http://www.icmc2005.org/index.php?selectedPage=134

ICMC 2005. Opening Concerts

Sunday, September 4th at 20.30 in SGAE
“TeleSon: Invention#8” by Chris Brown

This piece is composed for four musicians playing two networked “reacTables”, one each in Barcelona and in Linz, Austria. The reacTable is a new electronic music instrument developed at the Music Technology Group in Barcelona by a research team headed by Sergi Jorda. Brown explains: ‘I have interfaced my own synthesis engine, written in SuperCollider3, to the reacTable’s visual and gestural interface, thus composing my own synthesis environment with its own rhythmic and tonal character. Like the other works in my “Inventions” series (recorded on Pogus CD “Talking Drum”), this piece involves polyrhythms, computer networks, and improvisation. Like “Invention #5” (1999), it also involves musicians collaborating at great physical distance from each other’.

Biographic Notes:
Chris Brown, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. Recent recordings of his music are available on Tzadik, “ROGUE WAVE” (2005) and “LAVA” (1992); and on Pogus, “TALKING DRUM” (2001). He has also performed and recorded extensively with “The Hub”, “Room”, and the “Glenn Spearman Double Trio”. As a pianist he has recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, and John Coltrane; as an electronic musician, he has collaborated with John Zorn and Wadada Leo Smith. He teaches electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).

“On Nothing” by José Manuel Berenguer
Electroacoustic music for 5 +1 and 3D projections, generated and controlled in real time by means of a game pad. Generation of sound and images has been programmed in Max/MSP-Jitter.
Emptiness and fullness have never been reached by humans. Sometimes we feel they could be the same thing and we build metaphors that relate them. As On nothing, that is a dream where sound is completely empty, a variation of pressure that is only considered in terms of its form, its limit; hence, in terms of something that can not be considered as sound anymore. Its empty sounds are built of a vastness of grains coming from the regular soundscape : traffic, music, wind, demonstrations and other social activities. This basic matter only emerges sometimes from the mainstream of sounds to be recognized. When they do so, they become images from memory and, specially, from oblivion, that strongly evokes emptiness. How a so big amount of experiences could have disappeared forever? When finally nobody could remember them, probably they will fall into void and, perhaps, into absolute worthlessness.

Biographic Notes:
José Manuel Berenguer is Codirector of the Caos/Sonoscop-Experimental Sound Art Archive at the Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona. He teaches Aesthetics of Electronic Music at ESDI, Ramon Llull University (URL) and Sonic Languages at the on line net university, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Inter-media artist, founder of Côclea, with Clara Gari, and Orquestra del Caos, ex-chairman of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Spain, he is now Chairman of the International Conference of Electroacoustic Music of CIM/UNESCO. He also belongs to the International Academy of Electroacoustic Music/Bourges. In the last years, his work has been oriented to multimedia installation and, despite of the innacuracy of these concepts, to real time and interactivity. His artistic works develop diverse aspects on Filosofy, History of Science, Life and Artificial Inteligence, Robotics and metabolism of information. Recently, he has been working in two projects related to the Metronom’s Science and Art Project: “Lambda-Itter” (2004) with flutist Jane Rigler, an audio visual interactive performance devoted to the ideas of flux and turbulence, and “Mega kai Mikron” (2004), a sonic and visual installation that involves microelectronics tools and based on the the very limits of human comprehension and perception of the world.