Category: Concert

Composer Michael Wittgraf‘s Autogenous Mining for four double basses and Kyma will be premiered by the Chicago Bass Ensemble February 3rd 2012 at 8:00 p.m. at the Experimental Sound Studio 5925 North Ravenswood, Chicago and reprised on February 5th in Bennett-Gordon Hall at Ravinia as part of the Chicago Bass Festival in Highland Park, Illinois.  On February 5th at 2 pm, the Chicago Brass Ensemble will be joined by Mike Wittgraf and several other composers for a demonstration and Q&A on the subject of contemporary music for bass ensemble.

Autogenous Mining is a seven-minute work for four double bassists and a computer operator using Kyma X. The work exploits the size and weight of double bass strings, which afford an enormous variety of timbres and dynamics. The performers are asked to “mine” their own strings for all the sound that they can find. The computer assists this task by finding even more sounds. Autogenous Mining is about listening, reacting, and forging new paths in order to maximize the amount and variety of sounds extracted from the ore in the strings.

All four double basses are mic’d and fed through Kyma for manipulation. The resulting interactive output is broadcast to the audience over quadraphonic speakers.

Garth Paine‘s Fue Sho for flute and live Kyma will be performed by the Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) December 2 , 2011 at 7:30 pm at the Katzin Concert Hall.

Eckard Vossas is performing live at the Köln LOFT on the 24th of November 2011 20:30 on Kyma and Continuum, augmented by a variety of other synthesizers and controllers in a concert entitled eImprovisationen.

The focus of Vossas’ LOFT debut is spontaneous and free improvisation with live electronics, primarily the Kyma system with its enormous possibilities. Everything in the improvisation’s sound structures are controlled primarily by a Haken Continuum Fingerboard, complemented by an arsenal of additional controllers and pedals. The starting point of the individual pieces are randomly selected, found or ready-made preset sounds, generated or combined sound structures, or sound transformations whose sound characteristics can be changed drastically by a variety of live controllers.

A Ready-Made Sound becomes a primordial soup in a real-time evolving spectrum of sound events and timbres. Each performance explores the resulting musical space, playfully and experimentally dealing with the emerging structures of sound, as if a newly invented instrument were being discovered. The Continuum, which allows for musical ideas to be directly translated through the fingers into sound parameters, is particularly well suited to this expressive, evolutionary game.

Vossas has been making improvised music for 35 years, first with piano and keyboards, then with synthesizers. He has been exploring the universe of electronic sounds with the Kyma system since 2002.

After a long absence from Victoria, British Columbia, the Mexican/Dutch composer, Hector Bravo Benard performed a solo concert of multi-channel electronic compositions on November 5, 2011 at the artist-run venu, Open Space.

In addition to presenting his own compositions, Hector presented compositions by Agostino Di Scipio (Italy), Julio Estrada (Mexico), and René Uijlenhoet (Netherlands). Benard’s works for live electronics often start from sounds in the physical world, using the Kyma sound design platform to mould them, adding new depth and texture to create the unexpected and delight the curious ear.

Pianist Stanley Cowell with “electroacoustic enhancement by Kyma” will be joined by Vic Juris (guitar), Tassili Bond (bass) and Christopher W. Brown, (drums) as the Empathlectro Quartet performing on Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 8:00 PM at An die Musik LIVE!, a classical, jazz and world music venue in Baltimore Maryland. Audience members are invited to a post concert, meet-the-artists reception.