When composer/performer Steve Ricks upgraded his trombone to a B.A.C. Paseo and paired it with Kyma, it opened the door on a new world of improvisation with live electronics. You can hear some of those results as tracks in his new album Solo Excursions. (Listen for Kyma on tracks: 2, 6, 8, 9, and 11).
Ricks is particularly fond of the SampleCloud which he uses to create an overall texture in nearly every track. In track 6, “Kybone Study 16 Harrison Bergeron” he added several ring modulation sounds with filtering and delay/reverb to create additional frequencies and a “metallic” sound, suggestive of the metallic “handicaps” forced on the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron: a short story set in a dystopian near-future where anyone who is too smart, too beautiful or too athletic is required to wear “handicaps” to make them “more equal” to everyone else.
In the music, there is a sense of resistance that the performer has to push against as the sound is coming out of the trombone, through the microphone and into Kyma.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
— Kurt Vonnegut
On Steve Ricks’ May 2023 album, released in conjunction with Ron Coulter, Precipitations (New Focus Recordings), Track 2, Late Night Call, features Ricks improvising with a single SampleCloud Sound on one of his own audio files, while Ron improvises on percussion and lo-fi electronic devices.
According to the liner notes:
Late Night Call revels in the subtle timbral distinctions in non-pitched electronic sounds; early dial-up modems, bad telephone connections, and poor TV or radio reception come to mind as we listen to this ecology of resistors, currents, and connections. Mechanics’ Choice establishes a four note ostinato as a pad over which Coulter improvises on found objects and gongs. A reverse processing effect turns the texture inside out, distorting it as the sound envelopes fold back upon themselves.
The Precipitations tracks 4 and 6, Charming Ways and I-Se3m, also feature the same Kybone (Kyma + trombone) setup.
Another Coulter/Ricks project, Beside the Avoid, was released in 2022 by Coulter under his Kreating SounD label. According to Ricks, Kyma-created Sounds can be heard throughout the album. In a departure from the way Ricks typically uses Kyma, the track Wow, Why & Wot takes a random walk with the morphing sound and Steve’s spoken recordings of the words “Wow,” “Why,” and “What”.