere.
One day I happened to find a good spot underneath the bridge at 9th and Shoal Creek; the bridge is very low, which means it's possible to put a microphone right next to the bats, and record the direct sound of a single bat instead of the whole colony.
For Toneburst 3, I began by asking the audience to close their eyes, and turned off all the lights I could in the venue. I began playback of some of the edited recordings on the speakers in front of the room. After a few minutes, I slipped my shoes off and tiptoed through the venue with a speaker-equipped backpack, playing back another edit of the same recordings.
The performance was not recorded (when I am doing sound reinforcement and live recording for a performance I am in, sometimes my piece will go undocumented) but you can hear the source recordings below. I've manipulated them with SoundHack's brilliant binaural filter so that (especially over headphones) the backpack part of the piece sounds as if it's behind the listener.
The source recordings of bats were also used in my
Sonic ID for KUT Radio.