Category: Concert

Tridecaphiles can celebrate at Cafe OTO with the UK premiere of the Minibus Pimps on Friday July 13, 2012; doors open at 8 pm.  The first event in a new series at Cafe OTO co-curated by Norway’s Ny Musikk organisation and OTO projects will feature the Minibus Pimps – a new collaborative project between legendary UK musician John Paul Jones and prolific Norwegian producer/musician Helge Sten (Deathprod and Supersilent). The pair explore ravishing, intricate noise via a set-up of guitar/bass, Kyma, iPads, and more. The evening will open with an appearance by prepared piano/electronics and percussion duo, Steve Noble and Sebastian Lexer. Tickets are £10 in advance, £12 at the door.

Composer Scott Miller has been selected to write new music for Kyma and EMMI: a trio of self-playing acoustic robots created by Troy Rogers, Steven Kemper and Scott Barton. (Rogers studied with Scott Miller at St Cloud State University and Jeffrey Stolet at the University of Oregon and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Virginia).

In Détente, Miller will be using Kyma to create an ecosystemic environment for the acoustic robots and exploring the limits of real-time amplitude and frequency modulation by forcing them to perform audio-rate tremolo and trills. The new work is scheduled for performance at the Sound and Music Computing conference on the Music for Robots concert on 14 July 2012.

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, 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.