Babil-on (2013) by Greg Beller
Babil-on is a performance of augmented musical theater which describes metaphorically the fate of the speech. Of a birth marked by the enjoyment of the phonation and by the purity of the vowel, the babbling gets excited in hiccup, then in crisis to laugh. An accident occurs then: the irruption of a consonant. By contagion, the voice complicates little by little in the sketch of a pre-language. Then, the semantic sense bursts as a new disruptive phenomenon. It drives the speech in a continuous stream of linguistic actions, which will eventually impoverish the vocal material by exhaustion. It is the fall of Babylon. The word is exhausted only a pure singing will allow us a return in the original breath. Watch Babil-on
Vex (2013) by Chris Vik and Brad Hammond
Vex is broken geometry. You can hear it screech and groan as it undulates under pressure, until the moment it snaps and explodes into a furious and broken, but perfectly synchronised dance of both sound and form. A behavioral computation model directs Vex’s geometric movements, which in turn conducts its granular soundtrack. Vex never repeats itself. Its visual and sonic contours tightly follow a seemingly natural pattern of movement, randomly disrupted by the broken algorithms that drive it. Vex takes you on a journey between the ambient and the violent. Listen to Cybogensis
OnNextCount (2015) by Christopher Anderson
OnNextCount uses a generative music system to directly relate to compositional gestures of the author playing Trombone in the frame of structured improvisation. The piece is exploring alternative ways to engage in electronic music performance and representation. Both the improvisatorial and generative elements used within this performance are in dialogue with trying to better understand a thematic aspect of human and machine autonomy, and the aesthetics of disruption and the ephemeral. Algorithmic is performed using Ableton Live software. However, unlike many electronic music performances that also use this software to play pre-recorded material, this piece uses an embedded Max for Live system to generated new musical material and signal-processed gestures. This is also an attempt to move away from using fixed-media in live electronic music by allowing a computationally assistive system to disrupt the performer’s autonomy by also generating new MIDI melodies and rhythms based on a corpus of the composer’s own musical ideas. Watch Transom
Transmissions [v.2] (2014) by UVB 76 a.k.a Gaëtan Bizien and Tioma Tchoulanov
Transmissions [v.2] is an audiovisual performance that explores the place of electronic interfaces in our society. Many broadcast media are explored, remixed, repurposed, disrupted: television, computer screens, monitors, GPS, drones, satellite views... The overall design integrates the visual and noise disturbances from these technologies in order to produce a visual experience were the degenerative alterations are fully part of the creative process. These aesthetic choices allow the audience to consider unpredictable and disruptive elements as tools of expression evoking dystopia. Examples of previous work teaser by UVB 76
Curated by Philippe Pasquier, Metacreation Lab, Canada
