From New York City to the World
2014•03•27
Gallery MC


Program
King of Iniquity
David Morneau
[Amy Campbell & Amiti Perry, dance]

Emergence
Hubert S Howe

Dark Forces #1
Alon A Nechushtan

Bubbles
Allen Fogelsanger / Ann Johnston Miller

Longing Past
Briggan Krauss

Grande Liturgie Situationniste
David Jason Snow

Key Piece
Gary DiBenedetto

In Whirlpools (they feed)
Speak Onion (Dan Abatemarco)

Four
Jiafeng Gao

King of Broken Strings
Magdalena Kress

Live Bass Improv
Charles Halka

STATIC
Maggi Payne

Transmission
Aaron Fryklund

Threads
Andreja Andric

Between Sleep and Wake
Min Eui Hong
[Amy Campbell & Amiti Perry, dance]

Light Rain, Laganside
Eric Lyon

Henry's Cowbell
Gonzalo Varela

Rain Dances
Matthew Peterson



Biographies
David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre, a provider of exclusive unprecedented experiments. In his work he endeavors to explore ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. He lives and works in New York City. Learn more at http://5of4.com

King of Iniquity - In 2012 I curated a compilation album for I.B.N. called B'ak'tun Waning. Each month that year, on the 21st, we released a new track by a different artist as a countdown to December 21, 2012—the much hyped Mayan apocalypse. King of Iniquity is my contribution to the album, released on February 21, 2012, which was also Mardi Gras. It's a potent mixture of bass trombone drones, swirling synths, and splintered dub-step beats "bursting into a million ruined colors that that let you see forever."

Amy Campbell lives in Brooklyn where she dances and makes work for the stage, nightlife, bands, and anyone else who will let her put on a show. A native Ohioan, she received a BFA in Dance and Choreography from the Ohio State University, taught and choreographed competitive studio dance, and performed with multiple modern and dance theatre companies. She currently makes work with her super talented friends via Crooked Mouth, and performs with Inclined Dance Project. She has also performed and made work with Backspace Performance Ensemble, aemp:dance/Amiti Perry+Dancers, and multiple musicians and artists. When not dancing she can be found tending bar, stranded in Bed Stuy, and/or trying to keep up with all the things.

Amiti Perry received her BA in Dance from the University of North Texas and MFA in Choreography from The Ohio State University. In 2006, Amiti founded æmp:dance/ amiti perry + company, with whom she created, presented and performed in multiple New York venues. She also co-founded DIPdance with collaborator Coco Loupe in 2001; has presented and performed works in New York, Texas, Louisiana and Ohio; and performed, taught, assisted and designed, nationally and internationally, with Skip Costa/COREmovement Project-NYC (1999-2003). Recently relocated back to her Texas roots in 2012, Amiti performs with Satellite Dance Company and teaches part-time as adjunct at the University of North Texas.

Hubert Howe was educated at Princeton University, where he studied with J. K. Randall, Godfrey Winham and Milton Babbitt, and from which he received the A.B., M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He has been Professor of Music at Queens College of the City University of New York since 1967. He also taught at the Juilliard School for 20 years. Recordings of his computer music have been released by Capstone Records (Overtone Music, CPS-8678, Filtered Music, CPS-8719, and Temperamental Music and Created Sounds, CPS-8771) and Ravello Records (Clusters, RR 7817).

Emergence is based upon the fascinating thing that happens when a group of tones are played together and tuned in a harmonic relationship: another note jumps out – the fundamental – and we hear only that second note, the others being perceived as the timbre. The notes are presented in three ways: as independently attacking tones, as continuously fading tones, and as a complex envelope. They are played with overtone patterns that state the“harmony” of the context in which the note occurs. The work concentrates on the interplay between the overtones and the fundamentals they are a part of.

Alon Nechushtan’s music adventures has brought him to far corners such as the Yokohama Festival Japan with his contemporary compositions, The Sao-Paolo Brazil Jewish Music Festival with his Quintet Talat, Toronto and Montereal’s Rex Hotel with words beyond Jazz Trio and Tel Aviv New Music Biannalewith his Compositions for Large Ensemble. Resident of New York City, Alon has performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Central Park Summer Stage, The Blue Note Jazz Club and Joe’s Pub frequently with his projects as a band leader of various groups or as an in demand sideman.

Dark Forces #1 deploying ambiguous morphologies, as electronics, evoking games successive latency, environmental sounds – sea the wind, a bird – a fantastic bestiary, while a jungle, as strange process of involution and evolution, disfigurement and refiguration. It explores the dialogue between acoustic sounds and electronic soundscaping environment.

Allen Fogelsanger composes music for dance, accompanies classes, writes movement-interactive computer programs and teaches courses on dance and music. He was Director of Music for Dance at Cornell University until 2011 and now works at New York University, Marymount Manhattan College, the Gibney Dance Center and Ballet Arts."

Ann Johnston Miller works as a professional studio ceramist making clay sculpture and functional work as well as welded steel sculpture and installation. In 2000 she began working with video. The videos have been shown at the Ladyfest East film festival in New York and Rooftop Films in Brooklyn.

The video images for Bubbles were filmed in the winter of 2001-02 at Idyllic Wilderness Creek in upstate New York. They attempt to capture subtle visual aspects of natural phenomena, including the ephemeral textures of the play of sunlight and cloud on the stream's frozen surface and the uneven rhythms of interactions among water, air, and ice. The sound was derived from the original captured water noises, and the piano part was composed from the loudest frequency bursts in the water track. Some sound was temporally displaced to invite the perception of relationships with the video.

Saxophonist, composer and sound artist Briggan Krauss has been a strong presence on the New York creative music scene since 1994. He is a founding member of the band Sexmob, has played on Grammy Award winning and nominated recordings, and leads several of his own projects as well as collaborating with many other improvisers, composers and artists in New York City and around the world. He has recently earned an MFA degree from Brooklyn College's “Performance and Interactive Media Arts” [PIMA] program.

Longing Past - Suite of five, 45 second movements for alto saxophone and live generative computer music.

The compositions of David Jason Snow have been performed in concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble, the Ensemble InterContemporain, the American Brass Quintet, the Harvard Wind Ensemble, the Eastman Percussion Ensemble, and other artists throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. Snow has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the ASCAP Foundation, BMI, Musician magazine and Keyboard magazine, and has been an artist resident at Yaddo and the Millay Colony for the Arts. He holds degrees in music composition from the Eastman School of Music and Yale University.

Ennui is the death of freedom. Ennui is the death of creativity. Ennui is the death of passion, of life, of sense, and of revolution. Ennui is counter-revolutionary. Death to the counter-revolution. Death to oppression. Death to those who slavishly parrot slogans. Yes, death to us all. We are cows, the lot of us. Mooooooo. Long live ennui. Live without time. Art is dead, do not consume its corpse. Yes, consume its corpse. Yum-yum, yes, we will eat its corpse. It is forbidden to forbid. Happiness is the new idea. Beneath the paving stones, the beach!

Gary DiBenedetto’s work over the past 15 years has resulted in 11 electroacoustic compositions, 3 videos, 29 sound generating kinetic sculptures and 3 interdisciplinary performance works. His has three solo CD releases: Twin Towers 2010 Electroshock Records, Moscow A Drop in the Bucket and Season of Adjustment Diversity Music. He received a 2002 Composition Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2006 he won the overall prize in KAO International Kinetic Art Competition. He received his MA in performance and composition from New York University.

Key Piece was created from antique brass keys purchased twenty years ago at the estate sale of a master cabinet-maker. For the viewer/auditor the sight and sound of these keys may be used to symbolically unlock the past and open the future. The age and character of the keys relate to the passage of time while the electroacoustic aspects of the sound access the doors to the future.

As Speak Onion, Dan Abatemarco treads on, then completely explodes, the line between producer and noisician. He spews seething noise, giant deformed beats and absolutely wrong atmospheres in fits and starts until nothing sounds like what it sounds like anymore. Breakbeats and basslines enter innocently but end up processed beyond recognition and drowning in feedback. Synth sounds are stretched, manipulated, and left ruined as chilling shrieks. The resulting sonic abomination slips between the dimensions of experimentalism, harsh noise, and beat-bashed breakcore. Dancefloor? Maybe. Slaughterhouse floor? Yes, definitely.

In Whirlpools (they feed) - Synthetic ghosts haunting the guts of an ancient submarine call out desperately with what little force they have. The machine clatters on unaware, building up steam and speed, but light is bleeding away and pressure is mounting. Thick, malformed waves come in and out of focus as they home in; the sense of forward becomes confused with reverse. Futile radar pings come back as mockery in brief moments between crashing assaults. The machinery seizes, precipitating the clarity of suspension before a final bout of violence comes from without.

Gao Jiafeng is a composer, multimedia artist and multi-instrumentalist who currently resides in New York. He performs primarily on electronics, saxophone and Guqin - a plucked seven-string Chinese zither. He has toured in China and Japan for the past 5 years as solo electronic musician. His sound installation ""Tri-O"" was recently nominated for the 2014 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. Gao is also a member of NYU New Music and Dance Ensemble.

Four - Any space such as a room or a cup, does not always have to be absolutely empty when we think it is empty. For instance, a reading room in a library that has all the tables and chairs but has no one inside, or a paper cup in which there remains a few drops of tea and a used tea bag, may be still considered as an empty one. This piece is a personal approach trying to reach the line between of emptiness and its complement, by adding things to a limit where any further approach would lead to a collapse of the previously-built emptiness.

Magdalena Kress is a second year masters student in Music Composition at Bowling Green State University, where she has studied with Dr. Christopher Dietz and Dr. Marilyn Shrude. She currently holds a graduate teaching assistantship in instrumental and choral arranging. She recently had her piece Vasovagal Syncope read by the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. She has had works performed in Ohio, New York, and Alabama by artists such as cellist Craig Hultgren, The Relativity Jazz Quartet, and members of the BGSU New Music Ensemble. Kress is also an active double bassist throughout northwest Ohio.

King of Broken Strings - Imagined laments of discarded piano strings.

Charles Halka’s music has been performed in North America, Europe, and Hong Kong, including performances by such groups as counter)induction, ÓNIX, Volti, Jauna Muzika, Aquarius, and the Mexican National Symphony, and at such venues as the ISCM World Music Days, Vale of Glamorgan Festival, Lithuanian National Philharmonic, Saint Petersburg International New Music Festival, and the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. As a Fulbright grantee, he spent a year in Lithuania writing an opera, Julius, which premiered in 2010. Charles holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory and Rice University, and is Artist-in-Residence at the Foundation for Modern Music (Houston).

Live Bass Improv consists entirely of acoustic bass sounds performed by bassist Annabella Leslie and recorded by students at Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs (REMLABs). The sounds are arranged to give the impression of a bassist performing a live and virtuosic improvisation.

Maggi Payne composes music for dance and video, and is a video artist, recording engineer, flutist, and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her works have been presented in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. She received several grants from the NEA and honorary mentions from Concours International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges and Prix Ars Electronica. Her works appear on Innova, Lovely Music, Starkland, Asphodel, New World (CRI), Root Strata, Centaur, Ubuibi, MMC, Digital Narcis, Music and Arts, Frog Peak, and/OAR, Capstone, and Mills College labels.

An immersive four-channel environment, STATIC presents an episodic journey, ripping through the fabric of imagined time and space, encountering exotic entities and environments in its travels. Sources include radio emissions detected by Cassini and Voyager’s detectors. Some data are compressed in time and pitch shifted to an audible range. I further processed most beyond recognition. Other sources include shortwave transmissions, a throbbing faulty faucet, a squeaking fan transformed into Morse code, a crackling mixer output, and white noise generated by a Moog 3P analog synthesizer processed through its fixed filter bank. Static pervades these sources, thematically tying them together.

Aaron Fryklund (b. 1984) is a vital and progressive young composer based in Dallas, Texas. Fryklund's style exhudes a dynamic energy while his music maintains a delicate balance of cerebral intelligence and unabashed passion. Fryklund was recently honored to win "Best Score" at a prestigious film festival.

Transmission is a fixed-media composition for 2-channel audio. The original impetus for the work emerged from many frustrating hours spent in idle traffic. The piece is comprised of audio samples of various car noises sculpted into sweeping lines, grinding rhythms, and, well… honking horns. The piece is organized as a four-part triptych starting with the struggle to make the engine turn over, followed by the attempt to find the right radio station, then a fugue of horns, and finally an escalation of frustration and sensory overload ending suddenly when the parking brake engages. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!

Andreja Andric, born 1973 in Zajecar, Serbia. PhD in Computer-music applications from the State University of Milan, Italy. Two art awards, both from the Short Electronic Form Feast (2002 and 2004) in Belgrade, and two research grants, from the Italian State and from Microsoft Research Cambridge. Sound works, installations, videos and software on several new media festivals around Europe, Asia and Latin America. Currently living in Italy, Milan.

Threads explores the coexistence of a swarm of randomly generated sound lines in continually changing surroundings, a sort of an ecosystem in constant evolution. Staying clear of all the developments in of-the-shelf music software, the composition is programmed directly in C language.

Min Eui Hong was born in Seoul, Korea. He is teaching sound design at the Hongik University in Korea. His Film/Video works have been screened at the 9th Park City Film Music Festival, the 39th Athens International Film Festival, the 8th European Short Film Festival at MIT, the 2nd & 3rd Skepto International Film Festival, the 2nd New Media Film Festival, the Lightworks, and the 23nd EMAF. In addition, his electroacoustic work has been presented through the “ICMC 2010 – 360° of 60x60”. His works have been also performed at the Música Viva Festival, the International Conference “NIME”, Donaueschinger Musiktage - The next Generation, the ICMC 2007 / 2008 / 2010 / 2011 and broadcasted by Radio Bremen. He was awarded a prize at the 8th Park City Film Music Festival 2011.

Between Sleep and Wake is a Film/Video (Audiovisual) combining computer music with video art. Dreams are representations of thoughts, feelings, and awarenesses that have been occupying our mind — usually for the day or two prior to the dream. People dream during the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. This work shows a conscious and unconscious states on the fast movements of light fragment like REM occurring between sleep and wake. In this work, the moonlit sea is a canvas captured the momentary images between dream and reality in perspective, and then the dreamy state of the mind from the images are freely expressed by computer music.

Eric Lyon is a composer and computer music researcher. During the 1980s and 1990s, his fixed media computer music focused on spectral and algorithmic processing of audio, with a tendency toward extreme modifications of samples. From the early 1990s, Lyon performed live computer music, both solo and in the Japanese band Psychedelic Bumpo. In recent years, Lyon has focused on computer chamber music, which integrates live, iterative DSP strategies into the creation of traditionally notated instrumental scores. Other interests include spatial orchestration, and articulated noise composition. Lyon currently teaches computer music at Virginia Tech.

Light Rain, Laganside is a sonic essay built from materials created in Belfast. A set of digital keyboard improvisations was subjected to many iterations of digital sound processing, including algorithmic recombination, oracular processing, and live Max/MSP manipulations. The sounds for Light Rain, Laganside were chosen specifically for their association with experiences and sounds of living in Belfast. Urban existence, visibly bounded by encroaching natural beauty; multiple interpretations of place and identity; weather as a mercurial determinant of mood and sound.

Gonzalo Varela - composer and guitarist born in 1990 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Since 2011 has been studying composition and guitar at the Escuela Universitaria de Música (University School of Music). His professors have been Osvaldo Budón and Leonardo Secco in composition, and Ramiro Agriel in guitar (among others). Has also attended several courses and master-classes led by national and international professors. He has taken part in several Rock and Fusion bands (releasing two albums in 2011) and several choirs from Uruguay (having studied vocal technique with María de los Ángeles and Laura Baranzano). Has also written music for short Urugayan films, theater and videogames.

Henry’s Cowbell is a piece that makes use of the theories of composer Henry Cowell (later used extensively by others like Conlon Nancarrow) regarding the possibility of recreating the relationships between partials in a harmonic series by the means of polyrhythms. However, the narrative in the piece is not one that puts this always in the forefront, since to put that theory in an interesting context it also makes use of several other procedures, some still related to tempo and rhythm, while others focused on timbre and sometimes even melody. Most of the sounds heard in the composition are made with “found objects” (like a clock, a pair of scissors, cutlery and coins), and also some musical instruments are used (a cowbell and a piano that plays notes of a harmonic series). The narrative makes great use of suspense and surprise.

Matthew Peterson (b. 1984, Grand Forks, ND) is a composer exploring frontiers of sound and expression. Matthew’s expansive output of over fifty performed works ranges from documentary opera to stunning orchestral soundscapes, and features vivid orchestrations, rhythmic vibrancy, clarity of expression, and emotional depth. Peterson’s music has been commissioned and performed by musicians and ensembles around the world, and he has received awards including the Fulbright Grant, ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize, BMI student composer award, the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, Opera Vista Prize, and Fort Worth Opera Frontiers. Matthew is a freelance composer in Stockholm, Sweden.

Rain Dances is a tapestry of evolving canons and interlocking patterns, using marimba samples as its only sound source. It is dedicated to Steve Snethkamp, with thanks to Jeffrey Hass and Ben Rigney.