Noise In And As Music by CeReNeM Journal

4-6 OCTOBER 2013 centre for research in new music university of huddersfield

organisers

Aaron Einbond Aaron Cassidy

technical director

Alex Harker

studio director

Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay

technical team

Ryoko Akama Girilal Baars Apostolos Charisis FrĂŠdĂŠric Dufeu Beavan Flanagan Mihalis Santamas

support assistants

Eleanor Cully Maria Gkotzampougiouki Stephen Harvey Tom Holman-Sheard Phil Maguire Panos Sialmas

Contents Organiserâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Welcome

Schedule of Events

Abstracts and Programme Notes Friday, 4 October 2013

Presentation Session I

Opening Concert: Phil Julian

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Saturday, 5 October 2013

Presentation Session II

Keynote Lecture: Peter Ablinger

Installations

Concert II

Fringe Event

Sunday, 6 October 2013

Presentation Session III

Concert III

Huddersfield Food and Drink Guide

Welcome

On behalf of co-organizer Aaron Cassidy and our colleagues at the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), I am delighted to welcome you to the Noise In And As Music symposium at the University of Huddersfield, an interdisciplinary, three-day event with an international list of presenters, performers, and listeners. When Luigi Russolo wrote ‘The Art of Noises’ in 1913, he could not have anticipated the noise—musical, technological, cultural, political—of the century that followed. In 2013, we did not anticipate the enthusiasm, diversity, creativity, and mischief with which makers of many backgrounds—performers, improvisers, composers, scholars—would respond to our call for participation. So I extend heartfelt thanks to all of these presenters and performers, book contributors, technical team, and you the listeners, without any of whom Noise In And As Music would not be possible. We hope you will participate in the weekend’s events with the same nomadic spirit as the noisemakers who created them, drawing no boundaries between paper sessions, concert sets, and installation performances, a term deliberately abused to include extended-duration performances, fixed-media works, and sound sculpture. The unique facilities of the School of Music, Humanities and Media make for a fitting location, and we are pleased to share equipment provided from the Huddersfield Immersive Soundsystem (HISS), the unique 25.4-channel Spatialisation and Interactive Research Lab (SPIRAL studio), the spaces of the Creative Arts Building, and the town’s picturesque, Victorian Byram Arcade. The symposium is also the book launch for Noise In And As Music, published by the University of Huddersfield Press, which joins the work of symposium participants with a network of far-flung practitioners considering noise—in, and, and as music—from at least as varied vantage points. Copies are available for sale throughout the weekend at a special symposium price. As Ben Thigpen writes in the opening interview text, ‘Noise is a manifestation of truth…. To be in touch—in an immediate and total connection—with the real’. Or as George Lewis writes, quoting Public Enemy: Bring the noise, Aaron Einbond

noise in and as music

Friday, 4 October 4:30 Welcome/check-in/tea and coffee and Noise In And As Music Book Launch Creative Arts Building, Atrium 5:00–7:30 I. Noise as Music: sound, saturation, silence Creative Arts Building, room CAM G/01 Julio D’Escriván, moderator Sarah Benhaim Lilian Campesato Rossana Lara Adam Potts 8:30 Opening Concert Creative Arts Building, Phipps Hall Phil Julian

Saturday, 5 October 9:30 Check-in/tea and coffee Creative Arts Building, Atrium 10:00–12:30 II. Noise and Music: syntax, soundscape, bodyscape Creative Arts Building, room CAM G/01 Liza Lim, moderator John Dack Will Schrimshaw Stacey Sewell Marie Thompson 4

schedule of events

2:00–3:00 Keynote Lecture: Noise and Noises Creative Arts Building, room CAM G/01 Peter Ablinger 3:00–6:30 Installations Creative Arts Building, various venues Ryoko Akama & Pia Palme Marko Ciciliani (3:00–7:30) Fergal Dowling Richard Eigner Heather Frasch (9:30–8:00) Alec Hall Daniel del Rio 8:00 Concert II Creative Arts Building, Phipps Hall John Bowers Mark Summers Sick Lincoln Paul McGuire 10:00 Fringe Event Byram Arcade Tout Croche Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern Ryoko Akama Varispeed Canoe Club

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Sunday, 6 October 9:30 Check-in/tea and coffee Creative Arts Building, Atrium 10:00–12:30 III. Noise in Music: data, score, code Creative Arts Building, room CAM G/01 Monty Adkins, moderator Nick Collins Joan Arnau Pàmies Karin Weissenbrunner James Whitehead 2:00–4:00 Concert III Creative Arts Building, Phipps Hall Yota Morimoto Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch Marinos Koutsomichalis Rodrigo Constanzo

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I. Noise as Music: sound, saturation, silence Friday, 4 October, 5:00–7:30 Julio D’Escriván, moderator

Sarah Benhaïm On The Fringe of Mainstream Culture: the case of noise record labels Since its presages in the 1980s, noise music has been appearing essentially in an underground milieu, on the fringe of mainstream culture. Similarly to musical creation, which breaks with a lot of conventions and practices, the record production of noise music is indicative of its will to be completely independent from the musical industry, as evidenced for instance by the creation of an unofficial economy and specific networks of distribution. My talk shall deal more specifically with the role and operation of underground labels within the noise subculture, both in terms of local dynamism and exchanges on a larger scale, as the production has been increasing greatly in our contemporary globalized context. Relying on examples of labels such as RRRecords, PAN, Ultra Eczema, Phase ! Records and Tanzprocesz, the question will be raised of the impact of the DIY precept on the achievement and commodification conditions of records, via self-initiative and self-production. The aesthetics and forms assumed by these record productions will then be looked over, focusing particularly on the plurality of material supports and the omnipresence of tapes and vinyl. Finally, it seems essential to analyze the way in which these labels contribute to the dynamism of noise music by its diffusion conditions, whether through internet interfaces or practices of music exchange and sharing. Sarah Benhaïm is a doctoral candidate in music and social science at EHESS (Paris) and holds a degree in aesthetics. Her multidisciplinary thesis about noise music, combining sociology and aesthetics, is also based on an ethnography of the Parisian noise music scene that encompasses music, players, materials and performance spaces. She also takes part in the French research program ‘Musimorphose’ about music, listening practices and digital media.

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Lilian Campesato Noise silencing in radical noise music This talk aims at developing some aspects studied in my PhD thesis about the process of aestheticisation of noise in music. In general terms, noise was taken as a relation between elements (ideas, events, materials, concepts) and not as something in itself. In this sense, something that presents itself as noise in one context may fail to be so in another. In this work noise is not considered only in its acoustic and informational aspects. My main concern is driven towards subjective and metaphorical relationships that it establishes within the artistic creation. Noise is an essential part of music’s creative dynamics, even when it is not possible to find objective traces of it in a musical work. Indeed, what is considered to be noise in music is a political act that reflects the aesthetic choices of both artists and audiences. In the last decades many music genres elected noise as an essential element. They develop music strategies that approach the limits of what can be considered to be musical by assuming a radical attitude. However, even in Japanoise, most of noise is ‘treated’ or ‘filtered’. Thus, even when this music intends to break the limits of musicality, it needs to process, modulate and control noise in a somehow musical manner. Noise is thus silenced, musicalized. In this presentation I seek to analyze some examples of noise music ranging from the political use of noise in Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain to Vomir’s HNW to the radical body performances by Justice Yeldham and Paula Garcia. Lilian Campesato is a Brazilian performer and researcher interested in investigating experimental forms of sound art. Her works explore the use of voice and gesture in combination with interactive electronics and audiovisual resources. She regularly presents interactive and audiovisual performances in festivals and alternative venues in Brazil and abroad, such as Portugal, Spain, UK, Denmark, Argentina, Colombia. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of São Paulo (USP) with a thesis on the process of aestheticisation of noise in music. She currently is a research associate at the NuSom – Research Centre on Sonology at USP. Her main research interests are the use of noise in music and experimental forms of artistic production.

Ruido 13 collective, presented by Rossana Lara Noise-riders project: some possibilities of noise experimentalism in Mexico City In the last years there has been a boom of experimental audiovisual and sonic practices in Mexico that use noise as a central element of creation. In contrast to this, there is a lack of forums discussing the aesthetics and the social and political impacts behind 8

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them. With this in mind, the interdisciplinary collective Ruido 13 has developed projects that combine sonic experimentation and auto-ethnography, with concerns about how to extend the experimental practice beyond the circuits of experimental art. Our interest is to encourage different people to experiment with sonic situations, linking practices with discussions about the relationship between social practices, noises and soundscapes in Mexico City, as well as people’s possibilities in the active shaping of those sound spaces. All these aspects converge closely in our most recent project Ruicicletas itinerantes (in English, ‘Noise-riders project’) that will be shown at this symposium. In the current state of the project, we use both the energy produced by riding a bicycle and some electronic circuits to amplify sonically the bicycle mechanisms. This action is to be performed collectively through different urban contexts of Mexico City. Experiences of this action in context, as well as the spreading of the project in workshops, have contributed to modify our initial perspectives and goals not only at the level of the project but also at the level of the collective’s aspirations and its relationship with the sonic experimental scene in the city. How the project has changed over time, and what their current and future possibilities might be, will be presented at the symposium with an audiovisual record of the project. Ruido 13 is an interdisciplinary collective from Mexico City that relates sound experimentalism with broader social dynamics and noises that shape the urban space where we live. Guided by topics of free culture, self-management and social uses of the acoustic space, our practice combines free improvisation with other acoustic situations to intervene in the public space. Additionally, the collective is interested in the expansion of sonic experimental activity into groups with no previous musical training nor familiarity with those practices.

Adam Potts Noise, Nausea and the Night: Distinguishing between active and passive noise The aim of this presentation is to discuss the entangled relationship between two different—though fundamentally dependent—types of noise. While the ubiquity of noise and its disparate configurations are often tied together through ideas of negativity and radicalism, I want to suggest that it is the way in which the language of noise resists and withholds from these ideas that fundamentally makes noise what it is. Basing my argument on Maurice Blanchot’s belief that language sustains itself in absence, I will argue that nothing can be fixed and essentialised within the language of noise. Distinguishing between what I will be calling active noise and passive noise, I will expose the supposedly essential ideas of negativity to what Blanchot sees as the 9

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non-essentiality of conceptuality more broadly. If active noise names the language through which we understand the materiality, sonority and activity that charges moments of noise, then passive noise would name the way in which the language we use to talk about these noises is problematised by poststructuralist challenges to atomistic and holistic thinking. The aim is to show that while noise can be understood in part through these ideas of negativity and radicalism, there is still another, hidden and irreducible, account of noise that shadows the language of active noise making it unstable. This shadow is what lives on in noise theory as the impossibility of being able to say, once and for all, what noise is. In short, the language of noise can indeed be said, but in its saying, more noise is born. Adam Potts is a third year music PhD student at Newcastle University with a BA in Philosophical Studies. His thesis explores the relationship between Japanese art and the work of Maurice Blanchot, with particular focus on noise music and conceptual frameworks of noise. He is also a vocalist who performs in several experimental music projects.

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Opening Concert Friday, 4 October, 8:30 p.m. Phipps Hall

Phil Julian computer and modular analogue electronics Phil Julian is a UK based experimental sound artist/composer/musician.Under both the Cheapmachines alias and his own name, Phil Julian has been venturing across various strains of unorthodox sound since the late 1990s, with his prolific output on a catalogue of imprints encompassing sonic textures ranging from harsh squalls of noise to compositions structured around hyper-minimalistic timbres and drones.

noise in and as music

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II. Noise and Music: syntax, soundscape, bodyscape Saturday, 5 October, 10:00–12:30 Liza Lim, moderator

John Dack Syntax from Noise If the purpose of a musical syntax is to facilitate and direct the creation of well-formed structures that will lead to ‘meaning’, then it is clear that applying the term ‘syntax’ to noise raises many questions. Moreover, any discussion of a syntax demands a definition and description of the basic, discrete elements of a vocabulary. Discussing a ‘vocabulary’ of noise is equally problematic. My presentation will examine the concepts of both ‘syntax’ and ‘vocabulary’ in the context of ‘noise’ as musical material. My starting point will be a discussion and evaluation of Schaeffer’s classes of morphology. Included in this morphology are classes of ‘tonic group’, ‘nodal group’ and ‘white noise’ which suggest that Schaeffer was attempting to formulate a system that could emulate the ‘directional tendencies’ of definite pitch. Schaeffer was cautious in claiming that the model of pitch was applicable to all parameters of musical material. Nevertheless, I will propose that basic notions of tension and release can be identified in Schaeffer’s thinking. In addition to investigating this aspect of noise I will also examine Schaeffer’s largely ignored concept of a ‘plastic’ music whose meaning can be located in the sculpting of sounds, their dynamic and spectral evolutions, rather than in relationships between discrete sounds. I believe that noise has the potential to occupy areas of such a ‘plastic’ music and, to paraphrase Schaeffer, to create meaning precisely at the point where traditional music fails to do so. Born: Kings Cross, London 1950. Studied music as a mature student at Middlesex Polytechnic (BA Hons, 1980). Subsequent studies: PhD with Denis Smalley (1989); City University (post-graduate Diploma in Music Information Technology) (1992) and MSc (1994); Goldsmiths College (MMus, Theory and Analysis, 1998); Middlesex University (MA Aesthetics and Art Theory, 2004). Currently employed as a Senior Lecturer, Middlesex University. Research interests: history, theory and analysis of electroacoustic music, the music and works of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, serial thought and electronic music, the ‘open’ form in music.

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Will Schrimshaw The Forest of Everything: Noise and Ideas of Nature

Acoustic ecology has a long and complex relationship with noise. Where noise is thought as synonymous with the Schaferian lo-fi soundscape it is considered the ‘enemy of the acoustic community’. In the work of Barry Truax the status of noise within acoustic ecology becomes more complex, being identified as the necessary ground of signals and being ascribed a generative rather than strictly negative potential. In this presentation the relationship between ideas of noise and nature is explored through the work or contemporary sound artists working at the edge of what we could describe as nature recording or acoustic ecology. These include Jacob Kirkegaard, Jana Winderen and Toshiya Tsunoda. The work of these artists presents a variety of ‘home-spun metaphysics’ concerned with the nature of sound (Boehmer: 2011). The nature of sound speculated upon in the work of these artists differs radically from the harmonic equilibrium presented as both the nature of sound and sound of nature in the foundational texts on soundscape and acoustic ecology. A discussion of ideas pertaining to the nature of sound and the work of the aforementioned artists establishes a context for a presentation of one of the author’s ongoing artistic projects entitled The Idea of Sound. This project seeks out locations of natural noise—such as the seashore or forests during strong winds—that are as close a possible to ‘pure’ white noise. The author will present recordings of work in progress for discussion with the audience. Will Schrimshaw is an artist and researcher from Wakefield based in Liverpool. Often working with sound amidst a larger vibrational continuum, his work is broadly concerned with the subliminal influence of backgrounds, ambiances and atmospheres, with the often imperceptible determinants of space and place. In 2011 he completed a PhD in Philosophy and Architecture at Newcastle University, focusing upon ideas of acoustic space and auditory influence within architectural and artistic practice. He teaches courses on sonic interaction and sound design and has completed a number of residencies, solo and group exhibitions, performances and workshops across the globe. He is currently Lecturer in Sound and Music at Edge Hill University.

Stacey Sewell ‘The body is a noisy place’: medical listening and musical materials A growing number of contemporary musical compositions have drawn on the sounds of the human body. Many of these works may trace their history in medical science and the technologies used to listen to the body. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians developed ways of classifying bodily sounds as a measure of health or disease 14

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(Kassler, 1990: 248). Musical thinking formed a strong influence on these developments, and practitioners often assumed ‘that physicians required skills similar to those of musicians’ (Kassler, 1990: 252). Physicians developed listening techniques that bracketed out (as noise) sound that would not directly contribute to a diagnosis. More recently the situation has been reversed somewhat, and musicians have taken medical technologies and listening practices and used them to generate musical materials. Douglas Kahn describes Jacob Kierkegaard (in Labyrinthitis) and John Cage (during his famous anechoic chamber experience) as ‘listening to their bodies talk in clinical circumstances’ (Kahn, 2008). In this paper I would like to explore how three recent sound works (The Sonic Body, an interactive installation created by four interdisciplinary artists and a heart surgeon; A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure by experimental electronica duo Matmos; and Julian Weaver’s Respirer), build on or subvert medical ways of listening to the noises of the body. I explore whether these bodily sounds can ever become fully musical, and to what extent this is determined by the listening practices adopted. Stacey Sewell completed a PhD in musicology in 2012. Her research interests centre around music, sound and embodiment. Her writing has appeared in Radical Musicology, Body, Space & Technology, and Performance Research. She has presented work at national and international conferences including Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts and the International Conference on Music Since 1900.

Marie Thompson Gossips, Sirens, Hi-Fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise

Aristotle tells us that ‘silence is a woman’s glory’ but this silence is really noise abatement. Throughout the history of Western thought, women and noise have found themselves on the same side of philosophical dichotomies that have governed and legitimated their subordination. They have been condemned to the side of unreason, of madness and hysteria, of irrational non-meaning. There is, as Pythagoras tells us, a good principle that created order, light and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman. Women’s noises—their ‘idle gossiping’, their squeals of excitement—are cast out as distractions. It is her tongue, moreover, that is responsible for the original sin. The destruction of man’s paradise comes about from a woman’s chatter: it was Eve who listened to the undesirable noises of the devil, coercing Adam into eating the apple. Part presentation, part manifesto, this paper critically examines the intimate relationship between noise and the ‘feminine’ that shadows the noise lineages descending from Futurism and John Cage. In order to explore this relationship, I will draw from three figures that tend to remain silent in noise discourses: the gossip, the siren and 15

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the spouses of 1950s American Hi-Fi audiophiles. Subsequently, this paper will raise questions about who has laid claims to the radical, disruptive potential of noise. Yet if women’s noises are to be kept in silence, since they threaten (‘masculine’) order, then do they also carry with them a subversive potential? Can ‘her’ noisy disruptions become strategic?

Marie Thompson is a musician, researcher and writer currently working in the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University. She has recently submitted her PhD thesis, ‘Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism’, which uses a Spinozist notion of affect to disrupt the correlation between noise, ‘unwantedness’ and ‘badness’, so as to allow more fully for the use of noise as a musical resource. She is the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). Marie is also regularly audible as a performer, playing under the guise of Tragic Cabaret, and in the band, Beauty Pageant.

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Keynote Lecture Saturday, 5 October, 2:00–3:00

Peter Ablinger NOISE AND NOISES

Noise and noises are not the same. AN OLD SCHOOL BELL RINGS TWO SECONDS. In fact, ‘noise’ and ‘noises’ can, in my view, be almost opposites. CHILDREN’S VOICES. SHUFFLING BOOTS. What the singular form refers to is the totality of white noise. A FEW NEARBY SPARROWS, CHIRPING. What the plural refers to is the many individual objects—or event-related—noises of everyday life. THE FINE CLACKING IN THE VIBRATIONS OF A DIESEL ENGINE. A TRIUMPHANT BABY’S VOICE. As I read Russolo and perceive Cage, their noises, or rumori, are about sounds as individual acoustic events, as the material, the building blocks, the modules (or found objects) which might constitute a composition. THE VERY TENDER SHOWER OF DROPS FALLING FROM THE TREES. Thus, noises also represent the equivalent and complement of tones or instrumental sounds. In each of these respects, white noise (in German, Rauschen) is the opposite. SOMEONE BLOWS HIS NOSE. QUIET AND CAUTIOUS STEPS IN THE NEAR VICINITY. White Noise/Rauschen is not an individual in the sonic world, but its suspension. THE RHYTHM OF A DIESEL ENGINE IDLING AND, AT A SIMILAR FREQUENCY, VIBRATIONS OF A BICYCLE GEAR. It is not an equivalent nor a complement of tones, but rather it contains both the tones and the noises. NEARBY CHILDREN’S VOICES, THEIR CONSONANTS MINGLING WITH THEIR STEPS. It is the totality of all sounds and noises, their sum. ‘Sounds are not sounds! They are here to distract the intellect and to soothe the senses. Not once is hearing “hearing”: hearing is that which creates me’. Peter Ablinger was born in Schwanenstadt, Austria in 1959. He began studying graphic arts and was enthused by free jazz, but completed his studies in composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Graz and Vienna. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. In 1993 he was a visiting

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professor at the University of Music, Graz. He has been guest conductor of Klangforum Wien, Ensemble United Berlin and the Insel Musik Ensemble. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. Ablinger is one of the few artists today who uses noise without any kind of symbolism窶馬ot as a signifier for chaos, energy, entropy, disorder, or uproar; not for opposing something, or being disobedient or destructive; not for everything, for eternity, or for what-have-you. As in all these cases of music deliberately involving noise, noise is the case, but for Ablinger: this alone. He has also come a long way in questioning the nature of sound, time, and space (the components usually thought central to music), and his findings have jeopardized and made dubious conventions usually thought irrefutable. These insights pertain to repetition and monotony, reduction and redundancy, density and entropy. Peter Ablinger is Visiting Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield.

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Installations Saturday, 5 October, 3:00–6:30

Ryoko Akama & Pia Palme RADIAT

RADIAT is an experiment in meta-noise about noise. This juxtaposition of sonic installations by each composer engenders different perspectives on ‘noise’. Drawing on their personal musical backgrounds, Akama explores social noise from her position as a sound artist, whereas Palme uses the noise/signal duality to define her performance of the mind’s activity. The pieces co-exist in a shared space. The resulting work examines the cross-perspectives and methodologies of individual approaches, overlaid and influenced by parallel working processes. RADIAT GC. Akama’s installation draws on environmental and ecological concerns in which social noise and its capability of collaborative-ness are questioned. It uses a Geiger counter, a radiation detector in the air, and a radio transmission system. A pool of water is vibrated by four speakers that receive frequency compositions created by the noise data of the Geiger counter. The cymatic patterns that occur on the water’s surface result from the transformation of sonic energy. This physicality of information science sustains optic listening and a subtle encounter with low frequency soundscapes. RADIAT MN. In this installation Palme performs the multi-layered structure of ‘noise of the mind’ as she observes it during live improvisation. Four speakers and a human performer—Palme performing on a contrabass recorder and four microphones—are placed along a line in space. In musical practice, thought activity during a performance is largely considered as ‘noise’, an unwanted byproduct of the mind. Here, Palme redefines the relevancy of her inner states by reversing the noise/signal duality: the totality of the mind’s activity is turned into performative material, re-composed and reproduced by vocal and instrumental production, captured and amplified with microphones and exploded into the environment. The five-tiered score governing this performance requires precise awareness and monitoring of one’s inner states. Palme defines the mind as inclusive and multi-layered, on a scale from the internal monologue, the longing to communicate emotions and perceptions, to extrovert vocal production; the instrument, as an extension of her breath, marks the shifting border between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ herself. Actions to ‘re-perform’ 19

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the mind include various extended techniques picked up by four separate microphones, including a radio-transmitted throat microphone with PTT button. Each of the resulting sonic layers are distributed to four speakers. As a result, the internal monologue turns into a timing device for other forms of musical production. The resulting sonic environment oscillates between noise and signal, raising the question: which part of mental activity is relevant for a performance and which is not? Ryoko Akama is a sound artist, composer and performer. She is currently in the 2nd year of her PhD at the University of Huddersfield with Monty Adkins and Phillip Thomas, where she investigates sonic art and electronics. Her work is minimal in nature and focuses on the aesthetics of sound, drawing on Japanese concepts to create a quiet richness and fullness of sonic experience. She also runs Melange Records. A brief interview can be seen in The Wire magazine, July 2013. Pia Palme is a composer and performer. Her recent compositional projects are concerned with observations of the ‘noise of the mind’. She develops techniques to amplify and ‘compose out’ performative qualities of inner states and a fractal sense of identity. This process can be heard in the solo part of her opera ABSTRIAL. Her compositional plan can be ‘disturbed’ by such performative qualities. In the resulting works an improvisational element is encouraged, interacting with the meta-identity of composed parts. Currently she is undertaking a PhD in Composition at the University of Huddersfield with Liza Lim and Monty Adkins.

Marko Ciciliani Pop Wall Alphabet (3:00–7:30 p.m.)

An electronic composition, subdivided in 26 sections in alphabetic order. Pop Wall Alphabet explores the sound characteristics of 26 pop artists, by superimposing all the songs of a specific album of theirs into a diffuse sound wall, thus revealing the spectral composition of a certain production style and genre. As additional elements static spectral sound images of all the individual songs have been used, creating an abstracted sonic texture of all their otherwise iconic emotions. The interest in Pop Wall Alphabet lies in the investigation of ‘the sound’ which has become a central but nevertheless evasive and intangible criterion in pop production, giving it an almost mythical quality. As a result of the applied methods (condensation and spectral extraction) the specific production style results in walls of sound/noise of different, ever changing colorations. With each of the 26 sections a different artist and genre is explored. The compositional strategy is each time identical but it always yields a different result. When listening, a number of different listening modes are engaged as the sound texture moves from various degrees of abstraction to thinned out textures, where individual songs be20

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come recognizable, before moving again into continuously morphing spectral textures. As a result of the gradual move between thick textures of sound and recognisable genres, styles and songs, the hearing-modes of the listeners vascillate between abstract and referential listening, often dwelling in a state in between. Thereby the listening becomes a highly personal, immersive and sensual experience. Marko Ciciliani (b.1970, Croatia) is a composer, audiovisual artist and researcher based in Vienna/Austria. He received his musical training as a composer and electronic musician in New York, Hamburg and The Hague. It is characteristic of Ciciliani’s compositions that sound is not only understood as abstract material but as a culturally shaped idiom. The exploration of a sound’s communicative potential is as much in the foreground of his work as its objective sonic quality. Ciciliani’s work is characterized by a conceptual approach in which aspects of classical composition, sound- and media-studies play together. Ciciliani is guest-professor for electro-acoustic composition at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) of the Arts University in Graz/Austria and lecturer for electro-acoustic composition and acoustics at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

Fergal Dowling Cloud Types for Auditors

Cloud Types for Auditors applies granular synthesis techniques to render sound as evolving masses presented as a parade of seventeen voluminous ‘clouds’, each composed of many thousands of micro sound events distributed variously throughout a simulated space. Presented in partially overlapping sequences, these slowly transforming ‘clouds’ emerge, vanish, grow, shrink, rotate, retreat, coalesce into a dense sound-mass, or dissolve into scattered points. This application of spatial granularisation uses noise-based sound samples exclusively as source material to create sparse, colourless and transparent textures that allow the listener to hear ‘through’ the soundfield and to perceive multiple simultaneous, spatially separated ‘sound-point-fields’. Although texture is foregrounded, the listener can focus on the micro sound event, the clicks and bursts of each grain, while simultaneously attending to the super-sound objects, the mutating clouds structures, as they gradually describe and then envelope the space. Cloud Types for Auditors exposes these relatively extreme temporal ranges while over-stepping the intermediary rhythmic time range. The spatial distribution of the points within each cloud, whether dense or rare, static or dynamic, is a defining element in our perception of both temporal density and overall narrative. Fergal Dowling is a composer of electroacoustic and instrumental music. He studied composition at Trinity College Dublin (2004) and the University of York (2006). Many of his works make use of computer-mediated performance strategies to combine instrumental or vocal forces with live electronic parts, often using mobile or

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dispersed performers and multichannel loudspeaker arrays. His fixed media compositions often use granular spatialisation to render mobile sound masses in multichannel works. In 2008, together with the organist Michael Quinn, he founded Dublin Sound Lab, a group specialising in electroacoustic music and computer-mediated music performance.

Richard Eigner Denoising Field Recordings My ‘Denoising’ projects document an early attempt at using denoising techniques in a creative and compositional manner. Instead of utilising noise reduction algorithms for their intended purpose (the restoration of damaged audio signals), these processes are applied to various live signals or field recordings of urban and rural soundscapes. Since this audio material consists entirely of noises, this operation transforms the originals into an uncanny hybrid of newly introduced processing artefacts, occasional silence, and sporadically audible traces of the original field recordings. What kind of sound aesthetics can emerge while denoising field recordings? Which audible parameters can resist this ‘audio erasement process’? In what ways are these traces comparable to the visual remanences of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a de Kooning drawing? What is the effect of different denoising tools on the emerging sounds? Does the radical denoising of noise eventually result in a new kind of music? Dr. Richard Eigner is a composer, sound artist and percussionist residing in Vienna and Linz, Austria. In his music he is crossing the borders of ‘experimental acoustic music’, ‘minimalism’ and ‘electronica’, with a focus on the symbiotic use of acoustic elements and electronically produced and processed sounds. He is kept busy with his playful musical project Ritornell, the setup of Denoising installations or drumming for the likes of Patrick Wolf, Flying Lotus, Dimlite and Patrick Pulsinger. His compositions were used by Robert Seidel for his projection and paper sculpture ‘Chiral’ at MOCA Taipei or by Canadian director Bruce La Bruce for his melancholy zombie movie ‘Otto; Or, Up With Dead People’.

Heather Frasch Sense Boxes: interactive installation for small boxes, fabric, sensors, manipulated sounds & headphones (9:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m.) If one could touch sound, what would it feel like? We are constantly touched by sound in the world around us. But it touches us, we don’t touch it. Spatialization systems further emerge listeners in sound, engulfing the entire body. But we still can’t touch it. This installation seeks to allow that to happen—to allow the participant the possibility to touch sound. With the advent of electronic music, the timbral palette has expanded, creat22

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ing richer, more sensual, and even tactile sounds. The sounds used in this installation were selected for both their sonic complexity as well as their textual characteristics. The sounds were then analyzed with spectral analysis tools to understand their timbral properties. Then fabric and materials were chosen that correlated, according to the composer’s sensibilities, to these sounds. The material used falls into different sonic categories, such as ‘scratchy’, ‘smooth’, ‘fuzzy’ or ‘gloppy’, etc. Often categories mix and overlap, as complex sounds can do. In order to engage with the installation, listeners must place their hands inside of the boxes to discover a variety of unknown materials and objects embedded with a variety of sensors (e.g., force, stroke, and stretch). The listeners push, pull, squeeze and stretch the material, which manipulates the sounds coming through their headphones. The headphones create an individual and intimate sonic experience for each participant, such as in the sensation of touch. The interactive nature of the installation allows the listeners to engage with the idea of tactility but think through their own as well. Heather Frasch is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, improviser and experimental flutist and works on sound installations. Her music has been performed at festivals and concerts worldwide such as: FRUM (Iceland), Atlas Academy (Amsterdam), ICMC (Huddersfield), NYCEMF (New York), SICMF (Korea), Moscow Autumn Festival, San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Acanthes Festival (Luxembourg) and the Third Practice Electronic Music Festival (Virginia), among others. She attended the Cursus for Young Composers at IRCAM (France) with Yann Maresz, Schloss Solitude Academy (Stuttgart) with Chaya Czernowin and Mark Andre, and the Wellesley Composer Conference with Mario Davidovsky. Other honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris in Composition, Finalist for the 2012 International Sergei Slonimsky Composition Competition, and the Nicol DeLorernzo Prize in Composition, 2010 and 2008. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied composition with Franck Bedrossian and Edmund Campion and worked on interactive electronic music at CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) with David Wessel. Heather holds a Silver Medal from the Conservatoire Nationale de Region de Lyon and a Bachelor of Arts from Temple University.

Alec Hall Asheville Banter

Asheville Banter follows in the tradition of Stan Douglas’s ‘Evening’, whereby the Happy Talk news style is presented in a defamiliarized context and subsequently mined for its sonic and semantic potential. Asheville Banter departs from Douglas’s work, however, as I was more interested in the Happy Talk segues, where the news team engages in what could only be considered the most insipid kind of banter over truly banal subjects (often occurring between detailed reports of gruesome murders, for example). The title originates from Robert Rauschenberg’s Asheville Citizen, where a sample of the local broad23

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sheet is placed on a canvas, and then mostly obscured by paint. While obvious to the viewer that one is looking at a newspaper, making out the text is made difficult by the paint covering the text. In this work, it is instead noise that obscures the news content. Alec Hall was born in Toronto in 1985 and currently lives in New York City, where he works with George Lewis in the doctoral program at Columbia University. His works are primarily experimental in nature, with a strong focus on semanticity and representation in acoustic structures. His work is frequently performed throughout Europe and North America, with notable premieres by Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Intercontemporain, JACK Quartet, ICE and Talea, among others. He has won five prizes in the SOCAN competition for young composers and he was a finalist for the Jules Leger Prize in 2011. Future projects include a new work for the Ensemble Pamplemousse with a commission from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec, and he will also be touring Canada in November 2014 as part of the Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal Generation project. He is also the founder and co-director of Qubit, a non-profit organization in New York dedicated to presenting events highlighting new and experimental works with electronics, such as the Noise Non-ference, a two-day interdisciplinary festival in March 2013. Hall holds an M.A. in composition from the University of California, San Diego and a BMus in composition and violin performance from McGill University

Daniel del Rio Specific sound diffusion

Noise is not music, and not even noise. Noise allows the liberation of concepts; we must not confuse this liberation with infinite choice but it shows no other option than liberation itself. At this point begins the artistic practice. The noise experience presents the sound as a presence. Sound as unitary and antinarrative experience. On the occasion of the presentation with the 25-speaker system at Huddersfield University, I will expand the ideas developed during a past artistic residence in MediaStruch (Barcelona), where I discussed sound dynamics and trajectories between speakers from a point of view of apparent staticity, considering the multi-focal configuration as an entity in itself, allowing me to consider sound as a sculptural unitary phenomenon. Another topic would be the depth and sound presence through overlapping juxtaposed methods and playback variation systems. The space and time will be completely related to interdependence, to put on the table several aspects that can be potential in multi-channel work composition. Daniel del Rio works on sound and installation. He studied music theory and percussion at the Creative School of Music (Guadalajara, Spain) and electroacoustic composition at the Center for the Diffusion of Contemporary Music (CDMC-LIEM Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid). He took electronic composition lessons with the composers Sergio Luque and Alberto C. Bernal. Currently he is developing reductive, a platform dedicated to sound art internationally, responsible for the publication of works in digital and physical format.

saturday, 5 october 2013

Concert II Saturday, 5 October, 8:00 p.m. Phipps Hall

John Bowers Five Bowls Of Philosophy Circuit noise. Alchemical assemblages. Unwarranted devices. Liminal instruments. Suborderly sounds. Taking the values of musical chance, hardware hacking and circuit bending to an extreme, Five Bowls Of Philosophy investigates the possibilities of random mixtures of components and materials to make spontaneous synthesisers. Job lots of resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, transistors and the occasional shard of broken circuit board are blended with salt, fat, oil, iron filings and conductive organic fluids, and powered with homemade batteries. Shaken, stirred, stroked, stabbed, a quintet of emergent synthesisers will be improvised to explore radical uncertainty in the deepest noisy workings of electronic music. J. M. Bowers works with home-brew electronics and modular synthesisers, alongside contemporary digital technology, to create performance environments combining sound, vision and embodied action at a fundamental material level. He has performed at festivals including Electropixel Nantes, Piksel Bergen, BEAM Uxbridge, Venice Biennale, and toured with Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest. He has been artist in residence at Fylkingen Stockholm and is Associate Artist of Pacitti Company London. He plays in the noise rock band Tonesucker whose release, Omnia Convivia Crastina, was listed as one of A Closer Listen’s albums of 2012. He is Professor of Creative Digital Practice at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK.

Mark Summers Laminate

Written for improvising viola da gamba and live electronics, Laminate explores the noise-making capabilities of the instrument. Closely-captured cracks, creaks and groans

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are brought together by the computer and dispersed around the audience, building up layered masses of immersive sound. Mark Summers is a performer and researcher who specialises in improvisation on the viola da gamba, largely in conjunction with live computer processing. He has spent time as a professional musician, performing early and contemporary music, along with a period in information science research. Mark is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of Sheffield, looking at the performerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience of instrumental improvisation with interactive computer processing.

Sick Lincoln live algonoisethm Where algorave is algorithmic electronic dance music (a more well known aspect of sick lincoln performances), this experimental set will emphasize noise making algorithms under live coding control, from microtonal quirks to errant timbre. If any beats accidentally arise, they are surely there to confound you in the context of a festival of noise and otherness. Sick Lincoln is an anagram, dedicated to making music with processors. It didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t choose this life, but drew the short circuit. At robot school, borrowing a Roland D50, it tried out the factory reset, and had to spend a whole weekend reprogramming sounds. Experienced in live music construction, it performs under the weight of various aliases. Occasionally, it feels nauseous when listening to a track too many times; Sick Lincoln tragically combines a short attention span and a stubborn work ethic.

Paul McGuire Whitecaps

Whitecaps (2012) is a meditative piece for five performers in which the primary focus is on timbral modulation rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. My aim here was to create a dense, percussive and occasionally beautiful sound-world through the complete re-imagining of how the performers should approach their instruments, assisted through the use of organic and synthetic electronics. Undoubtedly, this idea owes a debt to the musique concrĂ¨te instrumentale compositions of Krzysztof Penderecki and Helmut

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Lachenmann. However, rather than briefly exposing an unusual sound and very quickly moving on to another one, as I find is the case with Lachenmann’s music in particular, I have aimed to hone in on these sonorities, to give them time to breathe and gradually transform. All of the instruments are amplified and close-miked so that the audience hears every sound intimately. Here, the real and recorded sounds have an interactive relationship, sharing certain characteristics that, at times, makes them difficult to distinguish from each other. In his composition, Paul McGuire (b. 1988) is fascinated by the grain of sound and the interactivity between the real and the recorded. He is currently studying for a PhD in Composition at Brunel University with Jennifer Walshe and Christopher Fox, funded by the 2012 Elizabeth Maconchy Composition Fellowship Award. In 2013, Paul won the Pablo Wendel – Performance Electrics International Composition Competition for his piece Marshes (2013) for mass guitar ensemble. He has attended Banglewood (2011) and II Bienal Música Hoje (2013). His compositions have been performed by groups including Ensemble Cross.Art, Open Source Guitars, and Con-Tempo String Quartet.

noise in and as music

saturday, 5 october 2013

Fringe Event: The Silent Howl Saturday, 5 October, 10:00 p.m. Byram Arcade Westgate, Huddersfield, HD1 1ND

Tout Croche Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern Ryoko Akama Varispeed Canoe Club A late night fringe event organised by The Silent Howl features performances by both new and well established noise and improvisation artists. We will also be launching the debut album, Super Silent, by Tout Croche. The line-up includes the post-genre power electronics of Tout Croche, the colliding music/art performance of Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern, complemented by delicate ambient sounds from Ryoko Akama and free bassoon+electronics improvisation from Varispeed (Mick Beck and Martin Archer). This potent mix brings a creative programme of explosive late night performances taking place in the atmospheric space of Byram Arcade. Suggested voluntary entrance fee of £3. Late bar!

noise in and as music

sunday, 6 october 2013

III. Noise in Music: data, score, code Sunday, 6 October, 10:00â&#x20AC;&#x201C;12:30 Monty Adkins, moderator

Nick Collins Noise Music Information Retrieval Techniques from Music Information Retrieval (MIR) have strong applications in computational musicology. In this project, MIR-informed analysis was explicitly applied to noise music, to assess the structure of individual recordings, and to compare multiple recordings, providing new insights into the sonic content of noise.Â Time-varying features such as the spectral entropy, sensory dissonance, perceptual loudness, transientness, spectral centroid and other timbral aspects are of high relevance to the perception of noise music. Similarity matrices can help assess within-piece formal relationships, including the detection of change points in a derived novelty curve. Pieces within a corpus can also be compared through summary statistics, or via models formed from time series, for instance, via k-means clustering from the feature vector space to cluster labels, followed by variable order Markov modeling. One interesting facet in the context of noise music is measures of dominance, where a predictive model trained on one work explains another work better than the other way around. Â The specific targets of study included two Merzbow albums, Oersted (1996) and Space Metalizer (1997), for which individual tracks were analyzed, and the pieces across the two albums compared. A corpus of historic noise music, including Whitehouse, Masonna and Xenakis, also placed the Merzbow works in a wider context. There is broad potential to this technology, including beyond musicology in new compositional directions, but there are also challenges, ranging from capturing visceral human physiological reactions, to the choices of thresholds of detection in the face of highly variable signal to noise ratios. Nick Collins is Reader in Composition at Durham University. Research interests include live computer music, musical artificial intelligence, and computational musicology.

noise in and as music

Joan Arnau Pàmies Noise-Interstate(s): Towards A Subtextual Formalization

This paper explores some of the mechanisms of the ‘noise-interstate’, a compositional concept whose primary goal is to enrich the translational intricacies between notation and interpretation by means of the intrusion of deliberate equivocation (DE). A brief introduction to a few terms from information theory will be presented, followed by a thorough examination of the methodology of DE within the context of my notational practice. Examples from some of my recent works for small chamber ensembles will be discussed in order to demonstrate the practicality of the ‘noise-interstate’. Joan Arnau Pàmies is a Catalan composer based in the United States. His works have been performed and workshopped throughout Europe, North America, and Russia by ensembles and individuals such as the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Felix Del Tredici, Fonema Consort, JACK Quartet, Kathryn Schulmeister, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, New Morse Code, Nora Volkova Ensemble, Taller Sonoro, and Vertixe Sonora Ensemble. He is the co-founder of Miiryn, a collective that functions as a catalyst for collaboration among independent artists. Pàmies is currently pursuing a doctorate in composition at Northwestern University, where he also teaches aural skills.

Karin Weissenbrunner Noise, objects and notational representations Noise in music is often performed live in the context of improvised and experimental concerts. In these unique performances, no scores, no drafts and often no recordings exist. Creating a listening score, however, of such improvised concert pieces brings up new challenges. How can noise be notated or visualised? Are there certain categories and qualities of noise? How can we describe them? Noise in music spans a wide range of mediums, both electronic and acoustic, and its production methods are many and varied. In short, this is a demanding topic, and a comprehensive approach has not yet been achieved. On the one hand, symbols for noise-producing playing practices are being developed in notational systems for contemporary classical music and percussion instruments. On the other hand, graphical representations of electronically produced noise can be a solution, such as Rainer Wehinger’s visual listening score of György Ligeti’s Artikulation (1958). I will present a mixture of these two approaches in a video/listening score of an experimental turntable concert, demonstrating the possibilities available for notating electroacoustic noise in a score, in particular in an improvisational situation. The notation that I have developed is in part based on the conventional notation system. I have 32

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used this notation system and included graphical representations to relate to certain categories of noise. As an explanation for why I have used this notation, the generation, characteristics and perceptions of noise will be addressed. It is my hope that this presentation will proffer useful strategies for understanding and finding ways of notating noise. Karin Weissenbrunner is a musicologist who studied systematic musicology, audio communication and technical acoustics at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Her current PhD project at City University London focuses on experimental forms of turntablism, especially regarding media-specific aspects and the æsthetic conditions of the live situation. Her professional background has brought her to IRCAM in Paris, the Berlin-based new music ensemble KNM Berlin and to the engraver company notengrafik berlin. Her interests lie in sound art, experimental music and DIY or hacked instruments.

James Whitehead Un-sounding music; noise is not sound James Whitehead’s ( JLIAT) presentation will cover the material from his chapter in the associated book, Noise In And As Music, where objective definitions of ‘identity’ and ‘noise’ can be gained from simple computer science. These non-subjective definitions are utilized to show a relation to recent philosophies where thinkers have attempted to break out of the ‘correlational circle’ of thinking, a ‘disaster’ in philosophy which it claims has dominated and limited philosophy since Kant. These philosophers are attempting to speculate about reality and the ontology of objects in a radical manner that runs counter to previous thinking, and gain access to ‘The Real’. Such a critique can and is then directed at certain ontologies of music that are, a priori, also correlational, something which ‘noise’ qua noise escapes from. This in turn challenges certain ideas in music, in particular its ‘taken for granted’ perceptual nature, and the ‘correlational’ thinking associated with certain theory and art practice as exemplified in seminal works by Cage and Duchamp. A much larger reality is identified that music has perhaps ignored. Noise qua noise is both ubiquitous and ‘a real’ outside of any correlation between thinking and thought’s object, as it exists in systems that are not bound to any culture, time or spatiality. Noise offers music the possibility of a new and radical ontology. The chapter and presentation should be seen therefore to be much more than a negative critique of music but instead as an indication of music’s potential to share in the ‘great outdoors’ offered by recent scientific thought and the philosophy of speculative realism. Rather than a single hierarchical ontology, which it could be argued was the problematic of modernism, noise offers a challenge and possibility for music to engage in ‘new’ territories similar to 33

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those of Deleuzeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s multiplicities, the flat ontologies of OOP, or the Non-philosophy of Laruelle, a potential radical diversity for music from its previous preoccupations. James Whitehead has been working with digital sound as binary data since 2000. As JLIAT he has released soundworks and performed in various venues and exhibitions. His current interest relates to issues regarding the ontology of music and noise which the digital media and recent philosophies have raised.

sunday, 6 october 2013

Concert III Sunday, 6 October, 2:00 p.m. Phipps Hall

Yota Morimoto transnd.xy The work explores the dynamics of machine codes in phase space. Sonified computer executables are ‘fragmentised’ and projected onto geometric forms which serve as anatomical cuts to the inter-aural space. Yota Morimoto is a Japanese composer born in San Paulo, Brazil, currently undertaking a doctorate research at the University of Birmingham, UK. His works explore unconventional approaches to generating and transmitting sound, implementing models of noise, turbulence and abstract machines. Works have been presented at festivals and conferences such as Gaudeamus Music Week [amsterdam], TodaysArtFestival [den haag], NWEAMO [mexico], Transmediale [berlin], ISEA [ruhr, istanbul], makeart festival [poitier], EMUfest [rome], ICMC [belfast], and SMC [porto, barcelona].

Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch Jodja The frame: a project named ‘around the world in 80 days’ that includes a dance piece (company MK plus dancers from the W. Forsythe company), other compositions (Fogg for violin cello and electronics) and several other collaborations. The concept: a solo based, among other things, on a reflection about an idea of space that comes out of the proxemic discipline, which divides space into four categories: intimate, personal, social and public. This spatial conception contrasts a more literal idea of space, which is the space without distance and without obstacles and that must be traversed as fast as possible. We can see in the novel of Jules Verne Around the World in 80 Days a premonitory conception of the contemporary idea of ‘space’. It is a work about distance, intimacy and distant landscapes. Practically I use midi interfaces and a Wacom tablet to control a large Max/ MSP patch (named “ELLE”) which I built for improvisation, creation, and production. 35

noise in and as music

The core of this patch is a synthesis engine based on gen~ (controlled with the Wacom) which allows me to create new noisy sonorities that I can control in a meticulous way. Then I let these new sounds pass trough my patch to treat them in unusual ways. The elements that comprise the performance (noises, sounds, parasitic elements, movements, whisperings) depend on details requiring sophisticated and rigorous control. The architecture of “ELLE” allows me quickly to reach new complexites in the organization and stratification of the musical material. It is a modular tool that collects all the ideas, engines, patches, and tools I built during the last few years. Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch (Milan, 1973) is a composer. He graduated in architecture (Italy) and composition (France) and after living in Spain for a while, he moved to Paris where he now lives and works. He has had many professional experiences, and is currently a lecturer in multimedia composition at Franche-Comté University in France, in the Multimedia Department since 2004, and also professor in the conservatory of Montbeliard, France. He has composed music for albums, installations, theater, images, performances. He composed the music for many contemporary dance shows of the dance company MK (Rome) commissioned by: Biennale di Venezia, Festival Sant’Arcangelo, Roma Europa…) and on tour worldwide (Europe, Japan, Indonesia, USA…) His interests span from instrumental composition with real time electronics (mixed music/MAXMSP-jitter), to audio and video installations to soundtracks and compositions for theater and dance, stemming from a formally strict process of experimentation by using electronic implemented improvisation. All this is a means of creation of new electroacoustic sounds.

Marinos Koutsomichalis The Buchla Project

The Buchla Project was realized during a twenty-one day residency at the ElektronMusikStudio (the Swedish National Centre for Electronic Music and Sound Art) in Stockholm, wherein it was attempted to interrogate the studio4’s Buchla Modular synthesizer in all sorts of possible and impossible ways. The project solidified in a digital library of numerous 1-6 channel audio pieces of various durations – all documents of a material interrogation of the machine. Marinos Koutsomichalis (Athens, 1981) is an artist and scholar working with sound and a wide range of other media. With his works he interrogates the specifics of site, perception, technology and material. He has widely performed, exhibited and lectured internationally and has held residencies in miscellaneous research centers and institutions. He has an MA by research in composition with digital media by the University of York and is a PhD candidate in Music, Sound and Media Art at the De Montfort University. He is on the board of the Contemporary Music Research Center (KSYME-CMRC), the director of its class of Electronic Music and Sound Synthesis, and also the director of the Agxivatein label.

sunday, 6 october 2013

Rodrigo Constanzo Improvisation Rodrigo Constanzo will be performing a live set of improvised music using his ‘drums’ setup which includes very little drums at all. A three piece, nearly child-sized kit, is modified, and augmented by home made electronic instruments including a three tiered zither like instrument, ‘electronic whisks’, circuit-bent drum machines, a nearly endless amount of brick-a-brack, and a vibrating sex toy for good measure. The recent addition of a laptop and monome controller adds an additional layer of glitched out electronics including realtime concatenative synthesis and live sampling/ processing. Rodrigo Constanzo is a Spanish-American performer and composer living in Manchester, England. He is an avid improviser and performs regularly using home made electroacoustic, and modified electronic instruments. He has performed at the FUTURESONIC and Manchester Jazz Festivals in Manchester, the SOUND Festival in Aberdeen, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, GEMDays, and the BEAM Festival He has released several CDs of solo and group music on a variety of labels. He is currently working towards a PhD in Composition at the University of Huddersfield and co-runs The Noise Upstairs, an improv collective and label which puts on monthly nights and quarterly workshops in Manchester and Sheffield.

noise in and as music

Huddersfield Food and Drink Guide ENGLISH Northern Taps

Slightly fancy British pub-style food, a few local ales on tap, only serves food until 8pm.

Herbert’s

Same owners as Northern Taps, good lunch menu, but avoid the clientele after dark.

Head of Steam

Traditional Sunday Roasts in a pub with kitchy-charming trainthemed décor, but can be crowded. A decent selection of real ale, though of variable quality.

Rhubarb

As convenient to the University as it is un-amazing.

SOUTH ASIAN Balooshai

Quirky take on typical Indian-British fare, “authentic” spice levels.

Nawaab

Popular favourite; three-course early-bird dinner menu 5-7pm.

Chennai

Great Dosas (South Indian rice pancakes), other items hit-ormiss.

Kebabbish

Local branch of a Pakistani-British chain; stick with anything grilled.

eating and drinking

OTHER ASIAN AND CARIBBEAN Med One

Nice Mediterranean dishes (Greek/Turkish/Lebanese), but can be slow and easily overwhelmed by large parties.

Noodle 88

Stand-by noodle bar, fast and convenient, don’t hold the grease. If you speak Chinese, there is a secret menu.

McNoodleKing

Passable fast-food pan-Asian stir-fry to go.

Discovery Bay

Fancy Caribbean food from an award-winning chef, good rum.

Thai Sakon

Perfectly respectable Thai food in an elegant atmosphere. A bit of a trek from the university, but very nice food. Can be busy on weekends for dinner, so phone ahead.

PUBS & CAFÉS The Grove

Unparalleled selection of real ales and craft beers, both local and not, also ciders, and a great whisky list. Knowledgeable staff. Convivial atmosphere full of “local flavour.”

The Rat and Ratchet Large local ale selection with authentic sticky carpet. The Sportsman

Also good local ale selection, good food when available.

Zephyr

Smaller selection of slightly pricier beers, but nice atmosphere.

Bar Maroc

Maroccan-themed bar with great homemade pizza, mint tea, and cocktails, good for a relaxed late-night hang.

Coffee Evolution

The only place in town for good coffee; nice soups and salads, vegetarian.

Time ca. 2000

Eccentric spot for tea, scones, soup, and sandwiches.

The Bakehouse

Nice bakery and sandwich takeaway. 39