WINTER 2013

FRIDAY 02.15.2013 + SATURDAY 02.16.2013 / 8 PM / FREE
500 BROAD STREET / PROVIDENCE, RI 02907

CTRL+ALT+REPEAT

CTRL+ALT+REPEAT is an experimental music series that focuses on cutting-edge electronic music, improvisation, contemporary classical music, and sound art. The Winter 2013 edition is a mini-festival spanning two evenings in mid-February. The concerts will feature the compositions 60 Pieces of Sound by Jurg Frey, performed by the Community MusicWorks Players and Gentle Fire by Alvin Lucier, realized by Caroline Park. In addition, there will be performances by local and Boston-based musicians: Rueben Son, Ed Osborn, and Vic Rawlings with Michael Bullock on Friday and Luke Moldof, Mem1, and Geoff Mullen with Keith Fullerton Whitman on Saturday. These concerts are presented in conjunction with Community MusicWorks and are made possible in part by ArtPlace and Stop Wasting Abandoned Properties.

FRIDAY 02.15.2013 / 8 PM / FREE

JÜRG FREY

Jürg Frey was born in 1953 in Aarau. Following his musical education, which finished with the examen de virtuosité in the class of Thomas Friedli at the Concervatoire de Musique de Genève, he turned to a career  as a clarinetist, but his activities as composer soon came to the foreground.

He developed his own language as a composer and  sound artist with the creation of wide, quiet sound spaces.  His work is marked by an elementary non-extravagance of sound, a sensibility for the qualities of the material, and precision of compositional approach. Sometimes his compositions bypass instrumentation and duration altogether and touch on aspects of sound art.

He has worked with compositional series, as well as with language and text. Some of these activities appear in small editions or as artist’s books as individual items and small editions. (Edition Howeg, Zurich; weiss kunstbewegung, Berlin; complice, Berlin). His music and recordings are published by Edition Wandelweiser.

He has been invited to workshops as visiting composer and for composer portraits at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Universität Dortmund and several times at Northwestern University and CalArts.

Some of the other places his work has developed  are the concerts at the Kunstraum Düsseldorf, the Wandelweiser-in-Residence-Veranstaltungen in Vienna, the Ny Music Concerts in Boras (Sweden), the cooperation with Cologne pianist John McAlpine, the Bozzini Quartet (Montréal), QO-2 (Bruxelles), Die Maulwerker, incidental music, as well as the regular stays in Berlin (where during the last years many of his compositions were premiered).

Jürg Frey is a member of the Wandelweiser Komponisten Ensemble which has presented concerts for more than 15 years in Europe, North America and Japan. Frey lives with his family in Aarau (Switzerland), teaches clarinet, and organizes the concert series moments musicaux aarau as a forum for contemporary music.

60 PIECES OF SOUND (2009)

The piece has three parts. Each chord is followed by a pause. The durations of the chords and the pauses are not fixed, but should be similar and without strong changes throughout the piece. The instrumentation is free, but the upper two voices should be played by instruments, that are able to play the written pitches without octave transpositions. The instrumentation of the third part is completely open: it could as well be played by an ensemble of several players. They may play pitches and/or noises.

REUBEN SON

Reuben Son is a multi-instrumentalist whose live performances and studio work most frequently includes utilization of guitars, tape machines, and modular synthesizer. His practice draws from multiple sources without adherence to specific compositional or conceptual frameworks. Most recently, his ‘breaking guitar’ pieces for live performance have focused on the fragmentation of linearity in performance-time and continues his ongoing work exploring opportunities for manual intervention within the context of electroacoustic music.

ED OSBORN

Osborn has performed, exhibited, and lectured, and held residencies throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. The recipient of many awards including a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Stipendium and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and is on the faculty of the Visual Art Department at Brown University.

Ed Osborn’s sound art pieces take many forms including installation, sculpture, radio, video, performance, and public projects. His works combine a visceral sense of space, aurality, and motion with a precise economy of materials. Ranging from rumbling fans and sounding train sets to squirming music boxes and delicate feedback networks, Osborn’s kinetic and audible pieces function as resonating systems that are by turns playful and oblique, engaging and enigmatic.

MIKE BULLOCK

Mike Bullock is a composer, improviser, intermedia artist, scholar based around Boston, MA. His modes of work include electroacoustic composition, installation, drawing, and video. Bullock performs across the US and in Europe, collaborating with a huge range of artists including Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Steve Roden, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley of nmperign, Mazen Kerbaj, and Theodore Bikel.

In 2010 he and Linda Aubry Bullock co-founded Shadowselves, a platform for their new media work. Bullock’s music has been released by numerous labels including Intransitive, Important, Winds Measure, Sedimental, Grob, 1.8sec, al Maslakh, and Homophoni. He received a PhD from the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and has taught and lectured in the US and Europe on field recording and improvisation.

VIC RAWLINGS

Vic Rawlings (cello/ electronics) employs a still and unstable sound language ranging from visceral excess to extreme austerity. He uses an amplified cello augmented with extensive and invasive preparations of his design, adapted from Baroque-era designs. On this instrument he has developed a vocabulary of extended techniques, approaching near-total abstraction from the cello. As an entirely separate unit, he uses and continually develops a modular electronic instrument with a highly unstable interface, acoustically realized by an array of exposed speaker elements. His writings on music/ instrumentation and contemporary music education have been published in Leonardo Music Journal and Intransitive Magazine. He has authored sound-based music and listening curricula that engage students at all levels in participatory experiences in which they often encounter unfamiliar experiential/ aesthetic territory. He presents in settings ranging from Ivy-League Universities to juvenile detention facilities. He lives in Somerville, Ma.

SATURDAY 02.16.2013 / 8 PM / FREE

ALVIN LUCIER

Alvin Lucier (born May 14, 1931) is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.

GENTLE FIRE (1971)

Collect, on tape, examples of ambient sound events such as those made by:

screeching brakes, chattering guests, warring gangs, rioting prisoners, stalling motors etc.

Using an electronic music synthesizer or any equivalent configuration of electronic components, process the examples in such a way that they become transformed into what could be perceived as sound events of different origin such as those made by

ocean waves, wind in trees, flowing streams, boiling tea, cooing doves etc.

For example, snarling dogs become crunching snow; crashing planes, laughing girls; and maneuvering tanks, ocean waves.

Record these transformations…in any sequence or any number of channels, using any manner of mixing, overlapping,or fading, taking care only that the process of change from each original sound event to its final state of transformation is slowly, gradually and clearly heard.

Deploying microphones in remote places, bring about these transformations in real time by the human manipulation of the synthesizer or with the help of self-governing control systems.

Based on these procedures and experiences, design for your personal use and store in your mind an imaginary synthesizer with which, when used in conjunction with blocking, masking, and pattern recognition techniques, you can willfully bring about such transformations at any time in any place without the help of external equipment.

―excerpt from the score

CAROLINE PARK

Caroline Park is a composer, musician, and artist working in experimental / new media art via performance and installation.

She has performed at the Stone (NYC), RISD Museum, AS220 (Providence), 295 Douglass Street (Brooklyn), 16 Beaver (NYC), Boston Center for the Arts, Goethe Institut-Boston, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (St. Louis), Ambassador Auditorium (Los Angeles), as part of R.K. Projects (Providence), ((audience))’s Sound Off (NYC), Non-Event (Boston), Together: New England Electronic Music Festival, Musicacoustica Beijing, SICPP: Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (Boston), Boston Microtonal Society, and Boston CyberArts. Caroline has shared the stage with artists such as Evidence, Dollshot, and Arnold Dreyblatt, and has worked with ensembles and performers Callithumpian Consort, Sound Icon, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, cellist Laura Cetilia, and pianists Stephen Drury and Yukiko Takagi. When not performing solo, Caroline performs with BUMPR, a quartet with laptopists/multi-instrumentalists Peter Bussigel, Stephan Moore, and Timothy Rovinelli.

A Los Angeles native, Caroline received degrees at the New England Conservatory and is currently a graduate student in the MEME program at Brown University. Her work has been presented in the U.S., U.K., and in China. Solo releases can be found on cassette, CD, and in digital formats via labels Private Chronology, Bathetic Records, Visceral Media Records, and Pure Potentiality Records. Her 2011 cassette “Adrift” was recommended by Steve Smith (Time Out New York) for anyone “interested in long-form, slow-drifting electronic buzz, crackle and drift”. Caroline lives and works in Providence, RI.

MEM1

Mem1 seamlessly blends the sounds of cello and electronics to create a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. In their improvisation-based performances, Mark and Laura Cetilia’s use of custom hardware and software, in conjunction with a uniquely subtle approach to extended cello technique and realtime modular synthesis patching, results in the creation of a single voice rather than a duet between two individuals. Their music moves beyond melody, lyricism and traditional structural confines, revealing an organic evolution of sound that has been called “a perfect blend of harmony and cacophony” (Forced Exposure).

Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Mem1 has traveled extensively, performing at Issue Project Room, Roulette, REDCAT / Disney Hall, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Electronic Church (Berlin), the Laptopia Festival (Tel-Aviv), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and the Borealis Festival (Bergen). They have taken part in residencies at Harvestworks in New York, STEIM and Kunstenaarslogies in the Netherlands and USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway. In 2009, they created Visiting Hours, a site-specific installation for the Museums of Bat Yam (Israel); in Winter 2012, they travelled to London to create Visting Hours II, a site-specific installation for the Sonic Arts gallery SoundFjord. Collaborative works with media artists Liora Belford, Kadet Kuhne and Mark Cetilia have been screened and installed at the Institute for Contemporary Art (London), the Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen), the Sundance Film Festival, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). Throughout their career, they have collaborated with a variety of musicians / sound artists including the Penderecki String Quartet, Steve Roden, Jan Jelinek, Frank Bretschneider, and Stephen Vitiello. Together, Mem1 curates the experimental music series Ctrl+Alt+Repeat and the record label Estuary Ltd.

LUKE MOLDOF

Luke Moldof is an electronic musician based out of Providence, Rhode Island. He received a BM from the New England Conservatory of Music. His current work utilizes flexible real-time modular electronic systems that split the difference between composition and improvisation through complex feedback loops and varying degrees of controlled randomness. Often these systems are made to respond to or coincide with the outside influence of reel to reel tape loops, field recordings, and prepared guitar improvisations. Moldof has performed at venues across the United States and has collaborated with artists such as Greg Kelley, Joe Morris, Vic Rawlings, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Howard Stelzer, CF, and Stephen Drury’s Callithumpian Consort. He is a member of the experimental electronic duo, Perispirit alongside Ricardo Donoso, as well as the deceased power electronic duo Craniopagus, with Jesse Ward. He has released recordings on Hospital Productions, Digitalis Industries, Ecstatic Peace, Ekhein, and his own most likely defunct Razors and Medicine imprint, amongst others.

GEOFF MULLEN

Using found sounds, tape, feedback, prepared string instruments, field recordings, and hybrid analog / digital systems, Geoff Mullen combines improvisation, post-industrial ambient music, and site-specific sound-installation. As a solo artist, he has toured throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, and is a frequent collaborator with percussionist / composer Eli Keszler. Since 2008, he has worked alongside Keith Fullerton Whitman at Mimaroglu Music Sales, and he is the founder of Rare Youth – an independent record label dedicated to the support of local experimental music.

KEITH FULLERTON WHITMAN

Keith Fullerton Whitman is a musician based in Cambridge, MA, USA. His current work is split into two avenues ::

1). “Live Electronic Music” ; largely improvised and/or performed in loose, through-composed or “Automatic” frameworks on a scalable array of hardware modular synthesis equipment.

2). “Studio Music” ; largely concerned with transformation of Acoustic & Electronic materials via Musique Concrète techniques, but also with Systems-Music.

He has been active since the mid-1990’s, first as a performer of real-time computer music (as “Hrvatski”), then computer-processed instrumental music (i.e. the “Playthroughs” system), and now a variety of hardware-based synthesis & process-oriented musics (“Generator”, “Occlusion” etc.) He has been known to playfully mix through-composed work with pure improvisation & “hands-off” algorithmic & generative systems.

Keith graduated from the Berklee College of Music with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Synthesis under the tutelage of Richard Boulanger in 1995. He has since lectured in Computer Music and the History of Electronic Music, as well as giving “Artist Talks” at Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In addition, to his own music, he is known for his realizations & performances of pieces by Dick Raaijmakers, and Conrad Schnitzler. He has also performed alongside Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine, and Terry Riley in improvisational settings as well as performing the work of Rhys Chatham & Phill Niblock in ensemble settings.