CONCERT 3 Electronic-Acousmatic 7:00 PM - 8:45 PM
Paul Doornbusch Australia
Continuity One 1999 0:11:08
Continuity is something that we perceive and take for granted daily. We experience a continuous world yet light and sound can exhibit discrete corpuscular behavior. Only occasionally do we perceive that there may be a fragmentation to the world and that what we perceive as fragmented may eventually become continuous and the continuous become again fragmented in a never ending cycle.
In the course of Continuity 1 as a whole, shifts occur from several extremes. Most important are the shifts from continuity to fragmentation. The listener has a sensation of being carried along in the music, sometimes as if in a torrent or raging whirlwind of sound and sonic textures. This invokes a sensation of universal process which we are powerless to control but which is also not totally out of control, even if we sometimes have difficulty following its movements. These extremes of fragmentation and continuity can be heard in the overall structure of the piece, but also in the internal life of the sounds themselves. The piece starts with a high continuous tone, seemingly simple and relaxed but it builds to a disturbing intensity until it finally disintegrates and fragments. This unleashes a deluge of sounds that fly into a frenzy of multi-dimensional activity. During this section the sound material traverses the whole spectrum of pitches and rhythms with fleeting sounds that frequently collapse in on themselves. This builds to a frenzy and then subsides again to a more steady tone. However, it never achieves real repose and through external excitation if finally takes off again on another journey through destruction and recombination.
Trevor Wishart UK
American Triptych 2000 0:15:00
The twentieth century was dominated by the American Dream - Liberty, technological progress and the pursuit of pleasure, represented here by the voice of Martin Luther, King, Neil Armstrong and Elvis Presley. The fall of the Berlin wall seemed to herald the final triumph of this dream, and the "End of History". How permanent or ephemeral will these icons be as we enter the twenty first century? As in other recent pieces, American Triptych explores and transforms the voices of the well-known public figures, in search for new aesthetic directions in sonic art. The piece was commissioned by the French Government for the GRM's Paris concert series, the Cycle Acousmatique, in January 2000.
Mathew Adkins 1972 UK
Melt 1995 0:11:45
This work initially grew out of my daily travels to the studio in Birmingham. The work also draws on Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed and by its very subject matter makes reference to Schaeffer’s early work the Etude aux Chemins de Fer. The quality of Turner’s later work that appeals most to me is the sense that more definable objects have been painted over, hard lines dissolved. There is a sense of implication and suggestion. Melt is a poetic depiction of a train journey. The work is based on meditation between extremes: smooth to pulsed motion, raw to processed sonic material. Melt draws upon all three levels of event-gesture: raw recordings of trains, station announcements and station concourses; synthetic materials that are modeled after the motion and characteristics of the raw source materials; synthetic materials of a dream world. Throughout the work sounds of the real world melt/morph into their dream world equivalents as the traveler lapses in and out of daydream. All of the material employed in the work is unified spectromorphologically thus allowing for a high degree of integration between the differing event-gesture levels of sonic material. The work was awarded the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award (1996).
Break 0:20:00
Jo Thomas UK
Dark Noise 0:10:35
I drew the inspiration for this work from the Irish writer Samuel Becket. I chose to focus on defining spaces and utterance in relation to an ethereal presence. This work is the forth in a series of works made almost entirely from the female voice. However in this work there is no female performer. She has been masked from our gaze. In this work the female voice is veiled under dark indefinable noise.
Ross Bencina Australia
Ad-Hoc Mulch 0:15:00
AudioMulch is software which I have been developing for some time; it's a musical instrument. Tonight's performance is an improvisation with AudioMulch. Some sound samples used during the improvisation were undoubtedly gathered from various sources and organised while you were making your way here - these are combined and processed by AudioMulch under my guidance to produce what you hear.
Justine Poplin Australia
Thumb Scum 0:3:39
Matthew Ostrowski USA
Single Saw Produces Sound When Bowed! 1997 0:10:01
This work is part of a series of 3 pieces, collectively entitled What Things Are, realized at the SUSS Electroacoustic Studios of Sheffield University during a residency there in the fall of 1997. It is an attempt to expand a single point (in the case of this piece, a wine glass) to the size of the world. Although the single object approach of electroacoustic composition is often used as a vehicle to show off ones prowess in handling audio-manipulation software, I have chosen to keep the processing relatively transparent to encourage a more tactile relation to the source. The object is stimulated, provoked, violated, and it is through the medium of these ‘wounds’, or rather, the glass’ response to the wounds, that its nature as an organism is unfolded and revealed.