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

Dialog: Sound and Movement in Geneva

Cristian Vogel @ Electron GVA Session. Photo by Onneca Guelbenzu

GVA Sessions is an interdisciplinary research and international exchange platform organized by the Gilles Jobin Company, geared to respond to the ever-changing artistic environment of the performing arts, primarily contemporary dance, music and related creative technologies.

In 2011, the GVA sessions have been focusing on one of the longest established collaborative partnerships in the performing arts: that between choreographer and composer, choreography and music. This year, GVA Sessions is offering a mixed format providing a collaborative space for different types and levels of knowledge, artists research and production.

In April, as part of the Electron Festival, Cristian Vogel and Gilles Jobin discussed their collaboration on Spider Galaxies, and Vogel presented an introduction to Kyma and the Pacarana.  The next installment in the series will be “Dialog: Sound and Movement“, a collaborative workshop for composers and choreographers that will take play in 16-23 July 2011 (the deadline for registration is 30 May 2011).

Since 2007, the GVA Sessions have led knowledge exchange gatherings inviting international creative arts practitioners to Geneva (Switzerland) with the goal of sharing in artistic inquiry, thinking  and creating together, all in an informal, collaborative yet rigorous setting. 

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.

Spiders Dance On

Gilles Jobin‘s Spider Galaxies, featuring a Kyma-generated score performed live by Cristian Vogel, is embarking on the next leg of a world tour with performances at:

  • May 20 – Festival Evidanse – Delémont – Switzerland
  • June 14 – Festival Latitudes Contemporaines – Lille – France
  • December 8 & 10 – Festival theater:now – Steckborn – Switzerland
Susanna Panandes Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clement da Costa and Martin Roehrich in a scene from Gilles Jobin's Spider Galaxies

In his May 3rd review of the Beirut performance of Spider Galaxies for L’Orient du Jour, Critic Edgar Davidian wrote:

The music is intense, rhythmic, percussive, and populated by noises of all kinds, from the tuf-tuf of trains and hissing of bullets, sirens roaring or speeding decibels, cries of a tropical forest, or the noises of a bustling city; the dancers are like air traffic controllers giving signals and weaving a web (is that the spider?) by way of gestures and unforeseeable pirouettes, free, impulsive, fantastic, at the same time having often an almost machine-like precision in obeisance to rigor and discipline.

The richness of the sound score is due to two modern composers, Cristian Vogel and above all Carla Scaletti, a pioneer and intrepid avant-gardist of electronic music.  An amazing score (all the more so in that the steps of the dance fit perfectly with the notes that spring forth from synthesizers and computers) where the sense of melody is deliberately ignored in favor of cadences, of rhythms, and above all strange groupings of sounds like roars, gun shots, deafening landslides, organized noise.

 

Read the full review in the original French.

In The Daily Star, May 3rd edition, Matthew Mosley wrote:

Some audiences might have seen resonances with the beguiling behavior of subatomic particles when the Gilles Jobin dance troupe came to town Saturday with “Spider Galaxies,” their brand new creation.

With an electronic soundtrack that makes use of data from the LHC, “Spider Galaxies” is an hour-long stream of non-repeating dance sequences performed by a team of four, a continually mutating bodyscape of interaction and divergence that generates an intense hypnotic power.

As a subterranean rumble resonated through the Madina’s sound system, algae-hued light revealed dancers Susanna Panandes Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clement da Costa and Martin Roehrich dispersed across the stage.

Randomness was built into the soundtrack, too, mixed live by longtime Jobin collaborator Cristian Vogel. At several moments Vogel deployed random number generating programs to dictate the specific texture of the soundscape.

Spread over a number of channels, Vogel’s incidental music blended sampled sounds, electronic melodies and tracks from composer Carla Scaletti, whose pieces incorporated LHC data. The resulting soundtrack veered between Kraftwerk-like electro, industrial clankings and ominous hummings.

At times Vogel [and Scaletti] used multiple speakers to create marvelous Doppler effects, giving audience members the sensation of sitting at the center of the LHC itself, with particles whizzing round at increasing speeds, preparing to impact.

Investigating the elusive notions of beauty, meaning and human behavior, Jobin provides us with a reminder, if one were needed, of the essential mysteriousness of the world.

Read the full review and other reviews of Spider Galaxies.

KISS2011

The third annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2011) is scheduled to take place from 16-18 September 2011 at Casa Da Musica, architect Rem Koolhaas’ dramatic new music venue in Porto, Portugal.

Inspired by Portugal’s proud history of navigators who set out to explore beyond the known and visible horizon, the theme of this year’s symposium is “Explorando o espaço do som”(“Exploring Sound Space”) in honor of those who are exploring new methods, concepts, and ideas, beyond the familiar horizons in sound and music.

Universidade do Porto and Symbolic Sound invite you to join us to share ideas, experiences and results related to this year’s theme, ranging from the most literal to the most abstract definitions of sound, space, and exploration. You are invited to learn, to share, to meet, and to enjoy!

For more information, please visit the KISS2011 web site: http://kiss2011.symbolicsound.com/

 

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.

Lulu at the Berliner Ensemble Theater

Composer/performer Sarth Calhoun is directing rehearsals of  Lou Reed‘s music for Frank Wedekind‘s Lulu directed by Robert Wilson at the Berliner Ensemble theater in Berlin. The score features Kyma processing, Continuum/Kyma playing, and dual Continuum fingerboard improvisations accompanied by a live string section.  Lulu, which depicts a society “riven by the demands of lust and greed” (and which became the basis for both Alban Berg’s opera and Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box) opens 11 April 2011 in Berlin.