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 (…)
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.
Cafe OTO
18 – 22 Ashwin street
Dalston
London E8 3DL
UK
Sound designers to converge on St Cloud Minnesota for over 24 hours of lectures & demonstrations, 9 hours of hands-on workshops, and 3 nights of live music, cinema and improvisation
The fourth annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2012) — to take place September 13-16 at St Cloud State University School of the Arts in St Cloud, Minnesota — will include over 24 hours of technical sessions presented by Kyma experts, 9 hours of hands-on labs, and evenings filled with live music and live cinema showcasing some of the most outstanding work created in Kyma this year.
Since the inaugural symposium in Barcelona in 2009, KISS attendees around the world have benefited from the extensive technical training, aesthetic inspiration, and opportunities for collaboration that KISS is known to deliver. This year, more than 100 sound designers, composers, performers, filmmakers, game designers, authors, audio engineers, educators, and students are expected to participate in KISS2012.
The dual nature of this year’s theme — reel time || real time — has attracted an incredibly diverse group of people! It’s just a great learning opportunity for everyone involved.
— Scott Miller, professor of music composition at St Cloud State University School of the Arts and host of this year’s KISS.
Throughout the four-day event, sound designers will be able to explore the latest innovations, features, and capabilities of the Kyma Sound Design Language and learn how to optimize their work flow so they can create amazing new sounds for film, games, music and more. Kyma practitioners are invited to bring their own Sounds to the labs where they can work with Kyma developers and fellow Kyma practitioners to enhance their results.
One of our passions is to partner with Kyma users to help bring their creations to life. There is no better way to maximize your Kyma skills and discover new collaborative opportunities than by participating in the Kyma International Sound Symposium.
— Carla Scaletti, president of Symbolic Sound Corporation, co-host of KISS2012.
If you are obsessed with sound — whether a novice seeking to kickstart your career, an expert looking to take your mastery to the next level, or someone who’s simply curious about sound design and Kyma — KISS2012 is your chance to immerse yourself in sound and ideas for four intense and inspiring days and nights.
St. Cloud, Minnesota: Photo courtesy of Adam Studer (http://www.Flickr.com/people/adamstuder)
Keynote speakers, expert presenters, and topics
Symbolic Sound President Carla Scaletti will start things off with an introduction to sound design in Kyma and an overview of this year’s theme: ‘reel time || real time’. On the last day, she’ll give attendees a tour of what’s new in Kyma.
Joel Chadabe, President of Electronic Music Foundation, author of Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Adjunct Professor in Music Technology at NYU, has been teaching and composing with Kyma since 1992. In his keynote address, he’ll discuss composition and sound design with Kyma as a learning and discovery experience. In his words:
Kyma is a kit from which you can connect specific components to make an instrument. It’s your instrument. And it does what you want it to do. I’ll talk about designing an instrument and how the design and the nature of interdependent variables, fly-by-wire and dynamic control hierarchies, and interaction affect what you do (and, by the way, what do we mean by ‘interaction’?).
British composer and sound engineer Greg Hunter is perhaps best known for his production work with The Orb and Youth and as a composer of electronic world music and contributor to the scores for Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. Currently writing a book on audio engineering, Greg will share some of the secrets he has learned during his career as remixer and producer:
In the 21st century, the distinction between composer and sound engineer has become very blurred. Most modern composers do not have the time or inclination to become professional sound engineers, yet an understanding of these skills is very important for creating music and designing sound.
More than 30 expert presenters from eight countries will be on hand, among them London-based sound designer and master of morphing Pete Johnston; Mike Johnson, senior sound designer at Blizzard (World of Warcraft-Cataclysm, Diablo III, and others); Rudi Giot, director of the Belgian ISB EEG Brain Computer Interface project; Edmund Eagan, Canadian film composer and Continuum fingerboard virtuoso; Jeffrey Stolet, author of Kyma and the Sum of Sines Disco Club (currently being translated into Mandarin for publication early next year); and many more!
Among the topics to be addressed are:
Sound design for games, film, advertising, and music;
Live cinema with real time sound tracks;
New approaches to improvisation and interaction;
New musical instruments and new approaches to performance, including continuous touch-sensitive keyboards, musical soccer balls, game controllers, treadmills, tablets, and a direct-brain interface!
Exploring the differences between working in real time vs working in reel time (and the relative benefits of each);
Plus an in-depth look at what’s new in Kyma and an exclusive peek at where Kyma is headed.
For a more complete list of expert presenters, performers, and composers, please see the preliminary program.
Composer Silvia Matheus will be participating in the 2012 Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes with White Cranes, a performance piece in collaboration with Laura Glen Louis, poet, and William Thibault, video artist, and Maria Matheus, visual artist and designer, who made many of the paper cranes. The concept for this concert is inspired by the story of Sadako Sasaki (instigated by Maria Matheus and Silvia Matheus in conversation on Skype). Sadako Sasaki was a Hiroshima survivor at age 2, who later developed leukemia. The Japanese story is that anyone who folds a thousand cranes will be granted a wish; sadly, she fell short before she died at age twelve.
Silvia will be folding cranes prior to the performance and invites you to fold a crane and make a wish. During the performance, Laura will be reading poems from her chapbook, “Some, like elephants”, accompanied by visuals created by William Thibault and an electronic music score with live Kyma signal processing that Silvia composed, inspired by Laura’s poems (one of which talks briefly about Sadako). There will be white origami paper printed by Maria Matheus marking the paths to our performance space.
Please visit the Garden of Memory website for a list of all performers, and for ticket information. Events run simultaneously and you are encouraged to walk around to sample anything that strikes you. You will find White Cranes in the Chapel of the Chimes by entering through the main door and follow the white cranes upstairs. Please, check the time schedule when you arrive; the plan is for the performances to be at 6-7 pm and 8-9pm. Seating in the chapel is limited, so, please be prepared to stand:
21 June 2012
6-7 pm and 8-9 pm
Chapel Of The Chimes
4499 Piedmont Ave
Oakland, CA 94611
(510) 654-0123
Cristian Vogel was commissioned by Grü Transtheatre to create a sound installation for their Last.Lost.Gru weekend. Here’s an excerpt of Vogel’s 72-hour duration granular time stretch of the infamous Doors song on his Kyma / Pacarana system.
The piece was played continuously for 72 hours over the emergency speaker system of the theatre from 15-17 June 2012.
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
Prepare for possible disruptions in the Earth’s magnetic field in the vicinity of Barcelona on June 15 2012 when Supersilent joins forces with John Paul Jones at the Sonar festival for a live performance that may feature as many as four Kyma systems on stage!  Be prepared for wormhole effects as the electronic improvisers start spinning their dense clouds of sci-fi jazz and colliding super-massive visceral sound objects into each other.
In the words of reviewer, David Broc at playgroundmag.net: “…those who found a way through the thick jungle of dark drones, schizophrenic bass lines and undefinable structures, found themselves in one of the most intense moments of the day. ”
Photo by David Broc
John Paul Jones, one of the earliest discoverers of Kyma, has been composing, producing, and performing with Kyma and influencing its development for nearly two decades. Jones has been working with Helge Sten for the past 3 years, and together they’re taking Kyma into dangerously powerful new sonic territories; last year, the Kyma meme infected two more members of the group: StÃ¥le Storløkken (keyboards, synth, electronics) and Arve Henriksen (trumpet, voice, drums, electronics), so at this point it’s on the verge of a pandemic.
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).
Composer/sound designer Phil Curtis is using Kyma to provide electronics and sound design for a new production of composer Anne LeBaron‘s opera, Crescent City, directed by Yuval Sharon and performed from 10-27 May 2012 at The Industry in Los Angeles.  Described by LA Times critic Mark Swed as a “darkly mysterious, troubling yet weirdly exuberant and wonderfully performed new opera,” the production is a meta-collaboration that includes six visual artists who were asked to build installations for the sets (shack, cemetery, junk heap, swamp, hospital and dive bar) in the Industry’s large warehouse-like space.  Variously priced tickets determine where you, the audience member, gets to sit (or roam), and the espresso bar has been deemed outstanding.
Curtis is using Kyma to spatialize sounds in the vast performance space and to create a swamp ambience at the climax of the opera as the Voodoo queen and healer Marie Laveau sings one final invocation and is swallowed up by the sounds of the swamp.
Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the libretto metaphorically examines the way people deal with disaster and post-apocalyptic scenarios, including nurses, Voodoo, and Loa. As Swed enthusiastically concludes: “We now have something that can genuinely be called L.A. opera.”
Joel Chadabe, President of Electronic Music Foundation, author of Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Adjunct Professor in Music Technology at NYU, has been teaching and composing with Kyma since 1992. In his keynote address, he’ll discuss composition and sound design with Kyma as a learning and discovery experience. In his words:
British composer and sound engineer Greg Hunter is perhaps best known for his production work with The Orb and Youth and as a composer of electronic world music and contributor to the scores for Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. Currently writing a book on audio engineering, Greg will share some of the secrets he has learned during his career as remixer and producer:
Composer Silvia Matheus will be participating in the 2012 Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes with White Cranes, a performance piece in collaboration with Laura Glen Louis, poet, and William Thibault, video artist, and Maria Matheus, visual artist and designer, who made many of the paper cranes. The concept for this concert is inspired by the story of Sadako Sasaki (instigated by Maria Matheus and Silvia Matheus in conversation on Skype). Sadako Sasaki was a Hiroshima survivor at age 2, who later developed leukemia. The Japanese story is that anyone who folds a thousand cranes will be granted a wish; sadly, she fell short before she died at age twelve.
ComposerÂ