Category: Concert

Steampunk Meets Sgt Pepper & Some Tiny Skeletons

 

Amon Tobin & Tessa Farmer ‘ISAM: Control Over Nature’ Preview from Ninja Tune on Vimeo.

Amon Tobin has just launched ISAM — an album, audio-visual live performance tour and art exhibition — pairing Tobin’s original and evocative music with Tessa Farmer’s intriguingly organic sculptures. Both artists, Tobin in sound and Farmer in sculpture, explore the rearrangement of the “familiar” in disturbing, playful and highly original ways. Imagine opening the specimen drawer in a darkly lit Victorian-style natural history museum in a parallel universe while a steampunk science-fiction-meets-Sgt.-Pepper score plays in the background and you’ll start to get the picture.

In ISAM, Tobin uses Kyma to successfully blur the distinction between sound design and music: transforming sound effects into drippy, gurgly beats that sound like they were emitted from steam-powered machines; continuously gliding pitches seamlessly morph into harmonic anthems; and repeating rhythmic and harmonic patterns with endlessly changing orchestrations and backgrounds; glockenspiel fairy tales juxtaposed with aliens bursting unexpectedly out of bubbling tar pits. The music is evocative, cinematic, and highly original: chopped spectra with hints of vocal resynthesis; Klangfarben rhythms; electronic insects encountering R2D2, repeating distortion patterns; the soundtrack from a childhood nightmare set to a swinging 6/8 nursery rhyme beat; sitars followed by glass beads flung across a frozen pond at midnight; aliens dancing heavily & deliberately at BPM = 76; and those ubiquitous miniature skeletons dancing so wildly that tiny bones fly off at right angles, making tinkly sounds as they hit the floor.

The audio quality is superb, always crisp, clean and masterfully mastered.

Despite all the little skeletons, the overall atmosphere of ISAM is playful, rousing, and at times downright cheerful—and the BPMs hovering between 76-88 make it the perfect iPod soundtrack for strutting in the city or skipping your way through a crowded airport.

ISAM: Control over Nature will be shown at the Crypt Gallery in London (26 May – 3 June 2011) followed by a showing at L’espace Art Roch in Paris (13 – 23 June 2011). Live tour dates so far are:

01.06.2011 Astra, Berlin, Germany
09.06.2011 AB Club, Brussels, Belgium
10.06.2011 Bataclan, Paris, France
11.06-17.2011 The Roundhouse, London, UK

Hallucination Sextet

Poem 88 announces a concert on May 15 at 3 PM by the famous Cullum-Robinson duo and their infamous HALLUCINATION SEXTET (two live and four virtual), a freely improvised, nonidiomatic, quadraphonic, quasichaotic performance jamboree…

Featuring (live) poet, Jerry Cullum and (live) composer Dick Robinson doing live Kyma processing, the concert will take place at the Tanner-Hill Gallery Project Space, Suite 111 of the White Provision Building, 1170 Howell Mill Road., Atlanta, GA 30318 (14th St and Howell Mill Road). Admission is free.

SoundProof

The SoundProof performance ensemble (Patricia Strange, violin; Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet & flugelhorn; Brian Belet, bass & viola) embarks on its ‘Sasquatch Tour 2011’ with concerts, master classes, and lecture/demos in Oregon and Washington:

  • ‘Future Music Oregon’ concert (8 pm, April 30)
  • Kyma master classes (10 am & 11 am, May 2) University of Oregon, Eugene
  • May 3 concert (12 noon) and lecture/demo (2 pm) Portland State University
  • May 7 lecture/demo (12 noon) and concert (2 pm) Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival

The concerts feature interactive computer music composed for the ensemble by Larry Austin, Brian Belet, Elainie Lillios (world premiere), Bonnie Miksch, Jeffrey Stolet, and Allen Strange. The concert performances are run entirely within Kyma.

John Paul Jones & Spin Marvel

 

John Paul Jones at KISS2010 (Photo by Peter Rantasa)

John Paul Jones will be joining Spin Marvel at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival on April 30, 2011 for a set of “textural soundscapes and colour” and “electronica jazz”.  JPJ will be enhancing the “distinctly European sound” of Spin Marvel by processing his bass through all manner of spectral transmogrifications arranged in a Kyma Timeline controlled by a SoftStep USB MIDI foot controller.

(Additional jazz gigs to follow later this summer so stay tuned!)

These Cats Can Speak

Working to keep St. Louis “strange and wonderful”, the Hearding Cats Artists Collective presents another poetry and multimedia word warping event on Saturday, Apr. 16, 2011 – 8 pm at Floating Labs multimedia performance gallery in St. Louis.

Featuring word-artists Brett Underwood, Anna Lum, Treasure Williams and Stef Russell conversing musically with Zimbabwe Nkenya (psaltry) and Rich O’Donnell (Kyma/Pacarana electronics), These Cats Can Speak promises an evening of enhanced word-play and lively interaction.

Yannis X 3

Composer Yannis Kyriakides’ “The Trojan Light” for ensemble and live Kyma electronics will be premiered by musikFabrik at the Muziekgebouw on Thursday the 17th of February 2011 at 20:15.

Yannis Kyriakides‘ The Trojan Light will be premiered by ensemble musikFabrik in the Muziekgebouw on Thursday the 17th of February 2011 at 20:15.  The Trojan Light, a new 45-minute piece for ensemble and  both fixed and live Kyma electronics, will share the program with two other pieces by composers named Yannis (but with alternate spellings): Kassandra by Iannis Xenakis and the cult performance piece, Anaparastasis III: The Pianist by Jani Christo.  Full program and ticket information.

Manda no Sahou

Composer Jeffrey Stolet’s new composition for bass/baritone Nicholas Isherwood and Kyma: Manda no Sahou will be premiered February 16, 2011 at CCRMA (Stanford).

Composer Jeffrey Stolet has just finished a new work for bass/baritone Nicholas Isherwood and Kyma: Manda no Sahou.  Manda is the name of a character played by actor Riki Takeuchi in a series of Japanese films.  Despite the fact that he is a mafioso and a loan shark, Manda lives by his own ethical code, championing the little guy and letting the real Yakuza (bad guys) have it.


Stolet uses lines from the films to evoke a cool Clint-Eastwood-meets-Buddha type vibe over menacing,  Kyma-granulated samples of Isherwood singing his basest of bass notes.  The premier is set for February 16 2011 at CCRMA (Stanford) after which Isherwood will incorporate the piece into his European concert tour.

John Littig Interview on WBAI

John Littig’s Audio Grafitti opens Tuesday January 18, 2011 at SOB’s in New York. He described how he used Kyma for the intro to Inside Reprise in a December 27 2010 interview with Lynne Rosen on WBAI in New York.

While studying at NYU and working as a research assistant in the brain imaging department at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, John Littig was simultaneously hard at work developing his craft as a jazz drummer in clubs from Greenwich Village to Harlem.  In a December 27th interview on Lynne Rosen‘s “In Pursuit of Happiness” radio show on WBAI in New York, John gave a shout-out to Symbolic Sound and played the Kyma-generated intro to Inside Reprise, one of the songs from Audio Grafitti,  his new show opening at Tuesday January 18 2011 at SOB’s in New York.

Listen to John Littig interview on WBAI; the Kyma shout-out occurs at  around 39 minutes, and the larger discussion on the importance of surrounding yourself with positive, affirming influences is important advice for all artists to reflect upon at the beginning of this new year.  As Littig points out, “No one can do this alone.”

OtherMinds: The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2011

Computer music by Jonty Harrison and Silvia Matheus will be featured on The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2011, Friday-Sunday, January 7-9, 2011, 8pm at the Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco: http://www.sfsound.org/tape.html

Surround yourself with 16+ speakers at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, during three concerts of  new and classic fixed-media compositions by 20 composers. This year’s event features Jonty Harrison, the British composer and pioneer of surround-sound diffusion and a performance of Crossings by composer/videographer Silvia Matheus.

For more details and advance ticket sales, visit http://www.sfsound.org/tape.html/

The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2011
Friday-Sunday, January 7-9, 2011, 8pm
Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco