Two compositions will be performed: Future Travel – Extracts and Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones (Deviant Resonances).
This performance follows the new expanded reissue by Black Truffle Records of the composer’s 1981 classic record, Future Travel. Future Travel, a journey in sonic imagery. The future traveler, whose point of view we imagine, is a spirit being, representing the first awareness of a new form of consciousness to which humans have evolved after becoming aware of the unlikelihood of surviving the unstoppable momentum of the evolutionary course they had set earlier. Future Travel is also the first major composition created with a radical keyboard instrument, called Touché, which resulted from a 1979-1980 design collaboration with Donald Buchla. This performance will use a software-based successor, an instrument called Touché II.
Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones (Deviant Resonances) is in large measure, a piece about listening as performance. To materialize that idea, specific features that can be sensed and analyzed in electrical signals emanating from the brains of two active imaginative, listening performers are linked to procedures for generating an electronic sound tapestry. A third performer calibrates a computer system to best follow varying degrees of coherency among particular smooth waves found in the listening performers’ EEGs, which can be associated with various states of consciousness, and which they can learn to control. In addition, the system detects both individual and synchronous changes in the EEGs that are typically associated with how the listeners’ attention may be shifting among features in the sonic landscape. The analysis and synthesis system adapts and responds to these features in specific ways. The performers listen creatively, noting their abilities to influence the sounds. The computer-electronics performer also interacts with them musically. A pre-composed architecture provides an array of available sound elements and guides the performance in time from initial simplicity to growing complexity, as sounds elements are delineated through the counterpoint of listening. Then, after a period of improvisation, the system is eventually guided back to simplicity again.
An artists talk, “Experimental Music in Toronto, c. 1970-1980: an Anecdotal History” featuring David Rosenboom, Gayle Young, and Andrew Timar, moderated by Gordon Monahan, will take place on Sunday, August 4th, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM.
Acknowledgment: Initial outreach for an event at Electric Eclectics was submitted by Anastasia Chernysheva.