Quarantine Sessions #17

Guests:
Jonathan Impett, trumpet and live electronics (Norwich, UK)
Alkimiya Transfer (Barbara Nerness and Stephanie Sherriff), live electronics (San Francisco, CA)
 

Performers:
Constantin Basica (Palo Alto, CA)
Chris Chafe (Woodside, CA)
Henrik von Coler (Berlin, DE)
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano (San Carlos, CA)
Juan Parra (Ghent, BE)
Klaus Scheuermann (Berlin, DE) 

The 'Quarantine Sessions' are realized using free and open source technologies, which can be adopted by anyone: 
JackTrip (audio)
Jitsi (video)

OBS (streaming)

Constantin Basica is a Romanian composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area (CA), whose current work focuses on symbiotic interrelations between music, video, and performers. His pieces have been featured at festivals and conferences such as MATA Festival (New York, NY), the International Festival for Video art and Visual Music (Mexico City, MX), Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM), the International Week for New Music and the InnerSound International Festival for New Arts (Bucharest, RO), next_generation Festival at ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), the 2016 Sound and Music Computing Conference (Hamburg, DE), and Aveiro_Síntese International Festival of Electroacoustic Music (Aveiro, PT). He received the ICMA Award for Best Submission from Europe at the 2017 ICMC in Shanghai (CN). Constantin earned a DMA in Composition at Stanford University (CA) under the guidance of Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, Brian Ferneyhough, Mark Applebaum, and Erik Ulman. He holds an MA degree in Multimedia Composition from the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre (DE) and two BA degrees in Composition and Conducting from the National University of Music Bucharest (RO). Currently, Constantin is a postdoctoral scholar and the concert coordinator at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA's SoundWIRE project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software including jacktrip and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in dozens of countries and sometimes at novel venues. A simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works are available from Centaur Records and various online media. Gallery and museum music installations are into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Brain Stethoscope project, PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.

Henrik von Coler is a musician and researcher in the field of electronic and electroacoustic music. He is currently working at Audio Communication Group, TU Berlin, where he is director of the Electronic Music Studio. In his compositions and performances he is focusing on the us of low-tech elements in state-of-the-art technical systems, combining vintage sound generation and erroneous systems with sound field synthesis systems. He is founder of the Electronic Orchestra Charlottenburg, a group of 10 musicians performing live electronic music with modular synthesizers and other instruments on large loudspeaker setups.

Jonathan Impett is Director of Research at the Orpheus Institute and Associate Professor at Middlesex University (London, UK). Jonathan’s professional and research activities cover many aspects of contemporary musical practice, as trumpet player, composer and theorist. He also leads the research cluster “Music, Thought and Technology” at the Orpheus Institute. His research is concerned with the discourses and practices of contemporary musical creativity, particularly the nature of the contemporary technologically-situated musical artefact. In the field of historical performance, he is a long-standing member of both The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. He is also a member of the experimental chamber ensemble Apartment House. As a soloist he has given premieres of works by composers including Scelsi, Berio, Harvey and Finnissy. He directed the live electronic chamber ensemble Metanoia, and was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica for his development of the metatrupet. His compositions have been broadcast throughout Europe. As an improviser he has played with musicians as divers as Paul Dunmall and Amit Chaudhuri. Work in the space between composition and improvisation has led to continuous research in the areas of interactive systems and interfaces. The current ‘active sound space’ project uses ALife populations of wave models to create interactive works combining aspects of composition and sound art. A monograph on the music of Luigi Nono has recently been published by Routledge, and Jonathan is currently working on a project considering the nature of the contemporary musical object, ‘The work without content’.

 

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano enjoys imagining and building things, fixing them when they don't work, and improving them even if they seem to work just fine. The scope of the word "things" is very wide, and includes computer hardware and software, controllers, music composition, performance and sound. His music blurs the line between technology and art, and is as much about form and sound processing, synthesis and spatialization, as about algorithms and custom software he writes for each piece. He has been working in multichannel sound and diffusion techniques for a long time, and can hack Linux for a living. At CCRMA, Stanford University since 1993, he combines his backgrounds in music (piano and composition), electronic engineering and programming with his love of teaching and music composition and performance. He discovered the intimate workings of sound while building his own analog synthesizers a very very long time ago, and even after more than 30 years, "El Dinosaurio" is still being used in live performances. He was the Edgar Varese Guest Professor at TU Berlin during the Summer of 2008. In 2014 he received the Marsh O'Neill Award For Exceptional and Enduring Support of Stanford University's Research Enterprise.

Barbara Nerness is many things, but foremost an artist, researcher, and composer. Currently, she is working toward a PhD at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. She holds a Masters in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford and a BA in Mathematics from UC Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of neuroscience, improvisation, and interface design. Recent performances and exhibitions have taken place at BAM in NY, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and C4NM in San Francisco, among many others.

 

Juan Parra Cancino studied Composition at the Catholic University of Chile and Sonology at The Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL), where he obtained his Masters degree with focus on composition and performance of electronic music. In 2014, Juan obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University with his thesis “Multiple Paths: Towards a Performance practice in Computer Music”. His compositions have been performed in Europe, Japan, North and South America in festivals such as ICMC, “Sonorities”, “Synthese”, and “November Music”, among many others. His acousmatic piece Serenata a Bruno obtained a special mention at the Bourges electroacoustic music competition of 2003 and in 2004, his piece Tellura was awarded with the residence prize of the same competition. Founder of The Electronic Hammer, a Computer and Percussion trio and Wiregriot, (voice & electronics), he collaborates regularly with Ensemble KLANG (NL) and Hermes (BE), among many others. His work in the field of live electronic music has made him recipient of numerous grants such as NFPK, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the International Music Council. Since 2009 Parra is a fellow researcher at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, BE), focused on performance practice in Computer Music. 

 

Trummerschlunk (audiolith, lemme records, hold your ground)

Trummerschlunk performs slow techno that immerses into a modular synthesizer-driven soundscape and invites to a sci-fi inspired journey toward big questions and amorphous feelings. In real life, Klaus Scheuermann is a Berlin based mix- and mastering engineer with allmost 20 years of experience in jazz and electronic music. 

Stephanie Sherriff is an interdisciplinary artist and performer currently based in San Francisco, California. Her work with sound, video, and plants is ephemeral in nature and culminates as time-based installations and performances that deconstruct familiar fragments of daily life through experimental processes. She received a BA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2019. Her work has been shown at numerous cultural centers, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, the Sfendoni Theater in Athens, Greece, and a range of art and music spaces within California including Gray Area, The Lab, Artists Television Access, and the Center for New Music.