HMSS is an ensemble for electroacoustic noise-improvisation consisting of Ludger Hennig (Leipzig) Markus Markowski (Bremen), Hanns Holger Rutz aka sciss (Weimar) and Johannes Sienknecht (Berlin). The ensemble exists since the beginning of 2006 and, searching to extend musical improvisation through electroacoustic software-instruments. The musical material of HMSS consists mostly of noise and ambient sounds but also live-soundscapes which are interconnected within a signal-network.

During the concert in Riga HMSS will be using a special 4 channel sound installation for visitors to experience the sound both
acoustically and spatially. During the performance which will be a special electroacoustic network improvisation visitors will be able to move around using the space to perceive the architecture of sounds, which will feature urban soundscape from Riga city.

Live stream from the concert-performance available here:

2 channel stream:
http://live.streaps.org:8000/_MIXstereo.ogg

4channel stream:
http://www.strommusik.org/download/streaming/ (follow the instructions in the file README-streamingapps.rtf ) http://live.streaps.org:8000/_MIX.ogg

more info: http://www.rixc.lv/projects/hmss/index.html

The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can they create?; how can they physically control these sounds?; how do they compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do they organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

In its first year of PLOrk’s existence, composers and performers from Princeton and elsewhere developed new pieces for this unprecedented ensemble, including Paul Lansky (Professor of Music at Princeton), Brad Garton (Director of the Columbia Computer Music Center), PLOrk co-founders Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, and several graduate students. They have made extensive use of a new music programming language created by Princeton graduate student (now assistant professor at Stanford University|CCRMA) Ge Wang, called ChucK, which allows the performers to develop new code in performance. In their first major performance (April 2006, Richardson Auditorium) we were joined by the renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, legendary accordianist and composer Pauline Oliveros, and the exciting young percussion quartet from New York City, So Percussion. PLOrk was featured in the April issues of the MIT Press Technology Review and Wired Magazine, and performed at the Dartmouth College “Orchestras of Sameness” festival in May 2006.

Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist and improviser-composer from an eclectic musical background. As singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using custom sound processing of voice and other instruments. Besides her composing and improvised projects, she co-leads the digital chamber punk ensemble What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton (http://www.whatbat.org) and has collaborated/performed with Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Ras Moshe, Alexander Waterman, Kathleen Supové and Hans Tammen, among others and done sound design and programming for Jin Hi Kim, Shelley Hirsch, Pamela Z, Phoebe Legere, Fred Frith, Jim Staley, Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, Chico Freeman and others. Dafna can be heard with Mechanique(s) on a forthcoming release on In-situ, and was featured vocalist on José Halac’s CD “Dance of 1000 Heads” (Tellus), as well as on her acclaimed release with What is it Like to be a Bat? on Tzadik/Oracles.

Dafna’s residency involved dynamically controlled algorithmic improvisation, using vocal cues, Morse code and Wii controllers to elicit beat frequencies, trigger and manipulate LEMUR percussion robots and shred on Guitar bot.

Andrew Schneider is a multimedia designer and performer whose work investigates human/technological interdependence. He is the co-founder and Associate Artistic Director of the Chicago-based theatre company, BigPictureGroup. His solo performance work has been seen at P.S.122, Monkeytown, The Prelude Festival, and The Tank. His multimedia devices have been featured in Art Review, Wired, TimeOut NY, Maker Faire, SIGGRAPH, Dorkbot, the Telfair Art Museum, and at the Center Pompidou in Paris. His Solar Bikini has been featured internationally and is slated to be featured in the next Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. His latest projects include Experimental Devices for Performance (.com) and Acting Stranger (.com). Andrew Holds a Masters Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU. He is currently working with The Wooster Group. (http://andrewjs.com)

Doing musical theatre with robots used to be Andrew’s standard joke answer to the question “So what do you want to do with your life?” Finally, a life-long dream comes true. He plans to start with a dance number, interfacing his movements with the robots via custom-built wearable controllers.

Born in New York City, Simon Morris (US/France) is a new media artist exploring urban landscapes, new musical interfaces and skateboarding. Investigating new forms of musical expression, his work examines technology and its role as a socially engaged art practice. He has conducted live performances at Eyebeam, NYC, the Article Biennale 2006 in Stavanger, Norway, the KiasmaMuseum in Helsinki, Finland and the Barker Theatre in Turku, Finland.

Simon is planning an interactive musical performance orchestrated by the movements of three skateboards.

By subway:

Take the F/M/R to 4th Ave. and walk one block down either 9th or 10th St. to 3rd Ave. LEMURplex is on 3rd Ave. between 9th & 10th Sts. Or, take the F/G to Smith & 9th Sts. and walk two blocks up 9th. Cross and then turn right onto 3rd Ave.

David Tagg - Waist Deep Seas of Milk (review) New York musician, David Tagg, has seen The Future of Modern Guitar. And this sonic seer’s astral projections are sumptuously spread across the ambient expanses of Waist Deep Seas of Milk, though all trace of twang, pluck and strum is dissolved in FX haze and spun out in endless echo returns. Review by Alan Lockett.

Favourite Places (review) Everyone has a favourite place, whether cosy internal retreat or cherished patch of Great Outdoors. Forest, bathtub, museum and alley find common cause on this audio-document from Audiobulb, compiling ten pieces representing selected artists’ Favourite Places. Captured field recordings blend with musical treatments to make mementos enfolding inspiring source within inspired composition. Review by Alan Lockett.

Hectic Tenuous - Chic Nerve (review) Starting with flanged, panned scratching (ala fingernails, not decks), this solo CDR from The Caution Curves laptop lady Rebecca Mills, is an eleven track melange of textures, echoes, drones, processed field recordings and even the occasional bit of singing! Review by Mark Francombe.

La Ciutat Ets Tu - Tomasz Krakowiak (review) La Ciutat Et Tu surrounds the listener with evolving percussive transformations in timbre. The compositions have a circular unwinding quality, never abrasive and utterly hypnotic. Tomasz Krakowiak is a Polish-born percussionist now living in Toronto, Canada. Having collaborated with the likes of Kaffe Matthews, John Oswald, Phil Minton, Otomo Yoshihide, Gert-Jan Prins among other. Review by Derek Morton.

Love City by Dsic (review) Dsic, also known as Greg Godwin, is a Bristol-based noise artist that employs a wide range of influences and sound sources. Love City and the miniDsic EP, both released through Lf Records, weave their way through noise, drone, glitch, ambient and microsound. Review by Alex Young.

Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn - Still Life (series) (review) The internally themed Rothko-esque cover art of the Still Life series could stand as a semiotic of Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn’s sound, with its slow-shifting tones that spread across a spartan canvas - ostensibly static swathes that reveal micro-variativity on deeper insertion. Review by Alan Lockett.

Of Memory & Dreams - Bill Thompson (review) There is a trajectory that many improvised electro acoustic performances reach, which although unique in every given context, often manage to take you to a zen like point where you become one with the signal and phase in and out of listening to the development of structure or dynamic of the work. Review by Roger Mills.

Three Rooms - Steve Peters (review) Sound artist Steve Peters’ recent CD, Three Rooms documents three of his site-specific installations. The three pieces succeed without reference to the installations for which the pieces were originally composed, capturing the quiet reflection of the original locations. Review by Caleb Deupree.

Thus, van Veen turned to reel-to-reel (RTR) tape machines and Konstantin Raudive’s experiments with blank media in which he attempted to record the ‘voices of the dead’. (Little did van Veen know that John Hudak was exploring similar terrain in Voices from the Paradise Network.)

“This led to a series of investigations of the sonic realm arising between two networked R2R machines, a simple mixer and a DSP processor (to add spatialization and stereo channel manipulation to sometimes mono signals). These investigations revealed a performative realm, a space to improvise and to develop a capacity to ‘play’ the machines, or rather tweak & twiddle their hard knobs into spasms of ecstasy, cries of joy &, at times, moans of despair. The machines sang to me & each other, & I was drawn into the deadzone…”

[’til death do us a part] will be performed live at Programmable Media II: Networked Music tomorrow [Not in New York? Join us in Second Life].

Read Greg J. Smith’s interview with Tobias on Serial Consign.

[’til death do us a part] is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Tobias c. van Veen is a renegade theorist and pirate, techno-turntablist and writer. Since 1993 he has directed conceptual and sound-art events, online interventions and radio broadcasts, working with STEIM, the New Forms Festival, the Banff Centre, Eyebeam, the Video-In, MUTEK, MDCN.ca, the Vancouver New Music Society and Hexagram. His work has appeared in CTheory, EBR, Bad Subjects, Leonardo, Locus Suspectus, FUSE (contributing editor), e/i, the Wire, HorizonZero and through Autonomedia, among others. He has sonic and mix releases on No Type’s BricoLodge and the and/OAR labels. From 1993-2000 he was Direktor of the sonic performance Collective [shrumtribe.com] in Vancouver. He is co-founder of technoWest.org with Dave Bodrug, controltochaos.ca with DJ FISHEAD and thisistheonlyart.com with artist ssiess. From 2002-2007 Director of UpgradeMTL [upgrademtl.org] and Concept Engineer at the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT.qc.ca]. Tobias is doctoral candidate in Philosophy & Communication Studies at McGill University.

TABLACENTRIC is thrilled to present Ajay Kapur, whose work revolves around one queston: “How do you make a computer improvise with a human?” Using the rules set forth by the north Indian classical tradition, Ajay strives to build new interfaces for musical expression by modifying the tabla, dholak and sitar with added microchips and sensor systems, while building robotic musical instruments which can be programmed to perform along with the human performer.

Ajay Kapur is the Music Technology Coordinator at California Institute of the Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Music and Psychology with a focus on Intelligence Music and Media Technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor in Science and Engineering Computer Science degree from Princeton University in 2002. He has been educated by music technology leaders including Dr. Perry R. Cook, Dr. George Tzanetakis, and Dr. Andrew Schloss, combined with mentorship from robotic musical instrument sculptors Eric Singer and the world famous Trimpin. A musician at heart, trained on Drumset,Tabla, Sitar and other percussion instruments from around the world, Ajay strives to push the technological barrier in order to make new music.

A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. It is a software tool based on MaxMSP and speech recognition software interacting with my own voice during performances. It’s also a state of mind enabling expanded spoken and vocal improvisation, expanded communication and ecstasy.

It has been developed in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Arts Center in New York and STEIM in Amsterdam. Mask/Mirror has to do with virtually everything but at the same time it does not have anything special to do with anything special. As well as being a blank mask I can put on my face - and my voice - it’s also a mirror that let me browse and talk to my memory while I am watching into it.

All mirrors are masks and vice versa. Both are tools enabling identity.

“It is difficult not to treat Mask/Mirror, with its randomized garble of words, as a willfully cryptic Oracle of Delphi reincarnated as an Apple laptop. While Bosetti had described the project as “about the aboutness of being about” what Noise got out all of this is that it’s devilishly hard not to seek meaning even where it’s clear none is forthcoming. Not until the program, in a moment of absurd hilarity, spit forth the word “hamburgers” did it all click: Mask/Mirror is a tool for shearing all meaning from language. It’s a liberation, of sorts, like the sound version of Rorschach tests: The mind is encouraged to wander freely and delight in words purely for their sound. In the information overload of contemporary times, Mask/Mirror’s playful rupturing of sense–its nonsense, in other words–is a welcome respite.” Raven Baker - Noise/Citypaper

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI, voice, electronics, Berlin / Milano / Baltimore: Alessandro Bosetti, composer and sound artist, was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He works on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication and produced text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves on the line between sound anthropology and composition often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews often build the basis for his abstract compositions along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies,trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations. Since he’s curious about differences he travels. Just in 2006 he’s been living and working in West Africa, China, Taiwan, Holland, Scandinavia, United States , Germany and Italy. For the future he plans to be living and working between Berlin (D), Milano (I) and Baltimore (USA).

CHRISTIAN KESTEN, voice, Berlin, Germany: Christian Kesten was born in 1966 and works as composer, performance artist, vocalist and stage director. He lives in Berlin, Germany. His interest lies in the “space in-between”: between music and theatre, music and language, between music and the visual arts. His pieces work with the space which opens up between the sound of language and the parallel, non-illustrative action (-cycling 1990; des Kleinen Übergewicht 1995; 45 seconds 2006). They make use of everyday spaces and their sounds, including works made for train stations, in which minimal sounds of winds and brass are spread over the station and mixed with sounds of trains and passers-by (nordbahnhof 1996, bahnhof westend 1996, bahnhof zoo 1997). welcome home is written for the squeaking doors of the Nordbahnhof station in Berlin and two violins which mirror the door sounds: the passers-by experience the music while on the move. In (o.T.) für klarinette in einem raum mit langem nachhall 1(1999) and 2(2000) [(without title) for clarinet in a space with a long reverberation time] the clarinet plays to its own reverberation as a second voice, microtonally, and thus refers to the presence of space. parochial (1998) – for the group “Maulwerker” (4 female voices, trumpet/voice, clarinet/voice, alto saxophone + additional instruments) – was written especially for the space of the Parochialkirche in Berlin: sculptural shaped sounds are moved in space, while trumpet, clarinet and sax move mostly outside the space and so extending acoustic perception beyond the walls of the church.

Recently he developed the “video audio field recording”, by recording field sounds with a video camera, composing dense and light sound textures of field recordings and live instruments. The projected images are always fixed camera angles, filming spaces in-between, the incidental, the mundane: the Los Angeles catalogue; dodger stadium; cypress park; urban cafe restroom (all 2007). Kesten studied at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin (Music: guitar, piano, voice; counterpoint/twelvetone-technique with H.Fladt; musicological thesis on “Silence in the works of John Cage and Morton Feldman”; Experimental music and music-theatre with Dieter Schnebel | Performance Art | Projects with the stage design class of Achim Freyer) and TU Berlin (German literature and linguistics). 1989-91 he studied privately with Michael Vetter (overtone singing, vocal improvisation, calligraphy/notation etc.). Movement studies with various teachers (Amos Hetz a.o.).

Since 1987, he has been performing new vocal music and experimental music-theatre throughout Europe and in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Israel, Moscow and Tokyo. He currently works with the ensemble “Maulwerker” and as soloist. In a long collaboration with Dieter Schnebel he premiered most of his music theatre works since 1987. He has recently worked with Alessandro Bosetti, Jacques Demierre, Chico Mello, Makiko Nishikaze, Iris ter Schiphorst, who wrote solo works or operas for him. Kesten conceives and curates the series “maulwerker performing music” (since 2005) in Berlin with programs like ?poems for feet“, ?pro cedere. Music as Process“, “Situationen.. Interpenetrations of art and life” or “Halt’s Maul. Screaming pieces from four decades”, with World Premieres by Antonia Baehr, Alessandro Bosetti, Bill Dietz, Jürg Frey, Robin Hayward, David Helbich, Michael Hirsch, Sven-Åke Johansson, Travis Just, Christian Kesten, Andrea Neumann, Pauline Oliveros, Dieter Schnebel, Emmett Williams, István Zelenka, a.o. Since 2006, he is co-curator of the experimental music concert series Labor Sonor at KULE Berlin.

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia was founded by composer Michael J. Schumacher in 2001 and its program builds on the efforts of Schumacher’s previous sound space, Studio Five Beekman, founded in 1996. Diapason is the sole venue in New York City and one of few internationally dedicated to the presentation of multichannel sound installation where composers and sound artists can realize their work for an interested public. By providing an optimum listening environment, two high quality multi-channel sound systems, a regular audience, and a place for experimentation, Diapason seeks to engage composers and the public in dialogue about the place of contemporary music and sound practice in a broader cultural context. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and by generous individuals. Diapason is a 501(c)3 organization.

Slought Foundation and Soundfield NFP are pleased to announce an evening of new and experimental music featuring Rome-based ensemble Ossatura and Philadelphia-based Ensemble Noamnesia. Ossatura features Elio Martusciello (electronics), Fabrizio Spera (percussion and electronics), and Luca Venitucci (accordion and electronics). They will realize graphic scores by Anthony Braxton, Franco Evangelisti, and others, in collaboration with Ensemble Noamnesia.

Improvisation represents the backbone of the music played by Ossatura. The practice of improvising is integrated by discussion, research and critical analysis, all of which contribute to the elaboration of structures, information and organizational modes. Their music is marked by a sequence of sound blocks and diversified interlocking timbres and shapes, where detailed textural work alternates with rhythmic accelerations and highly dense sound events. Standard instrumental techniques are explored, together with heterodox practices such as manipulation, treatment, electrification and amplification of various objects, assuming noise as a structural element. Their improvisational work develops through electro acoustical elaboration in real time and the use of tapes, which both expand and define the space where sound is manipulated. Ossatura tends towards a combination of non-musical languages through a creative process where music is but one of the components in a complex and extended project.

Elio Martusciello is a self-taught musician and composer and teaches electronic music and electro acoustics at the Conservatory of Cagliari, Italy.

Fabrizio Spera has actively contributed as a percussionist to the contemporary and improvised music scene since the late eighties. His current projects and groups involve “Ossatura”, “Trio” with John Butcher and John Edwards, “RARA ensemble,” and a trio with Alberto Braida and Lisle Ellis.

Luca Venitucci attended musical studies at the scuola popolare di musica in Roma and studied composition with Boris Porena. In the late eighties he began to participate in the activities of the improvised music scene in Italy and Europe, and during the next decade performed with musicians including Mike Cooper, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, Thomas Lehn, Axel Dorner and others. From 1996 to 2002 he has been part of zeitkratzer ensemble, with whom he performed and recorded contemporary music scores by Cage, Glass, Stockhausen, La Monte Young and James Tenney. He has undertaken original projects and collaborations with several experimental musicians and composers such as Christian Marclay, Butch Morris, Francisco Lopez, Keith Rowe, Phil Niblock, Lee Renaldo, and Nicolas Collins.

A distributed laptop performance between SARC’s own BLISS (Belfast Legion for Improvised Sights and Sounds) and Göteborg’s Academy of Music and Drama laptop ensemble, Sweden. This networked performance explores techniques and strategies for improvised electroacoustic music over the internet.

The Legion does not prescribe its sights or sounds; they are the product of digital and contra-digital networks of gates, tables, switches, speaker objects, cabling and data… The Legion is not a band – we don’t play weddings – but we like playing in the network! This event is a co-production between SARC and the Siren Festivalen för ny music. The performance will include works by Justin Yang and Alain Renaud. Related article.

Circo Ipnotico is an audiovisual improvised session with an open performer lineup. The score is given by dub architectures made by a crossing work of synths and laptops. The audiovisual journey evolves from here and the performers (from 3 to 6) use very different tools: from Girello, a rotating support supplied with different surfaces featuring shapes, colours and materials which are modified in real time using paint, to Pepposcopio a Moduli Digitali, to software interventions by other performers.

Otolab is an Italian collective of musicians, djs, vjs, video artists, video makers, web designers, graphic designers and architects who embarked on a common path within electronic music and audiovisual research. Otolab projects evolve through laboratory, seminar and live-set activities following principles of mutual exchange and support, free dissemination of knowledge and experimentation. The work-group is composed of individual and collective projects ranging from dj-ing/vj-ing sets up to live media and interactive installations, always investigating a symbiotic relationship between sounds and images. These three years of life have seen Otolab being invited to national and international festivals where it has presented its live sets, project presentations and installations, besides having promoted self-managed cultural initiatives. Otolab is today a cultural association which lives off its self-produced livesets, installations, audio and audiovisual productions. http://www.vimeo.com/tag:otolab.