Concert Programme

Alkimiya Transfer (Barbara Nerness and Stephanie Sherriff): Code 6: Responding from a Long Distance engages with issues of injustice within the American prison system through the voices of contemporary and historical Black civil rights activists. Their voices frame inequalities outlined in the poem, Distributive Justice, by Kenneth Reams, who has been living in solitary confinement on death row for 28 years for a crime he did not commit. Field recordings from protests against the murder of George Floyd and live interventions on voice, guitar, and percussion, swell over time, while real-time visuals composed of video feedback, security cameras, and video footage from spy cameras set the scene.

Mara Helmuth & Esther Lamneck: Sound Dunes, for tárogató and fixed media, is the third collaboration composed by both Mara Helmuth (computer music) and Esther Lamneck (tárogató). It was inspired by exploration of the tárogató sound world, and its digital transformations. The piece has resonances with the natural environment of a sand dune, with its curving contours and granular texture. Premiered at the Diffrazione Multimedia Festival 2019 in Florence, Italy in stereo, this new immersive version is being created for the Sonic Laboratory which allows the sound dune gestures in the electronic part to move around and up and down in the space.

David Z Durant & Esther Lamneck: The Crystalline, Radiant Sky for tárogató and audio file (2015) is composed using the sounds of the tárogató as played by Esther Lamneck. The audio file was created using recordings of Lamneck. She also composed the live tárogató part. The title refers to the past as represented by a crystal. Radiant represents the present and the live tárogató. The sky represents the audience. The title is from Fitzgerald’s first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” where the narrator says about the protagonist: He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

Michele Cheng & Simona Fitcal: Speed Dating (a three-screen video work in 3rd order ambisonics) talks about Asian American self-image and online dating culture. The fictional narratives cover topics such as colonization, immigration, multiraciality, and sexuality based on real stories, in-person interviews, and sources including dating websites’ slogans, Asian Bodies That Proudly Defy An Archetype from HuffPost, and Noёl Alumit’s Rice Room: Scenes From a Bar. While many works address how society perceives Asian Americans, there are not as many works on how Asian Americans view themselves. I am hoping to decode stereotypes in depth and shine light on disregarded issues through the intimate and introspective perspectives of modern young Asian Americans.

Sarmen Almond: Infiltrados tracks the sounds emanating from the performer and his immanent communication between them and the vibrations that surround them. Voices that manifest or hide personalities, as well as their relationship between them and with physical and imaginary spaces. Almond makes use of free improvisation resources, extended vocal techniques, programming and bodywork. The vocal performance is an interdisciplinary sound proposal, where the voice is the motive, seed and origin of the composition and its development, based on various resources as a means of transmitting ideas.

Douglas McCausland: Written in 2019 (rev. 2021), ISOLATE is a frenetic and chaotic piece composed for live electronics performer which, with the assistance of machine-learning processes, leverages the voice, hands, and gestures of the performer with a bespoke performance system to afford a high-degree of control over an array of digital synthesis engines and spatial controls. Musically, this piece explores a constantly shifting and fragmenting web of sonic materials which blur and shift in and out of focus. The result is a work which explores extreme sonic juxtapositions, which plays with complex nested gestural relationships, and which inhabits both periods of near stasis and the extreme density.