Performances
Carles López
Jana Winderen
Bruno Zamborlin and Ed Handley
Miha Ciglar
John Bowers
Julie Wilson-Bokowiec
Carol Robinson
Thomas Lehn
Frances-Marie Uitti
Sally Golding
Tomomi Adachi
Benoît and the Mandelbrots
Reactable with Carles López
Following Sergi Jorda’s keynote on the Reactable at the BEAM Symposium on Friday 22nd, Saturday night sees Carles López perform this revolutionary instrument in concert.
The Reactable was conceived as an instrument to bring back the expressive possibilities of traditional instruments to musicians who are working with new technologies by allowing them to touch and see the music while performing. It uses concepts of modular synthesis, sampling, advanced digital effects processing, and DJing and combines them with modern human computer interaction, multitouch technology and a tangible interface. The different sound generation and manipulation modules, which are real physical objects, permit infinite flexibility and control in musical expression.
Carles López sounds like electronic house, minimal, electro, techno, idm, dnb… Carles is an extraordinary talented musician who has performed in festivals and venues on more than twenty different countries. Some of his recent concerts include: Sonar Barcelona, New York & Washington, Electrosonic Burgos, Electrowave Firenze, Room 18 Club Taipei, Microwave Festival Hong Kong. He has composed music for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (Director of Babel, Amores Perros…) and Marcel.li Antúnez (Fura dels Baus).
Jana Winderen
Jana Winderen researches the hidden depths with the latest technology; her work reveals the complexity and strangeness of the unseen world beneath. The audio topography of the oceans and the depth of ice crevasses is brought to the surface. She is concerned with finding sound from hidden sources, like blind field recording.
Jana Winderen is an artist educated in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London, currently living and working in Oslo, with a background in mathematics and chemistry from the University in Oslo. Since 1993 she has worked as an artist, curator and producer and she is currently working on a commission for Sound and Music (UK), a public sound installation for Flanders Festival Kortrijk (BE) and a CD release for Touch in 2013.
Join Jana and other festival-goers on Saturday evening for the BEAM sleepover – a durational performance through the night. Spaces at the sleepover are limited so pleae email info@beamfestival.com when you book your festival ticket to reserve your space. Mattresses are provided, but please bring sleeping bags!
Mogees and Senouch (Bruno Zamborlin and Ed Handley of Plaid)
© Olga MascoloAs Senouch, Bruno Zamborlin and Ed Handley perform with MOGEES; a contact microphone-based system for the augmentation of sound objects. Mogees can utilize almost any object as both a musical controller and a sound source. The vibration “patterns” from a stimulated object are used to trigger and manipulate recordings and physically modelled sounds. The Senouch project will explore rythmical music through improvisations with Mogees.
After working for several years at the IRCAM IMTR team, Bruno is now a joint-PhD interaction researcher between IRCAM (Paris) and the Goldsmiths college (London). His interest focuses on real-time gesture recognition for performing arts and the design of new interfaces for musical expression. Ed Handley is perhaps best known as founding member of renowned electronic music group, The Black Dog, and also as one half of the legendary duo Plaid. Signed to Warp records since 1991, Plaid have been making music since the late 80′s. They have released a multitude of albums and film scores as well as having collaborated with musicians as diverse as Bjork and the London Sinfonietta.
Miha Ciglar
Miha Ciglar is an audio engineer and sound artist, working at the intersection of art and technology. In 2008 he founded IRZU – the Institute for Sonic Arts Research in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Institute is based on an interdisciplinary concept and is carrying out artistic productions in the field of electronic music, audio technology research as well as educational activities. In 2009 he organized and curated the sonic arts festival EarZoom, one of IRZU’s first major projects.
Ciglar will perform an improvised set based on “no input mixing board” feedback concepts, involving Santact™ – a new musical interface developed at Ultrasonic audio technologies. The revolutionary technology behind Syntact™ provides contact-free tactile feedback to the musician. By utilizing airborne ultrasound a force field is created in mid-air that can be sensed in a tactile way. It allows a musician to feel the actual sound with its temporal and harmonic texture. While an optical sensor system is interpreting his hand gestures and mapping the descriptors of hand motion onto sound synthesis/processing parammeters, the musician can physically engage with the medium of sound by virtually molding and shaping it – i.e. changing its acoustic appearance – directly with his hands.
John Bowers
J. M. Bowers works with home-brew electronics, self-made instruments and reconstructions of antique image and sound-making devices, alongside contemporary digital technology. He is concerned with making performance environments, which combine sound, vision and human gesture at a fundamental material level. He is co-founder of the Onoma Research label and also plays electric guitar in the fundamentalist noise rock band Tonesucker.
BEAM Transduction is an improvised performance which explores complex patterns of transformation of different forms of energy. Electro-magnetism, light, atmospheric conditions and ambient sound are all transformed one into another. Channels are also left open for occult influences using technologies (e.g. Raudive diode receivers) typically used by paranormal researchers. A selection of these energy flows will be improvised as live sound and image.
Julie Wilson-Bokowiec
performing V’Oct (Ritual), composed by Mark Bokowiec
An interactive vocal work for vocalist, Bodycoder System, live Max/MSP, automated and performer controlled 8-channel spatialization. In V’Oct (Ritual) a variety of extended vocal techniques, singing styles and ethnic modes of vocal production are processed and kinaesonically manipulated by the performer to construct evolving soundscapes through which new syntactical dialogues between the analogue and digital, acoustic and the processed, voice, gesture, body and space are created. Based around an Max/MSP architecture of eight independent compression loopers and two granulators, the voice is variously processed and re-processed, grain phrases manipulated, selectively sampled and re-distributed across eight channels or mixed and spatialized live by the performer in a shamanistic act of autopoesis.
V’Oct(Ritual) places the audience inside a circular liminal space of sonic evocation and transformation the boundary of which is defined by the presence of eight loudspeakers (21st century standing stones) that mediate and are the containers for the performers’ vocal transmogrifications. The piece is full scored with few moments of improvisation, and was created in residency at Dartington College of Arts, UK.
Carol Robinson
Carol Robinson, a Franco/American composer and clarinetist passionate about improvisation, presents Lamia. The original idea was to compose a basset horn trio for one real and two virtual instruments, creating a musical world of woven sounds and unexpected events that float, sing, whirl, bite, explode, etc. This demanded extreme musicality from the two virtual basset horns, and thus the reactivity of a live electronic system. A max/MSP patch in multiple sections was designed by Carl Faia to generate various responses and instrumental comportments: following (variable delays with pitch shifts), provoking (sound banks with fixed or aleatory commands), reacting (mungers and triggers), or responding (stop sensitive). Reality becomes distended between three equally important sound sources, blurring the perception of time. The piece is a reflection on surpassing violence, whether arbitrary or calculated.
Carol performs in major concert halls and international festivals, and collaborates with choreographers, video artists, photographers, and musicians from divers horizons. Improvisation is her passion. She has received commissions for concert pieces, installations, and radio, dance and film productions. Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was recorded for PLUSH. Other monograph recordings include music by Scelsi, Feldman, Nono, and Berio for MODE, as well as classical music and jazz.
Thomas Lehn
Since about 1990, Thomas Lehn’s central artistic work is live-electronic music, created on the basis of analogue sound synthesis. After a period of working with the Robert Moog’s Minimoog synthesizer, since 1994 his main electronic equipment is the Synthi, a modular analogue synthesizer developed and produced by the British company EMS in the late 1960ies.
Thomas Lehn’s electronic music is instrumentally live-performed; musical material, process and structure are all created and performed in real time. Rooted in a background including; classical, classical modern, jazz, music theatre and mixed media performances through to more contemporary forms of music including analogue live-electronic music, Lehn has been developing an individual language of electronic music in which the inner syntax often seems to be of an acoustic, rather than electronic, nature.
© Günter KrämmerFrances-Marie Uitti
Frances-Marie Uitti, composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato vs articulated playing. György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Lisa Bielawa are among many who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her.
Frances-Marie will performing on the Friday of the festival as part of the evening performance programme.
Sally Golding
Golding combines film projection with performance and installation creating live cine-sculptures and interactions. Photographic compositions printed as optical soundtracks and decomposed uprooted vinyl library music neatly situate her work at the crossroads of science and superstition, philosophy and pulp. Deconstruction of cinematic materials and apparatus reveal slippage between materialist investigation, sculptural forms, and bodily intervention – redesigning the cinematic viewing experience, exposing the typically locked process of beam-audience-screen. Using torchlight printed sound film, hacked sonic devices, motorised colour filt, stroboscopic light, refracting lenses and physical interference, Golding warps the output of the projector’s light and sound into a hypnotic and frantic field of colour, form and noise fuzz.
Golding is co-director of OtherFilm, a Brisbane based collective dedicated to expanded cinema, sound art and discussions, staging events throughout Australia and internationally. In London Golding co-curates Unconscious Archives with James Holcombe from no.w.here. Unconscious Archives is a bi-monthly live event which transverses noise core and vision spectacle bringing together expanded cinema and sonic propositions from London and afar. Since 2004 Golding has programmed for key festivals and events around the globe, curating projects that thread between expanded cinema and media art, curation and audiovisual archiving.
© Bryan Spencer
Tomomi Adachi
Tomomi Adachi is a performer/composer, sound poet, instrument builder and installation artist. Known for his versatile style, he has performed improvised music and contemporary works by John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, etc. all over the world. As the only Japanese performer of sound poetry, he performed the Japanese premiere of Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate” in 1996 and also directed the Japanese premiere of John Cage’s “Europera5″ in 2007. His release’s include solo albums from Tzadik, Omegapoint and naya records. He stayed in New York from 2009 to 2010 as a grantee of Asian Cultural Council and is a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD for 2012.
At Beam he will present improvisation/composition sets with self-made instruments and his own voice. The instruments include Tomomin II and Tomoring, which are an electronic sound generator and an amplified sculptural object, and also an Infra-red sensor shirt that is an original interface for real-time voice processing. These instruments are intended not only to make new sounds, but also to investigate extended ideas about musical notation, while the physical relationships between performer and interfaces present a theatrical situation.
Benoît and the Mandelbrots
Benoît and the Mandelbrots see the laptop as their main instrument; they are mainly dedicated to live coding: the process of writing software in real-time. This young computer music discipline uses the programming language itself as an at first sight non-intuitive, but simultaneously expressive interface between man and machine. Sonic conceptions and structures are expressed live as source code, and interpreted by the computer. Thus, the improvisational possibilities are practically endless. Every now and then they also use other tools to extend their musical form of expression. The results vary from electronica and ambient to electronic avant-garde. The ensemble consists of Matthias Schneiderbanger, Holger Ballweg, Patrick Borgeat and Juan A. Romero and was formed in winter 2009 at the IMWI (institute for musicology and musicinformatics), University of Music Karlsruhe.
