Festival Audioblast 10 – Variant Waves

FREDERICO PESSOA “Transmitting life from deep black holes”

Frederico Pessoa is a brazilian sound artist and musician who has been presenting solo and group exhibitions, sound and multimedia performances and working with other artists in different projetcs and artistic languages. He has studied classical guitar and has a PhD in Arts from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He is interested in the relations between sound and politics; sound and other artistic languages; sound, body and space; simple technologies and the vibrational aspect of day to day life and its effects on our bodies.

Transmitting life from deep black holes uses clipped and altered samples of sound transmissions carried out by interplanetary probes that traversed the solar system, mixed with recordings of drones produced by the machines of Brazilian mining companies that tear the ground creating holes the size of entire neighborhoods, as well as clippings from interviews, lectures and conversations broadcast by the Brazilian media in recent years. Through the appropriation of th electromagnetic waves that circulate between us and the universe, the waves that make the earth’s interior vibrate, as well as those that make us build a way of being in common, Transmitting life from deep black holes seeks to provoke, through sound and vibration, the reflection on our being in the world and our relationship with our surroundings. Transmitting life from deep black holes polarizes these waves so that they vibrate other ways of feeling and thinking about us and our surroundings. The small change of words in the title is intentional, seeking a metaphor for the situation we are in and what we need to get out of it.

TMS “Relay Station“

TMS is an experimental electro-acoustic project by the artists Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen and Malte Steiner. The format is improvisational sound pieces and concerts built out of Steiner and Madsen’s sonic interactions, where noise-scapes and complex structures emerge from intense layering of various in- and outputs. The choice of instrumentation and method varies for each performance and piece, where each chosen element is crucial and the combination of these play a vital role in the compositions. The inputs can be analogue as well as digital; modulated, transformed and distorted.

Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen & Malte Steiner will in their online concert Relay Station explore multiple layers of transmission and relaying forward of information. Madsen and Steiner here regard themselves as two sonic sources, researching what possibilities are present when they are sounding together but not located in the same place, one being in Helsinki (FI) and the other in Aalborg (DK). One sends a sound source over the network, to be received and responded by the other, who then forwards their multiplied signal back into the stream, as the final live feed. Like response rings over sonic air waves. Crucial for the piece is that live networked communication includes potentials for delay, chance encounters, and even failure, which here are regarded as creative forces feeding back into the work, as dynamic variations and potentials.

ANDRE PERIM “Unwanted sounds appreciation method”

Andre Perim is a Multimedia Artist, Musician and Composer. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, his work is focused in a critical view of the relation between technology and language in the digital era. His work was screened in several festivals around the world such in Bulgaria, Saudi-Arabia, Greece, Korea, etc…

As a Musician-Composer he released three albums and the last one is based on the work produced for the internet during a long period inside a hospital due to a cancer disease treatment. This work opened new possibilities regarding online artist expression as well as creative uses of electronic soundscapes, silence, and noise. In 2020 produced “XAM”, dedicated to the indigenous Brazilian people, composed during the burning of the Amazonian rain forest in 2019 and presented at the SOUNDBLAST#8 Global e-mission in Nantes, France and later also at The Climate Change Conference COP 26 (2021) in Glasgow (Scotland) In 2020 his composition “COAGULATION” was awarded by the site SoundSilenceThought

The project idea is about an unimpressive and exaustig collection of useless procedures for performing precoceus obsolete paraphernalia, Spontaneous desintegrative broadcasting, and an ostensive diary of an obssesive acumulator of noise and another accousting annoying phenomena. Sonic collages of random wave radio interferences, air traffic frequencies, and another ready-mades sounds were reprocessed through max/msp and piano midi. This work is an on-going open process, never finished and always reprocessed live system. Several multimedia art expressions are being used as raw material such as texts (in portuguese and english), video, programming and transformed in multiple processes.

ACOUSTIC MIRROR “Radio Walks“

Kamen Nedev is a sound artist, flâneur, fugueur, and independent cultural producer. Since 1986 he works and tries to live in Madrid, Spain. Since 2005, under the Acoustic Mirror moniker, he has been working on a line of research in phonography, sound art, and radio art, with an emphasis on the soundscape of urban space as well as social sound production, situated listening, and militant sound investigation.

Radio Walks proposes an exploration of the shortwave radio spectrum which replaces the conventional radio sweep with algorithmically determined “walks” through the frequencies. This emphasizes both the use of the (gradually deprecated) shortwave radio spectrum as a non deterministic sound source, and the use of algorithmic composition as a means to shape this serendipity into the body of sound production.

The use of radio as a “pure”, or at least indeterminate sound source has a long tradition, both in the avant-garde (the Futurists, the above mentioned Khebnikov, and also Cage, among many others) and in experimental forms of popular music (Holger Czukay in Can). This has confirmed the viability of radio as an autonomous art form. With radio being progressively “left behind” in the field of contemporary communication media, this autonomy can be further reinforced, with the radio agent becoming even freer in their sound production.

Carrascoza/Chagas “Telematic Audiovisual Immersion“

Paulo C. Chagas is professor of composition at the University of California,

Riverside. He created more than 180 works for orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic, audiovisual and multimedia. His works resulted from numerous orders and have been acclaimed in the United States, Europe, Russia, Asia and Brazil. Chagas develops extensive research in semiotics, philosophy, electroacoustics, multimedia, and technology.

Cássia Carrascoza is a virtuoso flutist from Brazil. She is Professor at the University of São Paulo and currently visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside, working on a research on telematic performance under the supervision of Prof. Paulo C. Chagas.

This duo works on electronics and video, it was created in March 2020 for performing telematic music with focus on electronic and audiovisual immersion.

Telematic Audiovisual Immersion is a collaborative project of telematic, audiovisual and electronic music. It will be a concert with pieces combining 3D video, ambisonic sound, live-electronic music and real time flute performance.

RADICALRADIO – 14MHz

GOO – Grand orchestre d’Ordinateurs

GOO – Grand Orchestre d’Ordinateurs

This project came out of the APO33 collective research programme and first was presented on Friday 15th November 2002 at Nantes Museum of Fine Arts. 6 artists work together on the public presentation of this ‘orchestra’, analysing it from every possible angle, unravelling, unbuckling, skinning it until they discover the cracks that will lead them to new modes of creation. The project rests on the contradiction between two systems : the orchestra and the computer, forcibly linked. The artists do not perform as players of the orchestra, but as actors of an experimental sound event. The project is not experimental because its object is experimental music; it is experimental because it appears incoherent and improbable, because it involves two conflicting choices and because we cannot guess what will emerge as a result. One possible result being of camouflage, of concealment – accepting to amalgamate the cluster of conventions linked to each of these systems (the artists as members of a group using their computers as musical instruments) i.e. becoming a pantomime of an orchestra. Another being of a surprise attack at the core of these systems (orchestra and computers) which would then interrogate each other.

BRU-ORO & YOG’ZTE “Progetto Rizoma”

Bru-oro approached the music through the study of the classical guitar at the “Vincenzo Bellini” Conservatory of Palermo with the teacher Marco Cappelli. In February 2015 he graduated in jazz guitar. Despite his youth he already got many approvals for didactic work and concert season. Furthermore he enhanced his repertoire composing soundtracks and musical scores for short film made by young film-maker.

Maurizio Cavaliere aka YOG’TZE begins his musical journey by listening to the Beatles and playing the electric bass in different bands. Later he discovers he can do whatever he wants on his own, using synths and samplers. So he becomes YOG’TZE

Technical tools and “in general” our shelf in the social totality gives conditions of production music and figurative of the excess development and rhizomatons, by using technological and never be over whelmed, painting and music become a combination more than conventional through which the music is interpreted and designed in a process “sound creative-extemporaneous: IMPROVISATION, SOUND REPETITIONS, EXASPERATION MUSIC, FIGURATIVE DRAWING, MICRO POLYPHONY, DRAWING, DISAGGREGATION, RECOMPOSITION.

MINJI KIM “Bus 22”

Minji Kim is a researcher and sound artist based in The Hague(NL) and Seoul(SK). Based on her work experience at Harvest Works, an experimental art studio in New York in 2016, and Elephant Space Seoul, in 2018, she is actively conducting her research and artistic activities. In her research, She explores the acoustics of intersection in psychology and geography; Psycho-geography while she narrowed it down to psychological experiences in the urban infrastructures. She obtained a master’s degree in music ArtScience Interfaculty with a thesis on ‘The other’s sonic experience; Bus 22’ about sonic phenomenology and psycho-geography in the city. In her practice, she is working with the latest media technologies such as immersive sound performances, live coded music performances, AI music performances, and creative coding.

1) Get on bus 22 and observe a person.
2) Imagine and write about the person’s sonic experience on the bus, Considering the Hague locale.
3) Based on the script, compose audio playbacks.
This work is consisting of on-site recordings using multiple microphone technologies, the audiobook Bus 22 includes an acoustic experience in a private sentimental space in a city vehicle. It goes beyond the sound that appears as a frequency, and is closely linked to the memory in the head, and consists of city information through the window. This is a possibility that can come out when SF-like imagination is based on the medium of radio.

Barg Transmission

YODEST “Revelation of Uranus”

Michał Wojciechowski born in Poland. Based in Leicester, UK. Video creator and a ‘noiseician’ (someone who is interested in sound itself rather than melody). Explores the surrealistic and dark side of life with emphasis on human beliefs and superstitions. Inspired by industrial noise music. Participant and creator in experimental projects : “Ideas of Noise” where he presented shaving as a source of droning noise. Gradually uncovering face, while at the same time playing sounds that correspond with that both dramatic and ordinary event. In ‘United Isolation Ensemble’ as a member of a group where the concept is for solo performance material sent via online transfer and overlaid into interesting and unexpected combinations.

Radio FM/AM/SW as a sound source transforms by pedal effects. The visual side of the performance shows that every aspect of the set-up has a symbolic meaning.

“Including radio is an obvious relation to the festival theme. But there is more. By giving the radio a sacred position as a God of the Future/Electricity/Information (Uran in astrology) I receive transmission as a revelation and retransmission as an interpretation of God’s Word. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ What is the Word? Word is a sound. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is awave…”

RADICALRADIO – 14MHz

The S.E.A.L.s + Katherine Liberovskaya “Synthetic Erudition Assist Lattice”

The S.E.A.L.s are an AI-inspired electronic noise band consisting of the collective efforts of Sofy Yuditskaya, Susie Green, Ria Rajan, Margaret Schedel and Sophia Sun, and here with guest live visualist Katherine Liberovskaya, augmented by the S.E.A.L. (Synthetic Erudition Assist Lattice), our AI counterparts that assist us in creating usable content with which to mold and shape our music and visuals. We also use the S.E.A.L. to randomly order the names of the group members each time we list ourselves.

Our music came about during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns across the globe. We individually created parts/content with which to compile into songs as a networked ensemble. This created a bed track for our live performances online using various tech stacks dependent upon the concert organizers preferences. During these performances we improvise on our respective music, audio and visual instruments.

We use telematic music technologies and radio waves, not only as means by which our live online networked performances can be accessed but also, as a chance-agent providing a completely individualized temporal experience. The way packets are delivered across various browsers, internet connections & locations in the world means that each viewer encounters The S.E.A.L.s in a unique way as the medium of the internet provides a multidimensional experience. The band members do not experience the set in the same way and any documentation of our live sets that exist are from the perspective of the individual who recorded their experience.

The Square Root of Negative Two (Robin Amos, Blaik Ripton, Allison Tanenhaus)

The Square root of negative two is a Boston-based electronic group specializing in atmospheric synth melodies, propulsive rhythms, and mind-bending glitch art visuals. Their dynamic vibes range from lush euphoric peaks to dark disturbing depths.

Blaik Ripton started out as a skateborder playing drums in hardcore punk band in New York city. He’s a sonic explorer in multiple genres, including punk, post punk, indie, ska, synthpop, electronica, and folk.

Robin Amos is a pioneer in numerous genres, including electronic synth, garage rock, art-punk, post-punk, post-rock and black metal.

Allison Tanenhous is a creative endeavord who began in street art, with appearances(both sanctioned and guerrilla-style, in 17 countries. She’s a self-taught glitch artist, she now makes trippy music videos, installations, and projections using just her smartphone.

GAEL MOISSONNIER “Respectrophonie”

Gael Moissonnier is a French experimental artist and musician from Grenoble. He plays modular synthesizer, analog tapes and field recording, mainly solo, but has also collaborated with Guentin AUvray, Julien Louvet, Simon Deterne, Ben Morris, etc.

He also played in the bands Motherfucking, LA 6ème Faute and Faux Amis. He has been in charge of the Zerojardins label since 2006, and was the programmer of the legendary concert hall Grand Zero in Lyon.

He has performed at Iklectik, London; Fuse Art Space, Bradford; Magasin Général, Tarnac; Festival Direct, Dijon; Cité du design, Saint-Etienne; Audioblast Festival #3, NAntes; LUFF Festival, Lausanne; etc.…

WOLFGANG SPAHN “The unsyncable”

Wolfgang Spahn is an Austrian-German sound and visual artist based in Berlin. His work includes interactive installations, miniature-slide-paintings and performances of light & sound. His art explores the field of analogue and digital media and focusses on both their contradiction and their correlation. That’s why he is also specialized in re-appropriated and re-purposed electronic technologies.

Spahn’s immersive audio-visual performances merge the technically distinct production of images and sounds. In this respect the data stream of a digital projector becomes audible whereas the sound created by electromagnetic fields of coils and motors will be visualised. Spahn is facculty member of Sound Studies and Sonic Arts of Berlin University of the Arts.

The Unsyncable is a sonic vaccination of digital devices with an excerpt of analog electronics. These so injected devices become immune against binary infertility and all kind of digital sterility and they are cured from the ordinary stereotypical monotony.