Electronica: Zlatko Tanodi, the new album of Croatian composer Zlatko Tanodi‘s highly imaginative electo-acoustic music has just been released under the Cantus label. Tanodi is a true musical eclectic; as adept at writing orchestral and chamber music as jazz and pop arrangements and scoring films, he tours internationally, performing keyboards with his jazz ensemble Opus X and also serves as the Head of the Department of Composition and Theory at the Zagreb Academy of Music. All of these experiences are evident in the music on this disc which slips easily from the classical avant-garde to a cinematic dramaturgy worthy of a Hollywood space fantasy and even includes brief snatches of DnB. Throughout, Tanodi has woven a surprising and delightful thread of pure sound design and a fascination with the human voice (both speaking and singing). Even more impressive than Tanodi’s masterful command of an astonishing variety of musical styles, though, is the force of his unspoiled, almost child-like imagination. Sounds transform themselves in a seemingly inevitable way from operatic diva to demonic baby; string quartets, frogs, and abstract sine wave modulations receive equal amounts of loving attention to detail and craftsmanship.
For a little foretaste of the sonic delights you’ll enjoy in the full album, check out Tanodi’s introduction to his contributions to the Recombinant Art compilation, produced by Edmund Eagan. Electronica is a must-hear for anyone who enjoys the pure physical pleasure of being immersed in sound and music and is eager to be transported to another world, at least for the duration of this CD. You can order the full album from the Cantus web site (100 HRK is approximately USD17).
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation.
Composer Bruno Liberda is your inspiring host for a modern day Tonsalon to be held in Vienna on Wednesday evening, 7 December 2011. Focusing primarily on one work, through repeated “Readings” (Listening, Looking, Learning, Asking questions = Pausing), time is accumulated in all dimensions; several episodes of individual perceptions merge into a star cluster of the now-plurality: a new piece of music systematically enters the consciousness of the guests.
Program
 Introduction:  Die Schläfer 2002, fixed Media, 5’14
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 Main work:   Self portrait without self, 2011, Zither, Voice, Kyma, ca. 13′
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 The composer speaks… and plays…the guests question (perhaps)
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Coda:Â Echoes in people’s minds: everyone speaks with everyone else!
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 When: Wednesday, 7 December at 20h (Doors open at 19h40, ending at 22h)
Garth Paine‘s Fue Sho for flute and live Kyma will be performed by the Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) December 2 , 2011 at 7:30 pm at the Katzin Concert Hall.
Post-human investigator Steven T. Brown‘s new video, Flowering of Resistance, pays tribute to thinkers throughout history who have had the courage to shake things up.
In it, you can hear how he uses Kyma to generate a slowly ‘flowering’ timbre, beautifully shaken up and interrupted with stutter effects to match the shaken images. Selected for inclusion in the (sub)Urban Projections Festival held in Eugene, Oregon on November 9-23, 2011, Brown dedicates this video to his fellow participants in the Occupy movement all over the world. He concludes with the reminder that:
The power to resist the status quo in a non-violent fashion is as important to the healthy functioning of a democracy as is the ability to forge consensus.
Eckard Vossas is performing live at the Köln LOFT on the 24th of November 2011 20:30 on Kyma and Continuum, augmented by a variety of other synthesizers and controllers in a concert entitled eImprovisationen.
The focus of Vossas’ LOFT debut is spontaneous and free improvisation with live electronics, primarily the Kyma system with its enormous possibilities. Everything in the improvisation’s sound structures are controlled primarily by a Haken Continuum Fingerboard, complemented by an arsenal of additional controllers and pedals. The starting point of the individual pieces are randomly selected, found or ready-made preset sounds, generated or combined sound structures, or sound transformations whose sound characteristics can be changed drastically by a variety of live controllers.
A Ready-Made Sound becomes a primordial soup in a real-time evolving spectrum of sound events and timbres. Each performance explores the resulting musical space, playfully and experimentally dealing with the emerging structures of sound, as if a newly invented instrument were being discovered. The Continuum, which allows for musical ideas to be directly translated through the fingers into sound parameters, is particularly well suited to this expressive, evolutionary game.
Vossas has been making improvised music for 35 years, first with piano and keyboards, then with synthesizers. He has been exploring the universe of electronic sounds with the Kyma system since 2002.
Composer Scott Miller will be in London working with the ensemble rarescale for their concert at Shoreditch Church on Wednesday, November 23, which is to feature the premiere of his new work, Anterior/Interior, written for rarescale flutist Carla Rees.
Anterior/Interior is for 1/4-tone alto flute and Kyma and is an exploration of microtonal multiphonics that are isolated, dissected, and exploded into relief against the beautiful, complex timbre of the flute. The concert will also include other interactive and improvisational Kyma works by Miller, performed by Carla Rees, including Lovely Little Monster and haiku, interrupted. Â Composer and rarescale member Michael Oliva has also invited Miller to do a presentation on his use of Kyma in interactive, improvisational music at the Royal College of Music.
The culmination of two years of research and development, Kyma X.82, a new software update for the Kyma X/Pacarana sound synthesis engine, is specifically designed to take advantage of the expressive capabilities and extended control offered by today’s new crop of alternative controllers and cutting edge musical interface designs.
The recent explosion of interest in new musical interfaces and alternative controllers for sound design and music has created a need for sound synthesis and processing engines that can take full advantage of the increased bandwidths, higher resolution, lower latencies, continuous pitch and velocity values, and subtle expressive capabilities of these new controllers. Symbolic Sound has a long history of support for alternative and extended controllers in Kyma X, and Symbolic Sound’s newest release, Kyma X.82, introduces several additional features to support these innovative musical interfaces and alternative controllers.
Features in Kyma X.82 include over 20 new morphing sound synthesis algorithms, support for 14-bit MIDI controllers, and the publication of Kyma’s OSC protocol to support and inspire future developments of new instruments and controllers that can exploit Kyma’s responsive, high-resolution sound synthesis and processing algorithms in a seamless, plug-and-play manner.
Whether you are a sound designer performing expressive creature voices to picture, an electronic musician performing live on stage with alternative controllers, or a composer using physical controllers to create dense multi-layered textures of sound in the studio, you will be able to take advantage of Kyma X.82’s ease of parameter-mapping, low latency, high-resolution parameters, and legendary sound quality. Additional features of the new release include enhanced multichannel panning and effects, higher quality spectral analysis, and a 40% speedup in the software executing on the host computer.
Sound and Video Examples
3d Morph on iPad
Using one of the new Morph3d objects to morph among a re-synthesized Tuva singer, bongo, flute, angry cat, female voice, violin, cat meow, and shakuhachi using Kyma Control on an iPad.
Morphadasical
The foreground ‘melody’ is performed live on a Continuum Fingerboard, using KeyTimbre (near/far) and KeyVelocity (pressure) to morph between re-synthesized violin, trombone and flute. In the background, Kyma is generating the Sax/Flute morph pattern.
Medieval Miasma
The key-mapped spectrum of an organ is re-synthesized through a FormantBank with a slowly changing formant. The voice is a key-mapped spectral analysis/resynthesis using sine wave oscillators.
Peace Flute
A key-mapped flute spectrum is re-synthesized with a time-stretched attack and played on the Tonnetz in Kyma Control.
Spectres
A re-synthesized voice morphing to re-synthesized bowed glass performed on the Kyma Control keyboard. In the background, a key-mapped piano spectrum performed on a standard MIDI keyboard is re-synthesized through a FilterBank with vinyl clicks as the input to the filter.
Cloud Cadence
A key-mapped CloudBank on a set of piano samples, performed on a standard MIDI keyboard.
PNO Squeal
Key-mapped piano spectra re-synthesized by a FormantBank played on standard MIDI keyboard with ModWheel controlling the formant to create the ‘squeals’.
The Minibus Pimps (aka John Paul Jones, Helge Sten, and a minibus’ worth of electronics, instruments, iPads, and two Kyma/Pacaranas), will be performing at the Alte Feuerwache in Mannheim on Monday November 14, 2011 at 8 pm as part of the Enjoy Jazz 13th International Festival for Jazz and More.
Photo by Alf S Solbakken
To paraphrase from Michael Engelbrecht Abgelegt‘s review of the duo’s debut performance at Punkt (the original is written in German and is roughly translated here):
Unique lighting choreography outlined the duo like spirit figures in an Asian shadow-puppet play.  To old-timers, the music of the duo evokes Led Zeppelin, “Metal Machine Music” and “Walk on the Wild Side”. The two made use of “Kyma”, a computer music language, to quickly create sound algorithms no one has never heard before.
I have rarely in my life, under live conditions, experienced such a clearly contoured, perfectly staged dramatic Noise as one piece of music. Noise, yeah, noise! Much as one might expect from an old pioneer of the avant-garde, but this is by Helge Sten and the ex-Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, a man with new ideas exploring new technologies.
This was not a soulless demonstration of a computer program: sounds were unleashed, the old tendencies of experimental rock music and “drone music” were picked up and catapulted into the year 2011. What a poignant ‘wall of sound ‘!
Twice the duo kindled a violent storm (gale force 13).  Those who did not take flight witnessed the way the noise textures become strangely melodic. A worthy finale (no guitars are burned these days but a few wild spirits are lured from machines) – the last concert on the big stage of Agden theater!
Helge Sten seemed to be remembering his “dark ambient” work as “Deathprod”. John Paul Jones seemed to tap into the wild energy of an older time without falling into the nostalgia trap.  Was it Neil Young who said, “It is better to burn out than to fade away”?
If you’d like to come by for a demonstration of Kyma, listen to some compositions, join the discussion, and try things out, please send email to EMF (it is free, but a reservation is required). Followup studio sessions are planned for November 17 and December 1 and 8 for becoming a Kyma professional.
