Category: Festival

Kyma at Musicacoustica Beijing

Three world premieres at the Musicacustica Beijing 2013 festival are utilizing Kyma for live sound generation and processing:

Magic Fingers for Leap Motion and Kyma by composer/performer Wang Chi, a composer and performer whose research and composition interests include data driven instruments and sound design. Chi is also an active translator for electronic music related books, including Kyma and the SOS Disco Club.

 

The FA Yun An man for Kyma by composer Wang Chunming, associate professor of Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, PhD candidate in digital media at the Shanghai Conservatory Of Music, and Director of the Institute of China Electronic Music.

 

And Theatre of Spheres by composer Jeffrey Stolet of the University of Oregon. Jeffrey Stolet is a professor of music and director of the Intermedia Music Technology at the University of Oregon where he has installed 5 Kyma teaching and production studios. In addition to teaching Kyma to his composition and sound design students at the University, Professor Stolet also directs the yearly Summer Academy on the UO campus where he welcomes international students and faculty for a two-week intensive course on digital audio, sound design and Kyma. Recently Stolet completed a book on Kyma, entitled Kyma and the SumOfSines Disco Club that is currently available in English and will soon be available in Chinese.

Concert of Di Scipio works at Sonorities Festival

A full concert of works by Agostino Di Scipio is to be featured as part of the Sonorities Festival in Belfast on 26 April 2013.

  • AUDIBLE ECOSYSTEMICS n.1 live electronics
  • PAYSAGE HISTORIQUE n.4 (New York. Background Media Noise), taped sounds and electronics
  • MODES OF INTERFERENCE n.1, audio feedback system with trumpet and electronics
  • 2 PEZZI DI ASCOLTO E SORVEGLIANZA, live electronics
  • Luigi Nono POST-PRE-LUDIUM PER DONAU, tuba and electronics Giacinto Scelsi PEZZI PER TROMBA SOLA

Jonathan Impett is performing trumpet and tuba and Agostino Di Scipio is performing the Kyma electronics.

Jeff Stolet & Chi Wang open for Musicacoustica-Beijing Festival

Chi Wang at opening ceremony of Musicacoustica-Beijing (Xinhua/Luo Xiaoguang)

Two live electronic pieces for Kyma and game controllers were selected to be a part of the opening ceremonies for this year’s Musicacoustica Beijing festival on October 22, 2012: Chi Wang’s Sound Motion for Kyma and Kinect and Jeffrey Stolet’s Lariat Rituals for and Kyma and Gametrak controller.

Wang Chi’s Sound Motion is a multichannel interactive composition that utilizes Processing to analyze data captured from the user’s movement in space; that data stream is then used to control recorded, synthesized, and modified sound in Kyma.

In Jeffrey Stolet’s Lariat Rituals, fine positioning of the Gametrak in 3-space controls formants and other parameters of a synthesized male voice (as seen in this video).

Following the festival Stolet and Wang spent two weeks presenting seminars and lectures on Kyma at conservatories throughout China.

Jeffrey Stolet performs Lariat Rituals at KISS2012 in St Cloud MN

 

LA area performances by Phil Curtis

Composer Phil Curtis will be performing in two up-coming Los Angeles-area events, bringing his own brand of live sonic palimpsests to the work of two LA-area artists. On November 6, he’ll be providing live Kyma electronics for a performance of Anne LeBaron’s Floodsongs (2012), a choral setting of three poems by Douglas Kearney performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale as part of the last ever SCREAM electronic music festival at REDCAT on Saturday November 10 at 8:30 PM.

The following weekend – Friday through Sunday with two shows on Saturday – Curtis is performing as part of a Furnace, a piece conceived by Carole Kim at Automata in Chinatown. Shows are at 7:00 pm November 16-18 (extra show at 9:30 pm on the 17th). Automata is at 504 Chung King Court. This will be a big multimedia interactive extravaganza with Butoh dance, Experimental Music, and Live Video Projection! Seats are VERY limited, so advance tickets are highly recommended!

For more information and tickets, visit the ticketing site or the Furnace facebook page.

SoundProofing

SoundProof (Patricia Strange, violin; Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet, flugelhorn, & voice; Brian Belet, viola, voice, and Kyma processing) have just embarked on a multi-city tour of the midwest culminating in the opening concert for the EMM festival on October 11 2012.

EMM will also feature the world premiere of Belet’s new percussion/Kyma composition on Saturday October 13 and a performance of Hua Sun’s Impression of Tibet for Wacom Tablet controlling Kyma on October 12.

The full SoundProof concert schedule includes:

Monday, October 1st: Bowling Green State University (Bryan Recital Hall, Moore Musical Arts Center), 8pm

Thursday, October 4th: College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati (Watson Recital Hall, Corbett Center), 8pm

Tuesday, October 9th: Ohio University, Athens (Recital Hall – Gldn 400, School of Music), 8pm

Thursday, October 11th: Electronic Music Midwest festival – opening concert (Lewis University, Romeoville, IL), 7:30 pm

The concerts feature interactive Kyma pieces composed specifically for the ensemble by Brian Belet, Bruno Liberda, Stephen Ruppenthal, Jeffrey Stolet. Each concert also includes a ’15 Minutes of Fame’ set featuring one-minute works by 15 composers including Brian Belet, Mark Phillips, Scott Miller, and Michael Wittgraf.

Kyma Symposium in St Cloud

Fascinating papers, lively concerts, entertaining hands-on workshops, and conversations that carried on late into each night made KISS2012, the fourth annual Kyma International Sound Symposium, an inspiring and invigorating experience for all.

The symposium was covered by several local news outlets (click on photos to read the stories):

 

 

 

Hua Sun and Kurt Hebel perform the annual ritual for KISS2012

Here’s a slideshow of photos from the event:

 

For more details on the event, please see the official KISS2012 site and Kyma Symposium on Facebook.

A Midsummer Night’s Supersilent

Supersilent, described as the stylistic intersection of Miles Davis, Tangerine Dream, Sonic Youth and Stockhausen has been collaborating with influential bassist/producer/composer John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin, Them Crooked Vultures) on a new project that takes the group to a complex and intensely powerful sonic space. The group performed at the Hafensommer Festival in Würzburg on August 1, 2012.  Check out the photo gallery on the official Hafensommer blog (and look for a shot of JPJ, pick in mouth, controlling Kyma from his iPad).

In an interview with the Main Post, JPJ revealed to the interviewers that he had attended kindergarten in Würzburg, so this was something of a homecoming for him.

As critic John Kelman wrote of the collaboration at All About Jazz:

It sounded, in fact, as if they’d been playing together for years, as Jones moved around the neck to create, deep, visceral and snaking lines beneath Sten’s sonic manipulation, Storløkken textural excursions and otherworldly electronic melodism, and Henriksen, who moved from kit to trumpet growl to falsetto and harsher to pocket trumpet (…) All of Which makes Supersilent a unique experience (…) a definitive moment in the history of the festival (…)

An orchestra of bats

Echolocation, Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation for an ‘orchestra’ of bats and accompanying ‘choir’ of bat detectors will be performed at the Wolfslaar nature reserve, outside Breda (The Netherlands) on Saturday 16th June as part of this year’s Interference Festival. The fun begins after sunset, as dusk falls and the bats come out to feed. As they fly around and make use of their biosonar radar capabilities in search of insects, Jarvis uses Kyma to capture the bat signals and extract information from them to control a musical score. The result is an evocative surround sound musical experience as night falls, deepening each listener’s relationship with the environment and creating a magical and memorable experience for all. Some responses to previous performances:

I couldn’t believe that I was listening to real bats – what a variety of noises, and to see them in real time was an absolute knockout. The whole thing was fantastic.

I was enchanted by the bat chatter… what a genius idea, and so beautiful.

This is the kind of music that makes people think and transforms their experience of bats, of humans, of sound, of communication. This kind of transformative experience is the whole reason for art.

Echolocation by Robert Jarvis
16 Jun 2012 — 22:30
Open to the public and Free!
Wolfslaar 4834 Breda Zuid Oost Breda Netherlands