Trophies
Composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti is joined by Kenta Nagai, and Ches Smith for Trophies. Focusing on mantra loops of spoken/sung abstract and highly emotional poetry, Bosetti has created a powerful trance band where voice and electronic sound melt with the hallucinatory fretless e-guitar playing of Kenta Nagai (Miya Masaoka, Eugene Chadbourne), and the patiently groovy and virtuoso pulses of Tony Buck (The Necks). Trophies uses lengthy, repetitive and highly dynamic text-sound forms in a unique and genre defying way.
Alessandro Bosetti
Sam Ashley + Robert Van Heuman and Jeff Carey (SKIF++)
Sam Ashley has devoted his life to the development of an experimental, non-religious mysticism, one rooted in a “find out for yourself” attitude, an attitude he advocates in direct opposition to so many traditions. He has been an avant-garde witch-doctor for more than 40 years.
For well over 30 years Sam has used this mysticism in the creation of music and art. His pieces are usually about luck, hallucination and coincidence. They can range from symbolic representations of shamanic phenomena to direct presentations of magic events, devices or objects. One might say that Sam’s sound works are about finding ways to amplify imaginary sounds. Much of Sam’s performed work features the use of authentic spirit possession, a phenomenon Sam has been working with for three decades. Almost all of Sam’s work relates to trance in some way.
Sam Ashley offers simple windows onto things that occur in-between the “real world” and something else.
A PROPOSAL FOR THE ELIMINATION OF SCIENCE
A musical “psychic reading”
I’m occasionally using a new instrument these days, one that I invented in 2005. It’s an electro-mechanical oscillator built using only speakers, batteries and some wire.
I’m always trying out different ideas for simple devices that I can use in genuine fortune telling, the way tea leaves, crystal balls and so many other things are used. If a device is sensitive, unstable and for the most part beyond human control, then it can serve that purpose. Divination (the authentic kind, not fake fortune telling) depends on there being a “screen”, metaphorically speaking, onto which one’s awareness can be projected, in order to objectify/amplify that subtle knowing of everything that does exist: the information is all always there; one problem is that one doesn’t recognize it because it’s as if one is immersed in it (a hard thing to explain, but if you’ve tried divination perhaps you’ll agree with my description). Another problem is of course that usually one is too busy to pay attention. This piece won’t solve that problem, but it can address the other one.
In a performance of A Proposal for the Elimination of Science the way the instrument works is this: if one connects a battery to wires then touches the electrical contacts of a speaker with the wires the speaker pops. So I had the idea that if I were to position the wires such that they might touch the cone of the speaker, and use thin wires, each pop would move the wires and each movement would pop the speaker again ad infinitum: an electro-mechanical oscillator. By experimenting with wire length, thickness and the like I can get the device to produce sounds that are not at all pure tones.
The instrument creates sound that is not very “musical”, even in the sense of “noise music”, mostly because it can contain abrupt starts and stops and other mentally jarring things, but I like it because it has a strictly shamanic emphasis. The sound tends to be unexpected, which is after all the idea. I also think that it’s beautiful, though some will disagree.
SKIF++
The electronic audio-visual trio SKIF++ is a collaboration of Jeff Carey (laptop SuperCollider), Robert van Heumen (laptop LiSa) and Bas van Koolwijk (laptop Max/MSP/Jitter). Sound gets processed into video and back, ranging from sonic bursts to melodic melancholy, using joysticks and selfmade controllers to keep it all in line (most of the time). Every SKIF++ performance is improvised, but based on structures that give each set its distinct character. This time SKIF++ will play as a duo, where Van Koolwijk is represented by an interactive Jitter patch. The SKIF++ video is generated live with a digital application that was inspired by the workings of the 1972 Rutt/Etra scan. processor The Rutt/Etra scan processor was essentially an analog computer which allowed for electronic real-time manipulation of the deflection signals that generate the television raster. The SKIF++ digital application uses audio signals for input and scans the incoming data to produce its characteristic graphics, delivering a very tight connection between the three players. The SKIF++ audio is generated by SuperCollider3 and LiSa X – SC3 delivers highly complex synthesized audio blocks while LiSa takes care of magnifying sampled material into territories unknown – all in a highly responsive environment. While the interaction from audio to video is digital, the counterpart is the musical response of the players to the green thing projected on the screen.
Jeff Carey
http://www.radiantslab.com/87central
Electronic music composer Jeff Carey, based in the US and in the Netherlands, has been working with experimental, improvised and composed electronic, electro-acoustic, and acousmatic music since the early 90′s. Originally from the suburbs of Washington DC, he has performed a handful of hardcore bands and has played electronic music or presented pieces and installations in the US and Europe at festivals and venues such as Boralis (NO), Gaudeamus Music Week (NL), Chelsea Museum of Art (US), Transmediale (DE), NuMusic(NO), Sonic Acts (NL), Ekko Festival (NO), Cave 12 (CH), DNK-Amsterdam (NL), Trondhiem Matchmaking (NO), MOCADC (US), The Network (BE), and Placard (UK). Having studied Audio Technology at American University (1994), and computer music composition at the Instituut voor Sonologie in the Koningklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag (2002), his work has evolved from an interest in no-input- mixer and field recordings to include a focus on non-standard synthesis, algorithmic composition and digital instrumentalism. Apart from purely acousmatic and electro-acoustic composition, he is focused on performative aspects of computer music and improvisation. He has played in the groups 87 Central, Office- R(6), SKIF++, USA/USB, N-Ensemble, and collaborated or performed with Francis Marie Uitti, Gert-Jan Prins, Cor Fuhler, Oren Ambarchi, Tobias Delius, Jaap Blonk and the numerous members of the N- Collective to name a famous few. Recent compositions include the acousmatic pieces ‘Blueshift’, ‘Music for Broken Flute and Stolen Computer’, and ‘Point Source 01′ for Double Bass and computer. Carey builds custom electronic instruments for musicians (most notably, MoHa!) and teaches courses in the synthesis programming language SuperCollider 3, recently at new media/arts institutions including NoTAM, BEK, TEKS (NO), STEIM (NL), and ITP (US). He is one of many founding members of the N-Collective, a pan- European music collective, and works to promote and present N-Events in the Americas.
Robert van Heumen
Robert van Heumen works with electronic means to create soundworlds. As a musician Van Heumen uses STEIM’s live sampling software LiSa and real-time audio-synthesis software SuperCollider, controlled by various physical devices. His soundworlds are a mixture of digital crackles, heavy distortion, melancholic melodies, environmental sounds, voices and sounds from kitchen appliances, some of the time smashed beyond repair. Live sampled source sounds are gesturally manipulated and reworked within open ended narratives, exploring cycles of repetition beyond episodic improvisation. Recent fixed-media works include the compositions Stranger and Fury, which are performed in multichannel and semi-improvised environments. Fury was presented at ICMC08, and Stranger premiered as a diffused work at Culturelab in Newcastle (UK) and was performed live at the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Porto in 2009. Both compositions are available on Creative Sources Recordings. In the fall of 2008 Van Heumen constructed the radioplay No Man’s Land, commissioned by the CEM studio at WORM in Rotterdam, NL. Van Heumen is performing regularly with the audio-visual trio SKIF++ (with Jeff Carey & Bas van Koolwijk), Shackle (working with electro-flutist Anne LaBerge on restriction), ABATTOIR (with cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen) and Whistle Pig Saloon (with guitarist John Ferguson deconstructing the guitar). He has shared the stage with dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit), Michel Waisvisz, Richard Barrett, Sakata Akira, Nicolas Collins, Oguz Buyukberber, Luc Houtkamp, Guy Harries, Tom Tlalim, Nicolas Field, Morten J. Olsen, Daniel Schorno, Roddy Schrock, Nate Wooley a.o. Van Heumen is Managing Director of the STEIM foundation in Amsterdam, curator of the Local Stop concert series and member of STEIM’s Artistic Committee. In a previous life mathematician, trumpet player and software programmer. He still reads L.E.J. Brouwer.
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...