Category: Concert

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

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.

Supersilence of the tomb

In fall 2011, Supersilent played 2 concerts in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo.  The hall, designed by artist Emanuell Vigeland to house his ashes, is an enclosed space with an incredible 17 seconds of natural reverb and intricate paintings depicting conception, birth, life, and death.

The concerts featured Arve Henriksen (trumpet & electronics), Staale Storloekken (Minimoog & electronics) and Helge Sten on Kyma and guitar.  Below is a meditative segment captured by a mobile phone:

Kyma, Curling, & Fondue

Cristian Vogel‘s Curling Sound System, part of the Antigel music and dance festival in Geneva, is a live sound track, captured and manipulated during a curling match between two highly-ranked teams, one from France and one from Switzerland. Vogel will be using eight Wiimotes to track the infrared signatures of candles positioned around the hall and wireless microphones to capture the slipping and sliding sounds from the match; he uses the Wiimotes and the audio signals to control live sound manipulation in Kyma. The event will culminate in a fondue supper with music in the restaurant of the Curling Club of Geneva.

10 February 2012 at the HALLE DE CURLING TIVOLI / Chemin du Fief-de-Chapitre 9A / 1213 Petit-Lancy / TPG 14 / ARRÊT Quidort

Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink

Artists Mark Amerika and Chad Mossholder‘s Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink will be premiered soon as an installation at  The Centre for Creative Arts in La Trobe. Described as “a collaborative ‘conceptual art’ album featuring the writing and vocals of Mark Amerika and the sound design of electronic music composer Chad Mossholder,” about 90% of the sounds were crafted in Kyma. The work is divided into nineteen tracks, each focusing on the work, language, notes, and influence of Marcel Duchamp on contemporary forms of remix practice. An exploration of glitch, microtonality, and the spectral analysis of recorded voices over time, Mossholder and Amerika challenge us to rethink the interrelationship between critical writing and critical listening.  This work was made possible thanks to a visiting artist residency for both artists at the Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.