electronic music

Abode (Paul Stapleton, Caroline Pugh) and RepoRoom, Luggage Store Gallery

Tonight we review last Thursday’s concert at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, part of Outsound Presents’ weekly series. I arrived to a darkened gallery with abstract bands and shapes of light being projected onto the wall, with Jan Pusina sitting in front controlling electronic musical sounds. The video was being controlled Bob Pacelli using analog video synthesizers.

The stripe patterns remained for a while with different combinations of colors and widths, before eventually changing to geometric shapes and even some curved forms. The music was primary long drones with complex timbres, but towards the last third of the set there were additional textures with shorter-length sounds. Overall it was a short performance, but I thought the duration worked well given the minimal nature of the visual and aural material and kept it interesting.

The second set featured Adobe, a duo of Caroline Pugh on voice and electronics with Paul Stapleton performing on his “Bonsai Sound Sculpture.” We have reviewed Stapleton performing with his creation before (see this article from last year). However, this was a more formal duo that has been performing together for a long time.

Stapleton’s electronic sounds blended well with Pugh’s vocals, which combined tradition Scottish folk singing with extended vocal techniques, feedback and cassette-player effects. I was impressed with her performance, both the range of sounds and techniques and the overall strength of her voice. Her sound ranged from long brilliant tones to rapid-fire sequences of phonemes that may or may not have been actual words. There was also an element of humor in her presentation and some of the text. Stapleton’s sounds ranged from DJ-like recordings played at variable speed to metallic noises and other scratchy bits of sound, and fill in the spaces in between the vocals. After the performance, I went to take a closer look at the Bonsai Sound Sculpture itself:

Overall, a strong performance with very contrasting sets, ranging from the more meditative opening to the more dynamic and virtuosic conclusion. I was quite happy I made the effort to come out on an exceptionally cold night in San Francisco to hear these sets.

Analog modular improvisation

Here is a little track I created last night improvising with a few of the modules in my Eurorack system. Enjoy!

This analog modular improvisation featured the Wiard Anti-Oscillator and Noisering from Malekko Heavy Industry, Make Noise Maths, and KOMA SVF-201.

World of Wonder with DJ CatSynth, January 2, 2013

Here is the podcast from my World of Wonder show that aired at midnight on San Francisco Community Radio.

12:00AM-12:00AM (0:48) Opening Chimes / Announcements

12:00AM-12:03AM (2:22) Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” from 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best Of (MP3, 2000)

12:03AM-12:05AM (2:46) Chris Cutler & Thomas DiMuzio “When Cracks Appear: Reappearance Of Birds” from Quake (CD, 1999)

12:05AM-12:15AM (9:35) Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics “Anglo Ethio Suit” from Inspiration Information 3 (CD, Album, Reggae, 2009) on Strut (UK)

12:15AM-12:26AM (10:47) C.O.M.A “Verdical” from Verdical (MP3, Single)

12:26AM-12:26AM Announcements

12:26AM-12:36AM (9:26) Nico “(The End)” from Classic Years (CD, 1998)

12:36AM-12:43AM (7:38) Cobblestone Jazz “Change Your Apesuit” from 23 Seconds (2007) on !K7 Records (UK)

12:43AM-12:46AM (2:16) The Work “Scream Circle” from Woof 7 Inches (Rock, 2006) on Ad Hoc Records

12:46AM-12:52AM (6:34) Fred Frith “Heart Bares” from Cheap At Half the Price (CD, 2004)

12:52AM-12:58AM (6:08) Solcircle “Uncle Bob” from Solcircle (CD, 2002)

12:58AM-1:00AM Station ID / Announcements

01:00AM-01:08AM (8:34) Bark Psychosis “The Black Meat” from Codename: Dustsucker (Rock, 2004) on Fire Records

01:08AM-01:14AM (6:05) Myrmyr “Fire Serpents Lull” from Fire Star (CD, 2012)

01:14AM-01:22AM (7:20) Oval “Textuell” from Systemisch (1996) on Thrill Jockey (USA)

01:22AM-01:32AM (10:22) Yuji Takahashi “Mimi No Ho” from Finger Light (1995) on Tzadik

01:32AM-01:39AM (7:13) Deletists “The Lure Or War And Boredom” from The Deletist (CD, 2003)

01:39AM-01:40AM Announcements

01:40AM-01:42AM (2:33) Cardiacs “The Obvious Identity” from The Special Garage Concerts Vol II (2005) on The Alphabet Business Concern (UK)

01:42AM-01:46AM (4:00) Various Artists – Buda / Ethiopiques “Ene Negn Bay Manesh – Girma Beyene” from Ethiopiques Volume 8: Swinging Addis (2000)

01:46AM-01:52AM (5:31) Duboniks “Fi Don’ Givit” from Trip Hop & Jazz 4 (1998)

01:52AM-01:57AM (5:23) Polygon Window “Polygon Window” from Surfing On Sine Waves (1992) on Warp Records

01:57AM-01:59AM (1:27) Ilkae “Push Pop Nil” from Pistachio Island (2001) on Merck Records

01:59AM-02:00AM Announcements / Closing Chimes

CCRMA Transitions

We close out the year with one final gig report: my performance at the CCRMA Transitions concert at Stanford University’s computer-music center. The two-night event took place in the courtyard of CCRMA’s building, with a large audience beneath the stars and between an immersive 24-channel speaker array.

I brought my piece Realignments that I had originally composed in 2011 for a 12-channel radial speaker and eight-channel hall system at CNMAT, part of my Regents Lecturer Concert there. This version, outdoors in front a large audience and clad in a provocative costume, was quite an experience, and you can see the full performance in this video:

The Transitions version of the piece was remixed to use the eight main channels of the speaker array at CCMRA. Once again, the iPad was used to move around clouds of additive-synthesis partials and trigger point sources, which were directed at different speakers of the array. The overall effect of the harmonies, sounds and immersive sound system was otherworldly. I chose this particular costume to reflect that, although I had also used it a couple of weeks earlier in my duo “Pitta of the Mind” with poet Maw Shein Win at this year’s Transbay Skronkathon. I am planning more performances with this character (but not the same costume) in the coming year.

Ambient-Chaos at Spectrum (NYC): Groupthink, Amar Chaudhary, LathanFlinAli, Charity Chan

Today we look back at the November 15 Ambient-Chaos night at Spectrum in New York. Spectrum is a new loft space dedicated to experimental music, and I was happy to have the opportunity to both hear new music and perform there.

The performance opened with LathanFlinAli, a trio consisting of Lathan Hardy on saxophone, Sean Ali on bass and Flin van Hemmen on drums.

Their music was an intense free-jazz style that moved between individual hits, bends and other sounds to more idiomatic and rhythmic sections. Every so often the intensity would swell to a loud hit or brief run on all three instruments.

The trio was followed by Groupthink an electronic duo featuring Darren Bergstein and Edward Yuhas. While the first performance was all about percussive hits and rhythms, this set was the complete opposite with ambient drones and thick electronic textures.

Throughout the evening, large programmable lights were pulsating, casting different color patterns on the wall and onto the stage. It probably worked best with Groupthink’s music.

It was then time to take the stage. I brought a relatively compact instrumental rig with a laptop, iPad, a garrahand (a metal drum from Argentina), a Luna NT analog synthesizer and a DSI Evolver.

The garrahand was the centerpiece of the set, both as solo tuned percussion and as a source for laptop-based processing. The texture of the overall performance was quite varied, ranging from analog noise to more melodic phrases on the percussion instruments. You can see a brief excerpt of this set in this video:

Amar Chaudhary live set at Spectrum, New York City, November 14, 2012 from CatSynth on Vimeo.

The final set featured Charity Chan on piano and Lukas Ligeti on drums. From the start, the pair’s sound was loud, aggressive and highly percussive. Chan definitely put the piano through a workout with her intense playing both on the keyboard and on the strings inside the instrument:

Ligeti was equally intense on drums, moving between loud hits and resonances.

The motion required for this music made the pair fun to watch as well as listen to.

Overall, it was a fun night of music and great way to start things out in New York. I am grateful to Robert Pepper (PAS) and Glenn Cornett

for hosting me at Spectrum, and hope to play there again.

Issue Project Room: Mind Over Mirrors with Zelienople + The Ashcan Orchestra

As part of my wanderings around New York this past week, I had the opportunity to hear an evening of experimental music produced by Issue Project Room. The concert, at the Actors Fund Arts Center in Brooklyn, featured two ensembles that were quite different in terms of music and instrumentation.

The evening began with a performance by the Brooklyn-based Ashcan Orchestra. The group is a project of composer p. spadine and involved a variety of colorful toy instruments.

[Ashcan Orchestra.]

Through the set of four pieces, the members of the ensemble rotated around the instruments, beginning with a piece for an ensemble of toy bells. The bells were actually quite sonorous, and one would be hard pressed to recognize this as a piece performed with toy instruments if only listening and not observing the bright colors. The colors were nonetheless an important part of the presentation and even part of the musical score.

As the performers rotated, the orchestration and timbres became more varied and complex, including more drums and other louder instruments, giving the impression martial music (ableit martial music with toys). In the end, however, they rotated back to the bells for one final piece. The music and presentation was a lot of fun, and I thought they could have easily done another piece. But the set as it was had a good structure. It was nice to hear the ensembles treatments of traditional harmony and ideas reminiscent of early-twentieth century music.

The second half the concert featured a collaboration of Mind Over Mirrors, the project of resident artist Jaime Fennelly, and the ensemble Zelienople. Fenelly’s work involves the use of harmoniums together with electronics. The combination was impressive to look at.

At least one member of Zelienople also used a combination of harmonium and electronics, while others used guitars and other instruments to produce music similar to droning or “space rock” that we have discussed on this site before.


[Mind Over Mirrors and Zelienople.]

In this case, the music was performed as a soundtrack to Gone, a film by Donald Prokop. The film appeared to be winter suburban scenes familiar to any of us who grew up around New York City, with bare trees, ranch houses, and white snow. A lone figure occasionally appeared, walking or entering and exiting a car, and occasionally the scenes dissolved into wintery abstract color contours. Throughout, the music remained based on long drones, but veered between moderate pads and loud dramatic flourishes. The structure of the music and the film both added to a sense of listlessness and disorientation – this was an experience to simply lose oneself in.

Overall it was a strong evening of music, and the performance was well attended. I hope that I can continue to hear programs from Issue Project Room during my visits to New York.

Y2K12 Live Looping Festival in San Francisco

For the past few years, the annual Live Looping Festival, which primarily takes place in Santa Cruz, California, co-hosts an opening-night performance in San Francisco with Outsound Presents at the Luggage Store Gallery. This year was no exception, with visiting artists coming from afar and braving the large flying piñatas on display in the gallery that evening.

The show opened with a solo performance by Philipp Zurcher, who was attending the festival from Switzerland. His set opened with dark and subtle tones on guitar and effects, and very little overt looping. The music remained sparse for a while, but eventually started to build up into a thicker texture as the loops came to the forefront.


[Philipp Zurcher.]

While Zurcher’s performance was subtle and sparse, the next set by Krispen Hartung and Aaron Davis from Boise, Idaho went in the opposite direction. Davis played fast runs and driving chords and rhythms on keyboard while the pair layered electronics and loops in a loud and intense rhythmic texture that they sustained for the duration of the set. There were moments where things grew a bit software which allowed Davis’ keyboard performance to come to the forefront, but overall it was a full-on barrage of electronic beats and semi-rhythmic long tones that enveloped the space and the audience.


[Krispen Hartung and Aaron Davis]

The final set featured Italian ” sound-sculptor” Luca Formentini. At first glance, he appeared to be another looper-guitarist, but that label sells his highly virtuosic and narrative music short. His guitar sounded other-wordly, aided by the fact that his performance was largely without any light. The dark, tense and melancholy tones were augmented by electronics and more complex loops layered with a mixture of effects. There were sounds that mimicked natural elements, such as water, fire and even sound evocative of cats. Rather than simply building up layers of sound, he adeptly added and removed the layers to forward an abstract narrative – one had the sense of a movie with something beautiful but tragic was about to happen. Overall, it was an impressive performance.

Overall, it was a good show, with a small but appreciative audience. The festival moved back to Santa Cruz after this opening performance. I was not able to attend any of the subsequent events, but glad I saw these artists on this night in San Francisco.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF): Art Installations

In addition to the main concerts, this year’s San Francisco Electronic Music Festival featured a concurrent gallery exhibition. It took place at Million Fishes in the Mission District of San Francisco, and featured a variety of works that combined sound and visuals. I had the opportunity to visit the gallery on the Saturday of the festival, just before that night’s concert.

I have experienced Matthew Goodheart’s work with transducer-excited cymbals a few times now, most notably in his solo performance at the Outsound Music Summit. Here, he arranged them around the front room over the gallery to create an immersive installation called …silence through things secret….


The installation dominated the main room both visually and aurally, with the late-afternoon sun reflecting off the cymbals, and a variety of sounds echoing around the room. Computer-generated sounds were created from analysis of the resonances of each cymbal and recordings of each instrument played in a variety of manners. The sounds were then used to excite the cymbals via small transducers.


[Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Because the sound from the cymbals is acoustic, the only notion one has of electronics at work is the fact that they are standing on their own without anyone there to play them. But there is nonetheless something otherwordly about the visuals and sounds of the unattended cymbals. Goodheart’s piece was part of a larger project he has developed in conjunction withe Center foew New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley.

Giant Leap, the result of collaboration by Floor van de Velde and Elaine Buckholtz, paid tribute to the late Neil Armstrong and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. The audio-and-visual work combined an anaglyph image of the moon with a sound score realized using modified rotary telephones.

The moon landing and the sounds associated with that achievement are still quite fresh, but the use of rotary telephones reminds us just how long ago this achievement took place. I consider rotary phones a particularly endangered technology in that it bears so little resemblance to contemporary phones in both form and function.

Dan Good presented two small kinetic sound sculptures. Artificial Lung combined standard speaker drivers in a novel way. They were pressed against one another a driven with a 1Hz sine wave. While the signal is far below the range of human hearing, the pressure on the speakers was visible and created the illusion of a breathing organism.


[Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

In, Good’s sculpture Petri Dish, small glass spheres are pulled up and down in a glass bowl and tubes. The sound of the glass is subtle, but the visual is quite striking, especially when it is moving (the photograph does not really capture this aspect.)

Both of Good’s sculptures draw upon simple shapes, lines and processes to create something conceptually compact and understandable. As such, they play to the strengths of modernism – something refreshing to see in a contemporary setting,

SFEMF has featured installations before, usually as fixtures in the lobby during concerts. I thought separating it out into a gallery presentation worked well and allowed the pieces the chance to be seen outside the shadow of the live performances and milling crowds. I hope they do this again next year.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF): September 9 Concert

The final concert of the 2012 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) took place on Saturday, September 9 at the Brava Theater. If there a common thread among the different performances on this evening, it was the use (and celebration) of analog electronics.

The concert opened with a solo piece by Chuck Johnson called Passivity and Void. The performance featured analog electronics with steel guitar as a sound source, and explored the tension between retaining and relinquishing control over timbre and musical processes. This is particularly true of feedback and random voltages that Johnson used. The result was beautiful low-frequency drones with complex textures layered on top.


[Chuck Johnson. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

I also found myself focused on his suitcase-based analog setup, similar at least in appearance to what I have been using of late.

The next set featured James Fei using a large speaker, in particular an Altec 604, as a musical instrument in its own right.


[James Fei and Altec 604. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The large speaker, which is a model that has existed since the 1940s, is visually impressive. And the dramatic movements of its driver in response to the low and mixed frequency analog sound sources was a central aspect of the performance. Through his mixture of subtle long tones and more pointed elements, Fei seemed to imbue the speaker with a personality, expressing itself with motion and sound. It was fun to watch. As a purely sonic experience, the elements were simple, though not as minimalist as the piece’s title Sine of Merit would suggest.

The final set of the concert and of the festival featured a collaboration of Peter Conheim of Negativeland and Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) appropriately called Negativewobblyland. They were joined for this performance by Don Joyce.


[Negativewobblyland. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Their performance, titled Booper Variations No. 18 and featured sounds and techniques based on Boopers, which were “analog feedback instruments created entirely from salvaged radio and amplifier parts.” Although the modern reinterpretation used samples and delays as forms of feedback, the music was based on the principles of the original Boopers. The result of sampling and feedback was a complex and varied array of electronic sounds and felt like a swiftly moving history of electronic music in a single set. The energy of the trio carried the music forward for the entire duration.

Overall, this year’s SFEMF included several strong nights of music, and each of the nights was quite well attended. Additionally, there was a concurrent gallery exhibition, which I will review in the final installment of the series.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) – September 8 Concert

We continue our review of the recent 2012 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) with a look at the third concert. It took place on Saturday, September 8 at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, and for the most part focused on music from unusual sources, such as natural materials, found objects and electrical circuits built in real time.

The concert opened with a solo performance by Cheryl Leonard with video by Genevieve Swifte. Leonard’s instruments are created from items she has collected from the Arctic and Antarctic, including shells, stones, kelp flute, and bones, as well as prepared viola and field recordings of wind and water. The music she produces from these sources is richly textured moving between long notes and short sequences of percussive hits, with minimal treatment of the amplified acoustic elements. Each of the two pieces, Sila and Polarnatt featured different elements in the instrumentation to reflect their respective themes.

‘
[Cheryl Leonard. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The video, which featured the formation of ice crystals on the surface of the ocean. It was quite subtle with little movement, except for an occasional bird flying through field of vision – as such, it served as support for the music and for Leonard’s live performance on stage, and a contrast to the more dynamic movement in the percussive sections.

This was followed by Loud Objects, a New York based group that creates noise by building circuits from minimal components live on stage. The performers Tristan Perich and Lesley Flanagan stood alongside an overhead projector with a clear piece of plexiglass as the performance began. It continued in silence as a few wires and integrated circuits were soldered into place on top of the surface until the first tentative and unstable sounds emerged.


[Live circuit building from Loud Objects. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Once the sound generation elements were live, the group lived up to its name. It was quite loud and intense, with various modulations of simple synthesized sounds. Much of the fun of this set was watching the construction of the circuit alongside the sounds being generated, and I found myself captivated and curious about what the shadowy integrated circuits were doing while I was listening. I would be curious to see how other performances by this group are similar or different to what they created this night.

After the intermission, renowned electronic musician and interdisciplinary artist Richard Lerman performed a version of his project Border Soundings. Lerm, an has been making audio and video recordings from the fences at the U.S.-Mexico border for many years. This version combined video taken at several locations with live performance on amplified musical instruments created from objects found near the border. Among these were a branch with things, a brush and dustpan and a tomatillo husk with onions.


[Richard Lerman. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

In this piece, the visuals were front and center, primarily the video scenes but also the live performance with the found objects. The amplified sounds from the objects were very literal, with the metal, wood, paper and other materials readily apparent. The electronic processing did not detract from the acoustic expectations. The border scenes in the videos ranged from serene, as along the linear form of the fence near Naco AZ, to forlorn in some locations, to the surreal emptiness of the Border Field State Park, with the border fence flowing into the ocean and the beach devoid of any activity (access to the beach on the US side is now restricted) – by contrast, looking through the fence to the beach on Mexican side reveals vibrant activity and daily life. The music through all of the scenes remains percussive and abstract.

The final set featured a solo performance by Dieter Moebius. Moebius is best known for his early with with the duo Cluster and the band Harmonia, but now performs solo work as well as collaborations with other noted musicians. His performance was different from the others on the concert that evening in that he focused on more conventional electronic sources, such as pre-made rhythmic loops and noise hits.


[Dieter Moebius. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Although Moebius’ performance did not use the same novel instrumentation or techniques of the other artists in the concert, it was nonetheless quite virtuosic – I particularly liked his third piece which employed more noise-based timbres and complex rhythms. His set did continue on for quite a while, however, far longer than I expected – and I suspect longer than the organizers or other members of the audience expected, as people started to file out of the auditorium as he launched into his fifth piece approaching a full hour. He even seemed poised to continue with another piece after the audience gave a warm and enthusiastic applause.

Despite the way the last set panned out, it was still a strong concert with much innovative music and technology. I am glad I had the opportunity to hear it.