Author: SSC

Tomorrow you’re gone

Hamilton Sterling at Helikon Sound has just completed the sound for David Jacobson’s new film, Tomorrow You’re Gone, a story of psychological vengeance and real-world redemption. The film stars Stephen Dorff, Michelle Monaghan, and Willem Dafoe.

As sound designer, supervising sound editor, and re-recording mixer, Hamilton created a sonic world that functions almost as a musical score.  Aside from guitar and drums (used by the composer), almost every scene in the film is inflected by sounds generated in Kyma (appropriately enough, since most of the film may or may not take place from a point of view inside the main character’s head).

Di Scipio in the Age of Cage

Agostino Di Scipio “The Age of Cage”, on Friday May 18, 2012 was the final event in an Homage to Cage series organized by the University of Salerno, culminating in Polvere di suono e altri resti (“sound dust and other remains”) a concert curated by Agostino Di Scipio, featuring new music by Di Scipio as well as new realizations of classic Cage works including: a new version of 4’33” with Di Scipio’s Background Noise Study Kyma patch; several Audible Ecosystemics pieces; and the 6 studi for piano & electronics. The concert, technically managed by Silvia Lanzalone and her electronic music students in Salerno, was a big success.

Di Scipio and Longobardi have several upcoming concert dates that will include a new version of Cage’s Electronic Music for Piano (1964). Imagine Cage’s Music for Piano 4-84 played through a network of self-governing feedback circuits (realized in Kyma), using only piezo discs, getting feedback through the metal and wooden parts of the piano! The Stradivarius label is about to issue a 50-minute long version of the new Cage/Di Scipio work on CD at the end of May 2012.  For dates and times, please visit: Di Scipio Upcoming Events

Post apocalyptic LA hyper-opera

 

Composer/sound designer Phil Curtis is using Kyma to provide electronics and sound design for a new production of composer Anne LeBaron‘s opera, Crescent City, directed by Yuval Sharon and performed from 10-27 May 2012 at The Industry in Los Angeles.  Described by LA Times critic Mark Swed as a “darkly mysterious, troubling yet weirdly exuberant and wonderfully performed new opera,” the production is a meta-collaboration that includes six visual artists who were asked to build installations for the sets (shack, cemetery, junk heap, swamp, hospital and dive bar) in the Industry’s large warehouse-like space.  Variously priced tickets determine where you, the audience member, gets to sit (or roam), and the espresso bar has been deemed outstanding.

Curtis is using Kyma to spatialize sounds in the vast performance space and to create a swamp ambience at the climax of the opera as the Voodoo queen and healer Marie Laveau sings one final invocation and is swallowed up by the sounds of the swamp.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the libretto metaphorically examines the way people deal with disaster and post-apocalyptic scenarios, including nurses, Voodoo, and Loa. As Swed enthusiastically concludes: “We now have something that can genuinely be called L.A. opera.”

 

Deathprod returns!

Helge Sten will be in Paris on 30 March 2012 performing as Deathprod for the first time since 2003 as part of the 8th Présences électronique festival, envisioned by ina GRM, the Centquartre and Radio France.  Deathprod is performing on Friday night at 21h30 in the main hall following acousmatic pieces by composers Arne Nordheim, Francesco Giomi, and Martin Tetrault.

Sten will be performing live, featuring pieces from Morals & Dogma and Nordheim Transformed. All pieces have been ported over to Kyma from various older samplers and updated to quadraphonic presentation.

Présences électronique is free and open to the public!

30 mars à 21h30
au Centquatre (Nef Curial)
104, rue d’Aubervilliers ou 5, rue Curial – Paris, 19e

Einstein’s bicycle

Einstein taught his uncle how to ride a bicycle, and, soon, choreographer Gilles Jobin will be able to return the favor by teaching a group of present-day physicists how to dance in his new role as the first Collide@CERN-Dance and Performance Artist in Residence.  Jobin wonders whether there is a parallel between the scientist’s totally focused thought in pursuit of knowledge and the artist’s total focus in the moment of performance. The wickedly playful Jobin promises to stir things up around the ring with several interventions across campus in unexpected places, all investigating the connection between thinking and moving, all certain to be stimulating and fun as learning to ride a bike for the very first time.

 

Jobin is an internationally acclaimed choreographer based in Geneva and well-known for commissioning new electronic music for his dance scores (several of which have employed Kyma)!

For periodic updates on this playful collision of art and science, follow ArtsAtCERN.

 

Dancing in the foothills of the Swiss Alps

Dance company, la Cie Gilles Jobin, will be performing a double-bill at Théâtre Les Halles in Canton Valais, Switzerland on March 16th and 17th.  The program is especially interesting in that it features choreographer Gilles Jobin’s first work, A+B=X (1997) presented on the same bill with his most recent work Spider Galaxies (2011).  The musical score for Spider Galaxies, composed by Cristian Vogel and Carla Scaletti, will be performed live in Kyma by POL (aka Christophe Polese).

Book your ticket online, by email, or by calling +41 (0)27 452 02 97. There’s a discount if you attend both shows!

Choreographic pianist

Choreographic pianist Eleonor Sandresky is performing music for piano and live Kyma processing at the Greenwich House Music School in New York on Sunday, March 11, 2012. In her performances, Sandresky is interested in how motion translates to emotion; she goes beyond merely composing the music to literally choreographing the entire performance. Recently, this interest has taken on a cyborghian element as she dons a new Perceptual Expansion Space/Suit (designed by Semiotech) to enhance the conversation with light and sound in her performances. Contact Electronic Music Foundation for an invitation.

Buddha on a powder keg

Composer Bruno Liberda sets up complex systems of silent analog feedback loops and communicating between Kyma and analog electronics through voice and an Obi-gong in his new work, Buddha cannot sit quietly anymore, premiered at 21h on 4 March at Elektro Gönner Mariahilfer Straße 101/1060 in Vienna. In analog electronics, exploring resonance phenomena, self-oscillation, over-driven filters can fling us either into the abyss, or into Seventh Heaven, depending on tiny variations in initial conditions and control signals. However, with Kyma in the cockpit, one gains (intuitive) control over this supersonic flight. In Buddha… there are in fact no sound-producing sources in the analog domain, but only a whispering speculation: what happens if some feedback loops are short-circuited through the winding paths and controlled from Kyma?

In the last few days, a rapidly aged circuit diagram illustrates the main issue: a 4-pole resonant filter, whose input is fed by analog delay.  As the latter needs some material to delay, it is fed by the resonant filter itself.   In order to avoid a simple short-circuit, the delay travels through a bit- and sample-shredder, before getting injected back into its own feedbackloop…. So the dance is not simple short-circuits; it is the feedback of the delay, sharpening the edges of the filter cutoff, losing a few bits, changing the sample rate. This in turn has interesting implications for the input of the resonant filter, and a complex dance is set in motion; the dance leads to new vibrations, more or less under the composer’s reins.

In Liberda’s new work, it’s not just that Buddha cannot sit quietly anymore; he is sitting on a powder keg!

TOUCH

TOUCH, a multimedia tour de force featuring Helge Sten (Kyma), Arve Henriksen (trumpet), Terje Isungset (percussion) and Therese Skauge (dance), was the first concert of the 2012 NOTAM Tuesdays series, taking place on 31 January 2012 at the National Stage (Schou quarter).

Arve Henriksen is an innovative artist in a wide range of music genres and TOUCH gave him a chance to show off his compositional side: the premiere of a new work commissioned by NOTAM. Helge Sten is linked to a number of different bands and projects, including Motorpsycho, Supersilent, and Minibus Pimps, as an artist making music at the intersection between noise, jazz, contemporary music, electronic music and rock. Terje Isungset is one of Europe’s leading innovative percussionists. The three musicians were joined by dancer Therese Skauge, visual artist Anastasia Isachsen and sound processing engineer Asle Karstadt.