Mediamatic, DNK-Amsterdam and <>TAG hosted another we love concert in front of the Post CS. We were lucky again to have such nice weather and a great turn out. Thanks for the support!

JS Lach’s video piece

Byungjun Kwon

Jun’s set up using self-built piezo camera pen instrument and analog sound generators

Neuringer / Mazur / Espinoza trio

Diego Espinoza on drums / percs

Rafal Mazur on bass

Keir Neuringer on saxophone

Nanko on guitar and computer

(all photos taken by Eelco Borremans)

Text from our mailing list:
Byungjun Kwon
Byungjun (1971, Kr) started his musical career in early 90`s as a singer/songwriter and has released 7 albums ranging from alternative rock to minimal house. He creates music for records, sound tracks, fashion collections, contemporary dance, theater plays and interdisciplinary events. Recent works and performances have been presented in many international venues. Now he lives and works in Amsterdam.
http://byungjun.pe.kr/

The Sightings (US)
http://www.myspace.com/sightings

<>TAG presents touch #28: audio solidarity
touch is a creative music concert series curated by Keir Neuringer for <>TAG in The Hague. This special Amsterdam edition, at Mediamatic, is an expression of solidarity with STEIM, an organization that has been an important source of inspiration for <>TAG’s audio programming. We present three artists who have performed at previous touch concerts and we believe live up to the high standards of experimentation and musical creativity that STEIM stands for.

Nanko (Rotterdam) - guitarist and electronics manipulator, creator of heavily cut-up, beat-driven, melody-laden, post-dance song forms and improvisations. Two CD’s (’Nanko’ and ‘Stratonica’) out on the Laterax label.
www.myspace.com/nankomusic

JS Lach (Ghent/Mexico City) composer, sonic researcher, and keyboardist. His audio-visual performance installation Victoria’s Secret, composed as an homage to Robert Ashley, mixes current events with pre-selected texts and sets up the voice of the computes operating system (Victoria) as a musical oracle.

Mazur/Neuringer (Krakow/The Hague) - Rafal Mazur (acoustic bass guitar) is an astounding musician whose improvisation defies superlatives. He has maintained a duo with Keir Neuringer (saxophone), since Neuringer arrived in Europe in 1999.
www.myspace.com/mazurneuringerduo

The recent interest in analog synths and circuit bending is an obvious reaction to laptop music. But what good would all this be if it was just about nostalgic or gadgety interest and not reflected upon music and its innovation? It is really hard to deny the richness of analog synthesizers and the wonderful look of hacked toys spread out on the table, but the music created must go beyond Tudor or Subotnick whether it is pure to its method or a combination with today’s digital tech.
DIE SCHRAUBER came with an impressive spread of instruments consisting of circuit bent toys, hand-made synths, radios, toy turntable, guitar and a MacBook running Max/MSP. Each player had a distinctive array of sounds, mostly playing short bursts at a time. The performance started with great energy but quickly fell into a random sound triggering contest until they agreed upon a delicate structure half way in. Once they settled there everything became much more musically structured with each player paying more attention to the overall energy and density.
Ankersmit and Tricoli played a wonderful set constructed between improvised, composed and pre-recorded material. The sounds and drones they produced where extremely textural and like their super directional speaker that occasionally swirled around the room, their musical direction was very clear, very well executed and very seductive.

DIE SCHRAUBER (from left to right: Hans Tammen, Mario de Vega, Joker Nies)

Ankersmit / Tricoli duo

(photos taken by Frank Balde)

Text from our mailing list:
Vol.2 STEIM Concert presenting the forefront of today’s electronic music

STEIM has never been the cutting edge of technology. We have always been the cutting edge of musical use of technology. Examining available technology for musical merit and expression is a special technique that falls in-between multiple disciplines. In our next concert we present highly unique use of familiar and unfamiliar tools for creating exciting new music.

Valerio Tricoli (IT) - Revox, lights, electronics
Thomas Ankersmit (NL) - Serge analogue modular synthesizer, computer, alto saxophone

DIE SCHRAUBER
Hans Tammen (NYC) - Endangered Guitar, realtime live sound processing
Joker Nies (Cologne) - Omnichord, circuit bent instruments
Mario de Vega (Mexico City) - SPK ®, glitch sampling

Videos:
DIE SCHRAUBER http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=hansteg
Thomas Ankersmit http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x47s2p_thomas-ankersmit-nl_music

dj sniff was invited to the dBâle Festival in Switzerland.

Chikashi Miyama and Qgo sensor instrument

dj sniff

Die Schrauber trio

(Photos take by Vivian Wenli Lin)

dBâle electronic music festival basel - interfaces-instruments-installations
Every 2-3 years, the Electronic Studio Basel of the Hochschule für Musik organises an international festival presenting re-known artists from abroad as well as from the local electronic music scene.
At this year’s dBâle electronic music festival, the theme is interfaces-instruments-installations with the design of electronic instruments and installations taking centre stage.
The music industry in general is still very much focussed on traditional instruments such as keyboards and controller for the recording studios. Therefore, many artists resort to self-designed hardware and self-developped software to produce and change electronic music live on stage. At dBâle, should you see a computer mouse or a plastic keyboard in a performance then, in many cases, you will see it in a diverted form, dispossessed from its original functionality, broken up, with changed soldering inside, cables hanging out, re-contextualized and recycled (circuit bending).
The festival’s aim is to show what is possible once there are no set frames nor limits to artistic creativity and interpretation of electronic music and electronic sound installations

Mediamatic and DNK-Amsterdam hosted a party to show their support for STEIM in time that we might lose our funding to exist in future. The event took place in front of the Post CS building parking lot. It was a really nice experience to play and hear this kind of electronic music outdoors. One Man Nation and Richard Scott kicked off the evening with a wonderful improv duo of stuttering beats and grooves. dj sniff and Fedde ten Berge debuted their turntable duo with heavy drones and ultra slowed down 4 on floor rhythms. Tok Tek delivered a energetic and frantic live sampling set that brought the crowd to its peak and calling for more at the end of the set. All three performances where highly physical but also beat oriented, which showed another side of STEIM that is rarely recognized. Tok Tek said in his email “I would be working in a super market if it wasn’t for STEIM.” I can say the same for myself. I hope that kind of love STEIM gets is heard by the higher people.

Marc aka One Man Nation

Richard Scott with his Buchala Lighting Rod

Turntable duo by dj sniff and Fedde ten Berge

Tok Tek rocking the party

STEIM’s wonderful sound and light man, Kees van Zelst

DNK DJ Crew

(photos taken by Vivian Wenli Lin)

The most recent Local Stop concert at STEIM featured four very different sets of electronic, electro-acoustic, and acoustic music. Each act presented a unique-enough approach to live performance to maintain interest throughout a lengthy but rewarding concert.

Hans Koch, a saxophonist and clarinettist from Switzerland, opened the evening on bass clarinet with a series of improvised tableaux that were connected in a single arc. There is one approach among soloists (I often do it myself) whereby the whole performance is contained in a particularly intense and exhausting experience for both player and audience. Koch played effortlessly, moving deftly through various extremes of timbre, pitch, and technique. While ‘reductionist’ in nature, the performance contained a good deal of humor and seemed to clearly engage the non-specialists in the audience. What was especially fresh in this solo was the degree to which the enitre audience was made acutely aware of Koch’s breathing, with a connection established early on between the performer’s lung function, his instrument, and the public’s sense of timing.

Robert van Heumen and Audrey Chen followed. They have performed together in various combinations before in Amsterdam and Chen’s home city of Baltimore, but this was their first duo. Chen played ‘cello with more finesse than I have seen her do before. When I have seen her in the past she has employed the ‘cello and electronics mainly as drone instruments, with her often primal vocalizations leading the performance. Tonight her voice fed hungrily and playfully off her capricious ‘cello playing. Devoted to not holding back when she performs, it was a pleasure to see her working so hard to match van Heumen’s often brutal digital transformations of her sound. There were several moments of pure psychedelia as van Heumen allowed untransposed, ungranulated repetitions of Chen’s voice to come through—often considered dangerous territory in some circles but used here in good taste. Van Heumen tends to play forcefully and loudly, and tonight was no exception. However, I noted positively that his choices seemed to be more calculated and considered than usual, with less attention given to his joystick controller and more focus on subtle actions and longer-term transformations. I loved it when, halfway through the second of two extended pieces, he took Chen’s keening voice and filtered it in such a way that, for a moment, it seemed that George Martin, the revered Beatles producer, had entered the room.

Bonnie Jones and Andy Hayleck, from Baltimore, have been in residency at STEIM for a week, working on a project called ‘Behavior Bending’. They performed facing each other, at tables that seemed to be moved directly from some laboratory and were only missing a few soldering irons. They took a major risk by presenting a lengthy, unbroken chain of non-goal-oriented sounds comprised mainly of quiet feedback and filtered noise running through low-priced delay pedals with open circuits. Though it did not capture the attention of a handful of people, I felt rewarded by listening long enough to become aware that what I was hearing was a delicately and minimally managed environment, rather than a ‘piece’. I appreciated the risk, and the potential of the experiment Jones and Hayleck are working on.

Alessandro Bosetti closed the evening with a solo performance that focused on spoken language. Beginning with an exquisite, flawlessly executed short film in which the voice of a composer trying to explain how a piece of his may be played is layered with guitar flourishes closely corresponding to the cadences of his voice. The precise text of the composer’s convoluted speech was visible onscreen, so that the public was able to see what would be said and anticipate, often to humorous effect, the choices Bosetti had made for the guitar part. When Bosetti, a well-travelled Italian currently based in Baltimore, sat down to his computer and a charmingly archaic keyboard, he presented what appeared to be a semi-improvised conversation with his own voice, speaking fragments of sentences and stories that dissolved into the abstracted sound of human speech. It was odd to hear Bosetti’s sentences finished by the computer, again often to humorous effect. But as with all the performances this evening, it felt good to be audience to artists opening themselves up, exposing their craft, and taking risks.
(review by Keir Neuringer)

Hans Koch

Robert van Heumen and Audrey Chen

Bonnie Jone and Andy Hayleck

Alessandro Bosetti

(Photos take by Vivian Wenli Lin)

Text from our mailing list:
STEIM Local Stop Concert

This Local Stop edition features 4 musicians from the Baltimore Improv scene, a German reed player and one local laptop musician. They will fill the night with 2 duo and 2 solo performances, presenting various sides of the electro acoustic music pallet. From the conceptual, via analog and circuit bending to the acoustic and the purely digital. Alessandro Bosetti presenting his Mask Mirror, Bonnie Jones & Andy Hayleck performing live electronics as a combination of broken delay pedals and digital processing, Hans Koch presenting an acoustic set with the bassclarinet, and Audrey Chen on voice & cello live sampled by Robert van Heumen.

Review coming soon…

Sparks

Joel Ryan

(photos by Vivian Wenli Lin)

Text from our mailing list:
STEIM Concert:
Sparks - Peter Evans (US) - trumpet + Tom Blancarte (US) - bass
with Joel Ryan (NL) - computer

In a post-Tonic / post-Knitting Factory New York, there seems to be a new emerging scene of exciting improvised and experimental music. These younger musicians are virtuosic and versatile with their instruments, and remind us how this city has always bred amazing artists despite its hostile environment. If you listen to Evans’ music it’s hard not to be impressed by his playing. His duo with Blancarte is hyperactive and bursting with energy. They will be working in the STEIM studios for a couple of days with Joel Ryan, concluding in this special concert. It will be interesting to see how our own wizard of live processing will channel their energy and create another sound dimension.
Take a listen to their music: http://www.myspace.com/nycsparks

Jonathan Stern

Installation by Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum

Tao Sambolec and Bojan Fajfric

Tao’s installation

Bojan’s installation

Text from our mailing list:
Lecture by Jonathan Sterne, writer of The Audible Past and catalog launch of Dissecting The Ear featuring installations and talks by participating artists

Date: Thursday, April 24
Venue: STEIM, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Time: 20.30 hrs.
Entrance: FREE
Reservations and more information: knock@steim.nl or 020-6228690

Jonathan Sterne (US)
Jonathan Sterne writes about sound and music, communication technologies old and new, contemporary cultural studies, and a range of other matters. His work is characterized by a taste for archival esoterica, unusual combinations of objects or approaches, big intellectual and political questions, and a sense of humor. Current projects include a study of digital audio technologies; a history of decline, failure and obsolescence in 20th century media; a special issue of Social Epistemology entitled “After Social Construction” and an edited reader in sound studies. In addition to his scholarship, Prof. Sterne is also interested in more public-directed intellectual work: since 1994, he has been an editor of Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (http://badsubjects.org), the longest-running publication on the internet.
http://sterneworks.org/

Topic of Lecture;
“Today, more recordings exist in MP3 form than in any other form in the world. What difference does it make? Arguments about sound quality abound in scholarship and the popular press, but much less has been said about the format as itself a cultural phenomenon. This is not entirely accidental, as scholars are more often in the habit of conceiving of technology in terms of hardware. In this paper, I consider the historical significance of format as a defining feature of recent audio media history, and argue that the history of the MP3 reveals otherwise hidden dimensions of 20th century audio history.”

Selected publications:
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
“Bourdieu, Technique and Technology,” Cultural Studies 17:3/4 (May/July 2003): 367-389.
“A Machine to Hear for Them: On the Very Possibility of Sound’s Reproduction.” Cultural Studies 15:2 (Spring 2001): 259-294.
“Television Under Construction: American Television and the Problem of Distribution 1926-1962.” Media, Culture and Society 21:3 (July 1999): 503-530.
“Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space.” Ethnomusicology 41:1 (Winter 1997): 22-50.
“The Burden of Culture.” In The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Bérubé, 80-102. Malden: Basil Blackwell, 2004.
“The Internet Race Goes to Class.” In Race In Cyberspace, eds. Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman, 191-212. New York: Routledge, 2000.
“Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies vs. The Millennium.” In Doing Internet Research, ed. Steve Jones, 257-288. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998.

Dissecting The Ear (Concept by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec and Bojan Fajfric)
“While living in a predominantly visual/written culture, there are certain moments in which auditory communication becomes crucial. It is, on the one hand, much faster than the process of written communication, while on the other hand lends itself largely to interpretation, since it is bound to vanish in time if not recorded. Dissecting The Ear is a group exhibition investigating and exploiting the ambiguities of intentional listening and hearing in different cultural contexts. (text taken from catalogue introduction)

David Behrman

David and Joel

(photos by Vivian Wenli Lin)

Text from our mailing list;
Presentation by electronic / computer / interactive music pioneer David Behrman and conversation with Joel Ryan

Date: Wednesday, April 23
Venue: STEIM, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Time: 20.30 hrs.
Entrance: FREE
Reservations and more information: knock@steim.nl or 020-6228690

David Behrman (US)
David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions for performance in concerts. Most of his pieces feature flexible structures and the use of technology in personal ways; the compositions usually rely on interactive real-time relationships with imaginative performers.

Unforeseen Events, Refractive Light, My Dear Siegfried… and Quick Silver are among Behrman’s recent works for soloists and small ensembles. Recordings of his works are published by Lovely Music, XI, Alga Marghen and Classic Masters. XI has recently released a double CD set entitled “My Dear Siegfried.”

Behrman’s sound and multimedia installations have been exhibited at the Parochialkirche in Berlin, Stanford University’s LaSuen Gallery, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Hudson River Museum, The New York Hall of Science, the DeCordova Museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art, Ars Electronica in Linz and La Villette Science and Technology Museum in Paris, and other spaces. Some of these installations have been collaborative projects with George Lewis, Paul Demarinis, and Robert Watts.

Together with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, Behrman founded the Sonic Arts Union in 1966. Sonic Arts performed extensively in North America and Europe from 1966 until 1976.

Working at Columbia Records in the late 1960s, he produced the “Music of Our Time” series of new music recordings for Columbia Masterworks, which presented works by Cage, Oliveros, Lucier, Reich, Riley, Pousseur and other influential composers.

Behrman toured as composer/performer with the Cunningham Dance Company in the early Seventies and again from time to time in more recent years. In the Sixties and Seventies he assisted John Cage with several projects. Merce Cunningham commissioned him to compose music for several repertory dances, including “Pictures” in 1984.

He was co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in 1975-1980 and has taught also at Cal Arts, Rutgers, and the Technical University in Berlin. He has been a member of the Avery Graduate Arts Program faculty at Bard College since 1998.

Behrman has received grants from the NEA, NYSCA, and NYFA, and residencies from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the DAAD (Berlin). From the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts he received two grants, one for music in 1995 and the John Cage Award in 2004. (Bio taken from http://www.lovely.com/bios/behrman.html)

Laptop musicians used to be cool. Now they’re the norm. Adding physical controllers to computers was one way (and the STEIM way) of dealing with this new instrument. The three performers that performed at this show presented us with other ways to engage the audience.
Riis prepared the speaker with two different kind of paper, exciting them from his Max program and occasionally using an accelerometer interface to move the sounds around. Physicality was manifested in the output rather than the input.
Harris has been working with satellite data and the concept of navigation in different forms of sound work. She had created mobile devices (in collaboration with STEIM) that sonify GPS data which she gave to the audience members to walk around outside during the performance. Because the performance space did not have good reception from the satellites Harris combined prerecorded sounds generated by the same algorithm with the live stream.
Friedl was the only one that played the laptop “conventionally.” What made his performance stand out was his concentration towards the most delicate sounds and their balance.

Jakob Riis

Yolande’s satellite data sonification machines

Heribert Friedl

Text from our mailing list:
STEIM Residency Concert:

Jakob Riis (DK) - Paper-Prepared Four Channel Speakers

Heribert Friedl (AT) - Non Visual Objects

Yolande Harris (NL) - Sun Running: live satellite data and environmental sound recordings

Date: Wednesday, April 2
Venue: STEIM, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Time: 20.30 hrs.
Entrance: 5 euros
Reservations and more information: knock@steim.nl or 020-6228690

Physicality in electronic music has always been one of the central themes at STEIM, but not every musician takes a gestural or bodily approach to performing their music. Physicality of the sound, the space and the location are equally important, especially for laptop musicians and sound artists.
For our next concert we have invited three typically “non-gestural” artists to work in our studios and prepare for this performance. We wanted to create a critical platform for laptop musicians as well where new forms of presentation and performances can be explored. For each of these invited artists, their instrument extends beyond the actual device that they are touching by incorporating the speaker, field recordings and navigational data as essential elements of the performance. We hope to see you at our next event to witness these extended techniques in live laptop music.

Text from our mailing list:

STEIM presents in the Local Stop series:

Ivo Bol & Amstel Quartet Light: 5 compositions
Robert van Heumen: Fury (solo)
Marko Ciciliani: 81 matters in elemental order (solo)

Date: Wednesday, March 26
Venue: STEIM, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Time: 20.30 hrs.
Entrance: 5 euros
Reservations and more information: knock@steim.nl or 020-6228690

This concert will be truly a Local Stop, in line with the original intention: presenting work of local musicians and composers. Ivo Bol has worked with STEIM technology for a number of years, creating compositions on the devide between live electronics and written work. At this Local Stop he will perform 5 short compositions with the Amstel Quartet Light (with 3 saxophones only due to illness of one of the players). Marko Ciciliani’s compositions, also involving live electronics as well as notated material, have often been partly conceived in the STEIM studio’s. He will present a set of live electronics using his no-input mixer, to celebrate the release of his CD 81 matters in elemental order on Evil Rabbit Records. Robert van Heumen has been involved in STEIM since 2001, and uses STEIM’s LiSa software as his main instrument. He will perform a live rendition of Fury, his semi-improvised composition that has been released on CD in January 2008 on Creative Sources Recordings.