Using a multichannel soundsystem throughout the entire space, a handful of sound artists activate the unique acoustics of Roulette’s new 1920’s Art Deco theater with multi-channel spacialized sound.

Featuring: Maria Chavez, Mario Diaz de Leon, Sabisha Friedberg, Alfredo Marin, Zeljko McMullen, Daniel Neumann, Tristan Shepherd, Doron Sadja, Ben Vida.

For more information here.

Dafna Naphtali + Bora Yoon will present/perform/spatialize multi-channel audio works for Issue Project Rooms 15 speaker sound environment designed by Stephan Moore.

Dafna will perform a set of interrelated pieces building on work created during her years working at Engine 27, and during a residency at Diapason, and also work on the very first Floating Points Festival a few years back. She will also perform an excerpt of “Panda Half-Life”, her new new multi-channel vocal work written for the Magic Names vocal ensemble (American Composers Forum commission), which premiered June 2010.

Bora Yoon will perform her multi-channel set joined by Luke DuBois’ unique video responses..

In its 5th year, Floating Points explores the versatility of ISSUE’s house speaker system designed by Stephan Moore. In the hands of these diverse performers and artists, this fifteen-channel installation of Hemisphere loudspeakers radically changes the concert experience for both performer and audience. Each Hemisphere radiates sound in all directions, activating the acoustics of this unique concert space where immersive sonic environments are generated, electronic sounds take on the intimacy of acoustic instruments, and location is liberated as a musical dimension.

The first Bell Tower is a general installation for people on the street. In the north tower of the Eglise du Gesù church, loudspeakers will diffuse the sound of the bell chimes every hour. Installing an invisible bell tower where there usually is none arouses the curiosity of the people walking by on two levels. First, they notice “bells” that they have never heard before. And, a few days later, they discover that there are not only « new bells » but also a plethora of sounds from far-away cultures.

At all times, bells have been used at special occasions (religious holidays, fire, mourning, …). Bells are part of the special soundscape of cities and expressions of their diverse cultures. This installation presents recordings of a wide range of different cultures that have been captured all around the world. The installation outside the church aims at creating a bridge to other places, including all the questions connected to the encounter with foreign lands and the unfamiliar.

This part of the installation has been previously shown in: Jena, Weimar, Posterstein; Germany Montbéliard, France; Florence, Italy; and Cambridge, Mass., USA

Listen here.

The voices in the nave – Indoors :: The second installation uses the large space of the nave of the Eglise du Gesù church. Here numerous loudspeakers have been arranged. You can hear voices speaking and singing dialogues. These voices, which were recorded on several continents, invite us to an intercultural journey. We follow them on their itineraries, and in their prayers, chants, arguments, and conversations.

The imaginary dialogue – Indoors :: The third installation has a more individual character. In a confessional, the artist has set up two “interactive“ spaces with microphones. Visitors can enter the confessional like a devout person coming to confess. In the confessional, you hear the voices of different religions and cultures. Then, when you speak into one of the microphones, you will hear your own voice transforming and mixing with the “pre-composed voices”.

This interactive part of the installation invites visitors to enter an imaginary dialogue, and, through the microphone, share with others what they are hearing.

“…Those who have reservations or, for that matter, are allergic to this type of music that is so necessary for this century and so burning with contemporary vision… must absolutely go and hear Tutschku perform. You will discover a different way of thinking and making acousmatic music. Tutschku starts by creating a space pocket… The perspective speaks, the silence is eloquent, the gesture and the composition turn out to be omnipotent in conveying sense…” — LE DEVOIR 2001, F. Tousignant.

Hans Tutschku, born in 1966 in Weimar (GDR), is an international artist in every respect. As a scholarship student, Tutschku attended renowned studios and schools of electronic music in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Before becoming a composition professor and director of the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition in Boston, Massachusetts, he was a guest professor at several schools, including the IRCAM in Paris and the Technical University Berlin.

Tutschku is an “artist of the world” in every sense of the word. Few of his compositions and multimedia works are limited to his immediate surroundings. His works reference distant places, travel to sound worlds and to what is different and exotic in those places. Field recordings from around the world serve as inspirations, sources and material for this near ubiquitous electro-acoustic artist. Yet, Tutschku remains loyal to his hometown and the Weimar Days of New Music, as well as the Ensemble for Intuitive Music Weimar.

The composer was an adolescent when he first encountered Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose works he brought onto the stage in the GDR. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tutschku became Stockhausen’s student and composition partner. With his innovative contributions in the field of instrumental and electronic music, Tutschku is part of today’s academic music avant-garde. His artistic creativity and willingness to experiment with theory and technology manifest themselves in numerous collaborations, ranging from dance and film to interactive installations and art exhibits.

Hard (difficile) to believe, but it’s been 9 years since Lampo enjoyed the pleasure of Lionel’s company. We missed him and so too have the nice people at Alcala’s. He created spectacular music during his 2002 visit, and then left town with an equally spectacular cobra belt—but that’s a story for another blurb. At long last he returns, and only in part for the Western wear.

Here, he’ll present an epic two-hour musique concrète performance, an “interpretation with spatialization,” layering nature recordings, spoken text, pop songs and ethnic music through eight loudspeakers distributed around the room. Once on site, Marchetti will study the acoustics of the space and select appropriate works from his 20-year body of work.

The evening, brought to you by Lampo and the Graham Foundation, will be divided into two parts, each with its own direction and theme — perhaps “the natural world” or “human psychology,” or “shamanism,” a favorite of Marchetti’s, who sees parallels between the medicine man and composer, both as someone who transports you into another world.

Lionel Marchetti (b. 1967, Marseille, France) is an electroacoustic improviser and musique concrète composer. Initially self-taught, Marchetti studied with Xavier Garcia in Grenoble. A scholar, he later worked at the CFMI (Lyon) and INA-GRM studios (Paris), and published a book on composer Michel Chion. In the mid-1990s Marchetti was one of a handful of artists who took electroacoustic music out of the academic studio and into the realm of free improv, using a live set-up with microphones, small speakers, tape recorders and radio. As an improviser he performs in his long-standing duo with Jérôme Noetinger, in the audio-visual project Le Cube, with influential collective Archipel, and with dancer Yôko Higashi. In his studio work he incorporates sound collage and electroacoustic composition, although the level of poetry and refusal of genre boundaries in his music puts him closer to Kristoff K. Roll and Luc Ferrari than Pierre Henry or Bernard Parmegiani. Lionel Marchetti made his U.S. debut at Lampo in June 2002, in a duo performance with Jérôme Noetinger.

Co-presented with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Tijuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface brings together works by seven artists who draw upon the cultural landscape of the border region linking Tijuana and San Diego. The works range from digital prints to interactive multimedia. José Ignacio López Ramírez-Gastón’s spatialized sound installation, 24 Speakers and 24 Sound Sources, deployed in the interior of the gallery@calit2, enacts the concept of the democratization of knowledge and ‘reversed migration’ in the use of technology.In the main hallway, Media Womb (pictured above) creates an interactive sound cocoon made of recycled egg cartons - visitors’ movements inside the womb modulate sounds connected to the media’s mis/representations of Tijuana and transborder drug cartels. Media Womb is a collaboration from the artists of the CUBO Project: Giacomo Castagnola, Camilo Ontiveros, Nina Waisman and Felipe Zúñiga, with programming by Marius Schebella. For other works on display, see: http://gallery.calit2.net/.

Thanks to: Ricardo Dominguez, Associate Professor and Hellman Fellow, Visual Arts Department, UCSD.

Sideralia is a collaborative spatial sound performance based on signals sonified from astronomical sources. Opening with an orchestration of original concrete audio fragments recorded at radio astronomy observatories around the world, the live composition unfolds in an immersive surround sound environment to engage the listener in an imaginary voyage through cosmic vibrations.

“In 1973 I made Rainforest IV where the objects that the sounds are sent through are very large so that they have their own presence in space. I mean, they actually sound locally in the space where they are hanging as well as being supplemented by a loudspeaker system. The idea is that if you send sound through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released and those can be picked up by contact microphones or phono cartridges and those have a different kind of sound than the object does when you listen to it very close where it’s hanging. It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something you have heard at some other point in the space. It’s (can be) a large group piece actually, any number of people can participate in it. It’s important that each person makes their own sculpture, decides how to program it, and performs it themselves. Very little instruction is necessary for the piece. I’ve found it to be almost self-teaching because you discover how to program the devices by seeing what they like to accept. Its been a very rewarding type of activity for me. It’s been done by as large a group as 14 people. So that was how our Rainforest was done.” — David Tudor

Performed by: Ryan Jordan, Julien Ottavi, Kasper T Toeplitz, Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, John Bowers, Dominique Leroy, Philip Julian, Chris Weaver, Jenny Pickett, Ryo Ikeshiro, Dawn Scarfe, Andy Wheddon, Duncan Ravenhall, Antonis Antoniou, and more.

Thanks to ResonanceFM for their support!

Who is David Tudor?

David Tudor was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1926. He studied with H. William Hawke (organ, theory), Irma Wolpe Rademacher (piano) and Stephan Wolpe (composition and analysis).His first professional activity was as an organist, and he subsequently became known as one of the leading avante-garde pianists of our time. Tudor gave highly acclaimed first or early performances of worksby contemporary composers Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Stephan Wolpe, and La Monte Young, among others.

Tudor began working with John Cage in the early fifties, as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and with Cage’s Project of Music for Electronic Tape. Tudor gradually ended his active career as a pianist, turning exclusively to the composition of live electronic music.

As a composer, Tudor chose specific electronic components and their interconnections to define both composition and performance drawing upon resources that were both flexible and complex. Tudor was one of four Core Artists who collaborated on the design of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo ‘70, Osaka, Japan, a project of Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. Many of Tudor’s compositions have involved collaborative visual forces: light systems, laser projections, dance, theater, television, film. Tudor’s last project, Toneburst: Maps and Fragments, was a collaboration with visual artist Sophia Ogielska. Tudor’s several collaborations with visual artist Jacqueline Monnier included the development of a kite environment installed at the Whitney Museum (Philip Morris, NYC) in 1986, at the exhibition “Klangraume” in Dusseldorf in 1988, and at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City in 1990. Other collaborators have included Lowell Cross, Molly Davies, Viola Farber, Anthony Martin, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Tudor had been affiliated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) since its inception in the summer of 1953. In 1992, after Cage’s death, Tudor took over as Music Director of MCDC. Merce Cunningham has commissioned numerous works from Tudor, including Rainforest I (1968); Toneburst (1974); Weatherings (1978); Phonemes (1981); Sextet for Seven (1982); Fragments (1984); Webwork (1987), Five Stone Wind (1988), Virtual Focus (1990); Neural Network Plus (1992); and most recently Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994) for what was John Cage’s last conception, Ocean.

“A sound spectrum is a representation of a sound…in terms of the amount of vibration at each individual frequency. It is usually presented as a graph of either power or pressure as a function of frequency.”

SPECTRUM is a sound and image sculpture utilizing multiple (number to be determined) audio and video channels across both of Diapason’s exhibition spaces. The process at the core of SPECTRUM is the visualization of sound through spectrographic analysis, which breaks up a complex wave into its constituent parts and displays them on a 2 or 3 dimensional grid. These analyses and their corresponding sounds form the basis for several complex, layered compositions.

DRAW’s architectonic sound-image-scapes utilize found and new footage, field recordings, analog synthesizers, DSP, and A/V processing tools. DRAW’s compositions form the basis for improvisations involving processed video, algorithmically generated sound and live musicians. Through experimentation and dialogue, they explore in depth the relation between sound and image. Their practice involves a number of strategies, such as coupling specific sound and image sequences, using multi-channel setups for video + sound, role-switching, and exploring notational techniques.

DRAW has performed with Bruce Andrews, Tom Chiu, Andre Goncalves, Tim Keiper, PadTech and Alex Waterman, and will be bringing an ongoing performance series to the theater at The Little Theater at the 63rd St. YMCA in late 2009.

Café OTO and Elevator Gallery in East London will be the temporary home for ELSA 2009, the graduation showcase for the BA Sound Arts & Design course at the London College of Communication, featuring work from over 20 emerging sound artists. As a prequel to the exhibition, Café OTO presents live performances including composed, improvised, interactive, and surround sound works.

Exhibition: Elevator Gallery hosts non-performance based sound works including audio-visual installations, interactive works and sound design for film and animation :: June 4-7, 2009 :: Elevator Gallery, Mother Studios, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, London E9 5EN.

Curated and moderated by Telcosystems, the focus of this session will be on different strategies of spatialisation in audiovisual art and how this alters our understanding of technology-driven forms of art.

Norwegian artist HC Gilje explores how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. He will present the research he has been doing over the last three years during his research fellowship at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen (KHIB). HC Gilje writes regularly on these matters on his blog ‘Conversations with Spaces’.

The Italian sound designer Lorenzo Brusci will give a presentation on his work in the field of immersive sound and experience design. He is (co-)founder of the applied acoustics division of B&C Speakers Architettura Sonora, the environmental design team Giardino Sonoro and the studio Sound and Experience Design. And Telcosystems will present their latest work 12_Series, which they developed at BALTAN Laboratories as part of the Pohme Numirique investigations.

BALTAN goes NATLAB is a monthly series devoted to presenting and contributing to BALTAN Laboratories research programmePohme Numirique. Previous guest speakers have included Tim Edler from realities:united (DE), artists BULL.MILETIC (NO), Thom Warmerdam (Philips, NL), Willem van Weelden (NL), and designer Christien Meindertsma (NL). The fourth BALTAN goes NATLAB session will take place on June 26, 2009 and will focus on the space between artistic and technological research and development.