real-time/non real-time
 ELECTRONIC MUSIC Festival
 16-19 June 2005

 

 

 

Stück / piece Komponist / composer

A joke on copyright
 This piece forms the first section - a sort of overture - to my large scale electroacoustic work Müllmusik which is derived from various types of discarded and reused data. Materials such as images from the news, the components of various operating systems and programming languages, and donations from composers and soundartists of unused material, were all converted and recycled as sound. This particular section takes its name from the fact that all the sound is derived from images of corporate logos. Conversion between audio and other file formats allowed for diverse software to be used to process audio. (For instance, image manipulation software could be used to process sound.) The process of conversion was not a conscious mapping of parameter to parameter (i.e. position to pitch, etc.). Instead, I accepted the data raw, as a rough material in which to mine for sounds beautiful, ugly and inconclusive. The results are seemingly arbitrary, noisy, but also unique, containing traces of their previous structure. The origins of the final sounds are not necessarily apparent, so when to hide them, when to hint, and when to reveal became an engaging, if ‘extra-musical’ concern.

 Scott Wilson was born in Vancouver, Canada. Undergraduate studies at Simon Fraser University, where his teachers included Owen Underhill, Barry Truax, and Rodney Sharman, lead to an early interest in electronic music and multimedia work. He received a master’s degree from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he worked with Ron Kuivila, Neely Bruce, Alvin Lucier, and Anthony Braxton, among others. A year in Germany at the Center for Art and Mediatechnology’s Institute for Music and Acoustics lead to the development of his large scale electroacoustic work Müllmusik, which has since been released on CD by the French label 326music. During this time he was also a guest student of the German composer Wolfgang Rihm. In 2001 he began doctoral studies at the University of Toronto where his primary teachers were Christos Hatzis and Gary Kulesha, completing them in 2005. He was a co-founder of the new music group Ensemble Symposium, and is a past president of Vancouver Pro Musica.
Wilson’s work spans a wide variety of genres and means, running the gamut from orchestra to tuba with live electronics. His music has been presented internationally, with notable performances in Canada, the U.S., Germany, England, Ireland, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland. It has been broadcast on CBC Radio 2, Radio France, the Netherlands' Concertzender, and BBC Radio 3. Recent presentations of his work have included ZKMusikFest, the Huddersfield Festival, the Open Ears Festival, the National Arts Centre Young Composers’ Programme in Ottawa, and the premiere of his work Tadayo for koto and Javanese gamelan in Tokyo. He currently teaches composition and live electronic music at the University of Birmingham in England.

flux (panoramic)
 A large amount of the source material for this piece was collected from an expansive field in Yorkshire. “Panoramic” refers to the form, since the piece surveys a sonic (and physical) landscape whilst “Flux” refers to the continuous blending of material.

James Carpenter (born 1982) is currently studying part-time for a PhD with Jonty Harrison. This forms part of a diverse interest in electronic music of all kinds. His Bristol-based outfit Anarchic Hardrive have recently released their debut album Feeding Our Paranoia on the French Breakcore label Peace Off.

Kaleidoscope: Arcade (2004)
for 12 channels
Come behind the neon façades of the one-armed bandits and pinball machines and into the hearts of the machines themselves. Among the gears and levers, the whistling, darting, ratcheting and rolling is frantic and all-encompassing. A rage within the machine. Respites are fleeting, for no sooner has a game ended than more coins are pressed into the slot to start another.
This piece is a celebration of the arcade experience in its myriad forms. It continues the Kaleidoscope series in which the aim is to create a wholly immersive sonic environment where the apparent viewpoint of the listener is from within the sound itself.

 Peter Batchelor is a composer and sound artist living in Birmingham, UK. He has studied with Jonty Harrison and Andrew Lewis and, having recently completed a PhD in composition at the University of Birmingham, is currently a lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Predominantly working with fixed-media, his output ranges from two-channel 'tape' compositions for concert diffusion to large-scale multi-channel installation work. Compositions have received recognition from such sources as the Concours de musique electroacoustique de Bourges and the International ElectroAcoustic Music Contest of São Paulo and have been performed internationally.
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