Quarantine Sessions #2

A Distributed Electroacoustic Network Improvisation

Sat Apr 4 @2pm PDT
Livestream/recording: https://youtu.be/E3TcwZXAwJw

 

The Coronavirus Crisis has changed our lives, and we are in the midst of a long period without concerts as we knew them. In addition to the problem of large audiences, the regulations also make it 'virtually' impossible for musicians to get together, to rehearse or perform. However, many technologies and solutions are already available, helping us to find new ways of collaborating and transporting our work to audiences. 
 

In the past two weeks we have been programming, testing and rehearsing in an online environment between California, which is facing a 'shelter-in-place' situation, Berlin (DE) with strict 'Kontakt- und Ausgangsbeschränkungen', and Ghent (BE). We are now announcing our first public concert, connecting six musicians from these locations and broadcasting the result as a Youtube live stream with audio and video feeds from each site. 

 

The 'Quarantine Sessions' are realized using free and open source technologies, which can be easily adopted by anyone: 

JackTrip (audio) https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/jacktrip/

Jitsi (video) https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/

OBS (streaming) https://obsproject.com

 

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)

 

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.

 

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.

 

Juan Parra Cancino (b. Chile, 1979) 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.