Category: Concert

Charging into the abyss

John Paul Jones is once more joining forces with Supersilent, this time for a whirlwind tour of the UK, demonstrating yet again that “the prolific multi-instrumentalist finds bigger thrills in charging into the abyss than reclining into the rock stardom he achieved decades ago” according to Dave Kerr in a recent feature article for The Skinny.

Supersilent have only one rule: no rehearsals!  And according to the Village Underground, on this tour, “they intend to push each other further, harder, wilder and freer into uncharted sonic zones.”

NOVEMBER:
14th – Birmingham, Town Hall | www.thsh.co.uk
15th – Glasgow, The Arches | www.thearches.co.uk
16th – Manchester, RNCM | rncm.ac.uk
17th – Bristol, Arnolfini | arnolfini.org.uk
18th – London, Village Underground | villageunderground.co.uk

Jones, as well as Supersilent members Helge Sten, Ståle Storløkken, and Arve Henriksen, each utilize Kyma in their live, improvised electronics performances.

LA area performances by Phil Curtis

Composer Phil Curtis will be performing in two up-coming Los Angeles-area events, bringing his own brand of live sonic palimpsests to the work of two LA-area artists. On November 6, he’ll be providing live Kyma electronics for a performance of Anne LeBaron’s Floodsongs (2012), a choral setting of three poems by Douglas Kearney performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale as part of the last ever SCREAM electronic music festival at REDCAT on Saturday November 10 at 8:30 PM.

The following weekend – Friday through Sunday with two shows on Saturday – Curtis is performing as part of a Furnace, a piece conceived by Carole Kim at Automata in Chinatown. Shows are at 7:00 pm November 16-18 (extra show at 9:30 pm on the 17th). Automata is at 504 Chung King Court. This will be a big multimedia interactive extravaganza with Butoh dance, Experimental Music, and Live Video Projection! Seats are VERY limited, so advance tickets are highly recommended!

For more information and tickets, visit the ticketing site or the Furnace facebook page.

Willful Devices embrace the unpredictable

As anyone who works with computers or musical instruments knows: sometimes, even despite your best efforts, these devices can seem to have a mind of their own. Composer/improviser Scott Miller and Clarinetist/improviser Pat O’Keefe accept this fact and even celebrate it, in the knowledge that, within this unpredictability lies the potential for unimagined sonic discoveries.  Miller and O’Keefe will be embracing the unpredictable this Thursday, October 25 as Willful Devices (Scott Miller, Kyma; Pat O’Keefe, clarinets) present a 7:30 pm concert, preceded by an afternoon masterclass at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Both events are open to the public:

3:30 pm:  Master class on Contemporary Clarinet Performance Practice and Real-time Computer Composition Issues in Room 160, Music Bldg., SJSU, no admission fee

7:30 pm concert: ‘Electroacoustic Mayhem Created With a Clarinet, Interactive Electronics, and Plenty of Improv!’ (Rumors hint at guest appearances by Stephen Ruppenthal and Brian Belet, of the ensemble SoundProof) in the Concert Hall, SJSU, Admission $10/$5

Be there; or be predictable.

Exploding Tickets at the Loft

The Exploding Tickets (Robert Landfermann – Bass ; Christian Lillinger – Drums ; Matthias Schubert – Saxophone ; Eckard Vossas – Kyma) are performing at the LOFT in Cologne on October 22, 2012 in a freely improvised, expressive, energetic, spontaneous and impulsive set of encounters between uncommon electronic sound experiments and natural instruments.

Eckard Vossas uses his Kyma system, controlled and tweaked by a Continuum Fingerboard and various other controllers like iPads and pedals, to create a unique individual style of improvised electronic music, sensitively modulating synthesized and artificial sound material with his fingertips, transforming and performing with the same expressivity as his acoustic improvisation partners with whom these sound transformations hold an intensive dialogue. It can be fascinating to hear how new and different the acoustic instruments – Saxophone, Bass, Percussion – can sound when they are confronted with experimental electronic timbres!

Concert at the LOFT starts at 20:30 (ticket information).

SoundProofing

SoundProof (Patricia Strange, violin; Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet, flugelhorn, & voice; Brian Belet, viola, voice, and Kyma processing) have just embarked on a multi-city tour of the midwest culminating in the opening concert for the EMM festival on October 11 2012.

EMM will also feature the world premiere of Belet’s new percussion/Kyma composition on Saturday October 13 and a performance of Hua Sun’s Impression of Tibet for Wacom Tablet controlling Kyma on October 12.

The full SoundProof concert schedule includes:

Monday, October 1st: Bowling Green State University (Bryan Recital Hall, Moore Musical Arts Center), 8pm

Thursday, October 4th: College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati (Watson Recital Hall, Corbett Center), 8pm

Tuesday, October 9th: Ohio University, Athens (Recital Hall – Gldn 400, School of Music), 8pm

Thursday, October 11th: Electronic Music Midwest festival – opening concert (Lewis University, Romeoville, IL), 7:30 pm

The concerts feature interactive Kyma pieces composed specifically for the ensemble by Brian Belet, Bruno Liberda, Stephen Ruppenthal, Jeffrey Stolet. Each concert also includes a ’15 Minutes of Fame’ set featuring one-minute works by 15 composers including Brian Belet, Mark Phillips, Scott Miller, and Michael Wittgraf.

Kyma Symposium in St Cloud

Fascinating papers, lively concerts, entertaining hands-on workshops, and conversations that carried on late into each night made KISS2012, the fourth annual Kyma International Sound Symposium, an inspiring and invigorating experience for all.

The symposium was covered by several local news outlets (click on photos to read the stories):

 

 

 

Hua Sun and Kurt Hebel perform the annual ritual for KISS2012

Here’s a slideshow of photos from the event:

 

For more details on the event, please see the official KISS2012 site and Kyma Symposium on Facebook.

A Midsummer Night’s Supersilent

Supersilent, described as the stylistic intersection of Miles Davis, Tangerine Dream, Sonic Youth and Stockhausen has been collaborating with influential bassist/producer/composer John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin, Them Crooked Vultures) on a new project that takes the group to a complex and intensely powerful sonic space. The group performed at the Hafensommer Festival in Würzburg on August 1, 2012.  Check out the photo gallery on the official Hafensommer blog (and look for a shot of JPJ, pick in mouth, controlling Kyma from his iPad).

In an interview with the Main Post, JPJ revealed to the interviewers that he had attended kindergarten in Würzburg, so this was something of a homecoming for him.

As critic John Kelman wrote of the collaboration at All About Jazz:

It sounded, in fact, as if they’d been playing together for years, as Jones moved around the neck to create, deep, visceral and snaking lines beneath Sten’s sonic manipulation, Storløkken textural excursions and otherworldly electronic melodism, and Henriksen, who moved from kit to trumpet growl to falsetto and harsher to pocket trumpet (…) All of Which makes Supersilent a unique experience (…) a definitive moment in the history of the festival (…)

Future Music’s Summer Academy of Electronic Music

Professor Jeffrey Stolet and post graduate teaching assistant Chi Wang

This year’s Summer Academy of Electronic Music, directed by Professor Jeffrey Stolet at Future Music Oregon, welcomed 5 faculty members from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Shenyang Conservatory of Music and the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.  The faculty members, along with students from their schools and from Peking University and the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, immersed themselves in Kyma, recording techniques, sound synthesis, and composition in a two week intensive seminar based on Professor Stolet’s text, Kyma and the SumOfSines Disco Club, now available in both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Professor Stolet was assisted this year by three of his current and former graduate students: Chi Wang, Jon Bellona, and Hua Sun (see photo on left).

The Summer Academy culminated in a final concert featuring 20 compositions, all completed by students over the course of the two-week course.

Professor Jeffrey Stolet, academy student Yang Fan, & Professor Yang Wanjun

If you missed the summer academy, you still have a chance to learn about Kyma.  During the fall semester 2012, Professor Stolet and his former masters degree student Chi Wang will be presenting Kyma seminars at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Shenyang Conservatory of Music and Sichuan Conservatory of Music.