Category: Concert

Mu-psi: a sonic analog to sci-fi


Composer and Kyma-creator Carla Scaletti, along with special guests Anna Lum (poet) and Rich O’Donnell (percussionist/composer), present an evening of Mu-psi: a sonic form of science fiction that you experience with your entire body through total immersion in the vibrational field we call sound.

Mu-psi, like sci-fi, starts with a hypothetical premise and imagines a universe in which that premise is true. Inspired by ideas like double-well potentials, friction, Huygen’s pendulum clocks, CERN, and the emergence of life from inorganic matter, the sounds are visceral, passionate, and playful.

Mu-Psi is an evening of live experimental quadraphonic electronic music where the audience is invited to listen, to ponder, to question and, at times, to help generate some of the sounds.

Produced by the HEARding Cats Collective (now in their eighth season of “working to keep St. Louis strange and wonderful”), this all-Kyma concert will be at the .ZACK, the Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s new four-story, 40,000-square foot property, developed in the historic Cadillac building in St. Louis:

Friday, 7 April – 7:30pm
.ZACK, 3224 Locust Street
St. Louis, Missouri USA

$20 General Admission, $15 Students and Artists
Tickets are available at MetroTix as well as at the door on the night of the show.

2017 SEAMUS Award Goes to Kyma Creator


On April 21 2017, the 2017 SEAMUS Award for “important contributions to the field of electroacoustic music” will be presented to Carla Scaletti at the SEAMUS National Conference banquet, following a concert of her music.

Carla is an experimental composer, designer of the Kyma sound design language and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation.

SEAMUS Conference registration is now open: April 20–22, 2017 at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Cloud to Ground Strikes Again!


John Paul Jones and Helge Sten will be performing together as the Minibus Pimps on April 16, 2017 as part of a Présences Electroniques concert in Paris.

Since their first performance in 2011, Minibus Pimps — a unique and unconventional UK/Norwegian collaboration featuring John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin’s legendary multi-instrumentalist), and prolific electronic musician, improviser and producer Helge Sten (Deathprod, Supersilent) — have, in the words of Mark Roland, been creating a “dense, disturbing primordial world of dread and awe.”

Their debut album ‘Cloud To Ground‘ includes seven tracks, each recorded live at a different venue, from London’s Café Oto to venues in Norway and Denmark. The secret of Minibus Pimps’ colossal sonic gas giants is their use of the Kyma computer system (created by Symbolic Sound). Instruments such as guitar, bass and violin are fed into the system and radically transformed by self-designed digital instruments and processors until their sources are barely recognisable.

More info here: http://www.inagrm.com/presences-electronique-2017-0

La Berge Touring North America

Composer/Performers Anne La Berge and David Dramm are touring North America from the end of February through March 2017.  This is your chance to catch a live performance of Anne’s controversial Utter — for flute, multiple iPads and Kyma — and discover for yourself why Utter generated such intense post-concert discussion at KISS2016.

Here are the dates (in reverse chronological order so scroll down for the upcoming dates):

11 March 2017
San Francisco Center For New Music
San Francisco

10 March 2017
Indexical Concert
Radius Gallery
Tannery Arts Center
Santa Cruz
20.00

6 March 2017
Composition Colloquim with David Dramm
UC Santa Cruz
13.20 – 14.50

1 – 4 March 2017
Residency with David Dramm
Brigham Young University
3 March – La Berge solo concert
Madsen Recital Hall
19.30

28 February 2017
Solo concert
Music on Main
Vancouver
20.00

24 February 2017
INsphere
Vancouver

23 February 2017
Elastic Arts concert
with
Sam Pluta, Dana Jessen and Katherine Young
Elastic Arts, Chicago
21.00

21 February 2017
Compostion Seminar
University of Chicago

Between What Is and What Could Be…

The Hearding Cats Collective presents Between What Is and What Could Be, a concert in celebration of the 80th birthday of their co-founder and artistic director, Rich O’Donnell.

Director of the Washington University Electronic Music Studio in St. Louis, Rich O’Donnell’s musical career spans over six decades, including 43 years as principal percussionist with the St. Louis Symphony. O’Donnell is also a prolific composer, innovator and inventor of percussion and electronic instruments, a producer, a teacher and a writer.

Between What Is and What Could Be spans 47 years of creative work, from O’Donnell’s 1970 MikroTimbre I solo for amplified TamTam, to free improvisation in the present moment with the Symprov Trio, an ensemble of virtuoso current and former St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians Asako Kuboki (violin) and Timothy Myers (trombone), and includes interludes featuring O’Donnell’s virtual drumming on Wiimote and nunchuck to accompany Casper McElwee’s 3D Anaglyph video and live poetry performance by Anna Lum.  It’s a major birthday, so there will be other surprises as well!

Rich O 80 logo
Sunday, 26 February – 7:30pm
The Sheldon Ballroom, 3648 Washington
St. Louis, Missouri USA
General Admission $20, Student and Artist $15
Please RSVP

Visit the Hearding Cats Collective site for full details.

Just Call Me God!

In Just Call Me God! John Malkovich plays a megalomaniacal dictator teetering on the brink of madness in a one-man show exploring the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely.


Martin Haselböck (organ) and Franz Danksagmüeller (composer/organist, LinnStrument and Kyma processing) — respond to Malkovich’s words with music by Bach, Wagner and Schubert — in a confrontation of words against music. At one point, Danksagmüller even uses Kyma to merge the voice of Malkovich with the timbre of the organ, allowing the actor to speak with the voice of a mighty pipe organ — every power-mad dictator’s dream!

On tour this spring in Europe and Russia, the group is arranging bring their message to a worldwide audience early in 2018.

08-10 March 2017
Hamburg, Elbphilharmonie

12-13 March 2017
Vienna, Konzerthaus

15 March 2017
Amsterdam, Concertgebouw

18 March 2017
Groningen, De Oosterport

21 March 2017
Birmingham, Symphony Hall

23-25 March 2017
London, Union Chapel

28 March 2017
Luxembourg, Philharmonie

2 April 2017
Moscow, House of Music

4 April 2017
Budapest, Palace of Arts

9 April, 2017
Munich, Residenztheater

Transformation of fear

Kurt Schwitters Ursonate is a testament against war, nationalism, protectionism and establishment. In Landscapes of a voice, Roland Kuit seeks to transform his own fears into beauty by combining Schwitter’s poetry processed through Kyma with visuals by Karin Schomaker. In the face of his fears that progress has come to an end and the only thing left is degradation, Kuit seeks to create disruptive art, creating a peregrination through the human soul, finding new values in an impellent quadraphonic terrain of vocal spectra.

Roland Kuit – Kyma, voice 
Karin Schomaker – visuals

Hear it December 3-4 2016 at the Festival Internacional de Música Experimental en Vallecas, Sonikas XIV, Centro Cultural Lope de Vega, Madrid, Spain

TMIE — mediating the inner and outer sound worlds

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Carlos Alberto Augusto’s new opera “TMIE, on the threshold of the outside world” just had a successful premiere in Lisbon on Thursday September 8th, 2016, at the O’culto da Ajuda; so successful in fact, that they added two additional performances! Apparently, the sound quality of the 10-track Kyma-generated score also attracted attention and appreciation from composers in the audience.

The 51 minute work was entirely composed in Kyma and is dedicated to Portuguese soprano Marina Pacheco who performs three roles over the course of the opera — Meretseger, who loves silence; Selene, who drives her silver chariot through the skies and vibrates to the beats of the stars; and Corypheaus who listens and tries to interpret their dialog.

The TMIE gene (Transmembrane Inner Ear) is implicated in the development of the cochlea and in the synthesis of a protein that mediates between the outer acoustic environment and the inner sound world of the auditory nerve and the auditory cortex of the brain; in the opera, TMIE serves as a metaphor for the interface between the inner and outer self.

For more details and contact information on how to program this work, please see Augusto’s fascinating program notes and news site.

One man’s junk is another man’s musical instrument

Since childhood, composer/performer Franz Danksagmüller has been fascinated with the rich, interesting sound palette one can create from broken, discarded and so-called unplayable instruments. In 2013, on a visit to a local junkyard, he noticed a strange metal object that immediately captured his attention.

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Read the story of how he added contact mics and sensors and developed a bowing technique to transform this strange object (which he later discovered was part of a device for food preservation) into a new musical instrument that sends both audio and MIDI control data to Kyma.

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You can hear this mysterious and beautiful instrument performed live at KISS2016, when Danksagmüller and composer/performer/computer scientist John Mantegna perform their new piece — The Artificial Brain!
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KISS2016: Emergence

Emergence — it’s what a complex system of interconnected agents can do collectively that they could not do in isolation. Emergence goes beyond the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — emergence arises from the relationships among those parts. Emergence is that seemingly magical moment when an unanticipated novel behavior or dynamic pattern arises from a complex network of simple components and rules.

Symbolic Sound, in partnership with De Montfort University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities; the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, and the Performance Research Group, invite you to participate in the eighth annual Kyma International Sound Symposium and to explore emergence with an international gathering of Kyma practitioners ranging from experts to aspiring experts and including many who have never used Kyma before and are simply curious.

Get the inspiration, support and professional connections to motivate and energize you for the rest of the year. Join us at the Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2016) — 7-10 September 2016 in Leicester, UK — as we explore the concept of “Emergence” through 4 days and nights of words, live musical performances, open labs, and interactive discussions.

Unique features of this year’s program include an improvised conduction performance by the Emergent Ensemble; a 3-D sound immersion lecture/concert in De Montfort University’s 20+ speaker DOME; a 3-D film with a live sound track; workshops on ecosystemic composition; collaborations across international and disciplinary borders; and a celebratory club concert featuring live Kyma with acoustic instruments, vocals and analog synthesis.

Live performances featuring some of the most cutting edge music composed with Kyma this year, lectures where Kyma practitioners share their insights and reveal a few of their secrets, master classes and labs led by the creators of Kyma; and the unparalleled camaraderie and inspiration from your fellow sound and music explorers — these are some of the regular features of KISS that inspire people to return to KISS year after year.

Explore the full program here: http://kiss2016.symbolicsound.com/program/

Register now to immerse yourself in the fun, hands-on creative technology environment that will inspire you for years to come! http://kiss2016.symbolicsound.com/kiss2016-registration

Based on current registration levels, we are anticipating a record turn-out this year. So please be sure to reserve your spot by registering as soon as possible. Do it today so it doesn’t get forgotten on your to-do list. (Please be advised that there is a strict upper limit on attendance based on the venue sizes). Thanks!

Photos by Belinda B Carr.