For composer Bruno Liberda, the train is his mobile studio (thanks to the battery-powered Pacamara).
This week’s journey, a mere one and half hours by train from Vienna, Austria to Brno, Czech Republic, finds him collaborating with students and faculty at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU), where students focus on developing their own artistic practice within the broader context of studies in history, theory, culture and society.
During the seminar, students had an opportunity to delve into Kyma with the benefit of Bruno’s experience and guidance. Topics included sound design using the signal flow editor, composing for live performance in the Kyma Timeline, and reactive programming with Capytalk.
Liberda dedicated a full day to the question top-most in the student’s minds: “How can we feed the sounds from a modular into Kyma?” Together they delayed, granulated and realtime spectralized / froze / singled-out individual overtones… in Bruno’s words, “we spectralized the hell out of it!”
Curious to hear some of Liberda’s music? L’après-midi im Stiegenhaus von Mozart, for various analog synthesizers, piano, Kyma, and organ pipes that Liberda claims to have found in Mozarts’ basement, was just released (4 April 2024).
Liberda requests that listeners please
listen with headphones (or on a good stereo system), otherwise you will not only miss the mysterious murmuring in the stairwell, but also all the shadows and fine cracks of light in the spatial structure, the top, bottom, front, back further left or right – everything quiet and surprising exploding in multifold time.
In a word: the soul of the piece!