04.24.11 - 8:00pm

Quartet for the End of Space: Pauline Oliveros, Francisco López, Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch (CD Release)

CD Release Concert: Pauline Oliveros, Francisco López, Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch:

Quartet for the End of Space (Pogus)

Please join us for this very special release party and concert that promises to span a vast sonic terrain, challenging listener and performer alike through a seamless blend of Deep Listening and Absolute Noise, moving between ever-fluid improvisation and carefully controlled sound manipulation.

This quartet convened for two improvisational sessions between February and May of 2010, with López sitting in on a Triple Point (Oliveros/Van Nort/Braasch) recording session and bringing his finely crafted sonic objects-as-instruments, further spanning the electro-acoustic divide that has become Triple Point’s calling. The four later re-formed for their debut concert at the Deep Listening Institute in Kingston, NY in September of 2010. These sessions have since become raw material for the individual artists to construct new visions of this shared sonic body through extensive and thorough evolution of the recordings – personal reflections culled from a collective tapestry.

These works will be brought to life through unique multi-channel presentations by each artist. Moving back from the personal to the collective, this will be followed by the quartet in full improvisatory mode!

Fragments from this crafted past will blend with reactions to the moment, sonic gestures being shared between players and sculpted within this unique space.

Pauline Oliveros (1932) has influenced American music extensively in her career spanning more than 60 years as a composer, performer, author and philosopher. She pioneered the concept of Deep Listening, her practice based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation, designed to inspire both trained and untrained musicians to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations. During the mid-’60s she served as the first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College, aka Center for Contemporary Music followed by 14-years as Professor of Music and 3 years as Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001 she has served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music  in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is engaged in research on a National Science Foundation CreativeIT project. Her research interests include improvisation, special needs interfaces and telepresence teaching and performing. She also serves as  Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College doing telepresence teaching and she is  executive director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. where she leads projects in Deep Listening, Adaptive Use Interface. She is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement.  A retrospective from 1960 to 2010 was performed at Miller Theater, Columbia University in New York March 27, 2010 in conjunction with the Schuman award.  Recent recordings include Pauline Oliveros & Miya Masoka and Pauine Oliveros & Chris Brown on Deep Listening.

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival.

Doug Van Nort is an experimental musician and digital music researcher whose work is dedicated dedicated to personal and collective creative expression through noise, free improvisation and generally electro-acoustic means of production, from the lo-fi of broken electronics to the hi-tech of custom signal processing algorithms.  Recent projects have spanned telematic music, laptop ensemble compositions,, immersive electroacoustic works, interactive sonic installations and machine listening systems. He is currently active in the improvisational trio Triple Point with Pauline Oliveros and Jonas Braasch, wherein he plays his custom GREIS software designed for on-the-fly spectral and textural sound transformations; Van Nort currently acts as research specialist in music at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute. Recordings of his music can be found on Deep Listening and Pogus among other experimental music labels; he has performed at venues ranging from the [sat] in Montreal, Casa da Musica in Porto, The Red Room in Baltimore, Roulette, Harvestworks, the Miller Theatre, the Flea, Elebash Hall and the Stone in NYC, at Town Hall on intonarumori and at EMPAC in Troy, NY. Recent collaborations include Oliveros, Braasch, Francisco López, Stuart Dempster, Chris Chafe, Al Margolis, Ben Miller and others.

Jonas Braasch is an experimental soprano saxophonist and acoustician with interests in Telematic Music and Intelligent Music Systems. He has performed with Curtis Bahn, Chris Chafe, Michael Century, Mark Dresser, Pauline Oliveros, Doug van Nort and Stuart Dempster – among others. His saxophone style expands the traditional repertoire by incorporating various non-western elements and extended techniques. Jonas Braasch studied at the Universities of Bochum and Dortmund (Germany) and received Ph.D. degrees in Musicology and Engineering. He currently works as Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he directs the Communication Acoustics and Aural Architecture Research Laboratory (CA^3 RL).