Jeremy Keenan: Sound Artist
Jeremy Keenan`s practice has involved the independent production of music in both live and recorded contexts. His works have utilised methods of live sampling, instrumental electronics, fixed media and interactive performance. Having performed at various festivals and venues in his native California, as well more recently in various locations around the UK, his music and sonic art have seen a variety of exposure.
Some of the various venues, festivals and collaborations he has been involved with as a sound artist and performer include the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the 2006 Maker Fair (both in collaboration with Visual Artist Michael Carter), The Rich Mix Cultural Foundation (as a part of Kaffe Matthews` Sonic Bed London project), Sonic Arts Network Festival 2007 (as a part of live electronics improvisation ensemble From Honey to Ashes), The Shunt Lounge (in collaboration with artist and musician Olly Farshi, and Laban choreographer Helene Cooper as well as with From Honey To Ashes), the 2007 Shoreditch Festival as part of Matt Lewis` Mr. Shordy project, and the 2007 Foldback Festival, The Green Room in Manchester (in collaboration with performance artist Maya Zbib), the 2008 Netaudio as well as many others.
His current line of exploration involves the development of new strategies in the fields of live electronics performance, studio practice, and sound-enabled interactivity.
He is a current Mphil/Phd candidate at Goldsmiths College, London. He is of no (known) relation to the anthropologist of the same name.
For this Local Stop, he will be using a camera to trigger transformations of the sounds being recorded of various objects.
http://www.ollyandjeremy.com/jeremy/Jeremy_David_Keenan/Main.html
Earth Tones – Electronic Zones Revisited
An African Udu drum traditionally played by Nigerian women for ritual uses will be used to express acoustic and electronic sound sources and their transformations thru analog and digital signal processing. EarthTones – Electronic Zones will reveal another phase of real and imaginary potential through cycles of sonic enhancement.
Inspired by global traditions and spontaneous music, Tina Blaine (BEAN) has built custom electronic midi devices and studied acoustic percussion from Africa to Asia and beyond. She has written music for NPR, video games, TV and documentary soundtracks, and has performed/recorded with Brian Eno, Mickey Hart, Haunted by Waters, D`CüCKOO, RhythMix, Pandemonaeon, University of Pittsburgh Gamelan, Maze Daiko and others lured by the muse. Bean currently works as a curator for the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA and is an artistic inspirator with the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam. As an educator, Blaine developed a variety of interactive media experiences while teaching at Carnegie Mellon University`s Entertainment Technology Center and previously worked as a "musical interactivist" at Interval Research in Palo Alto. Her collaborative work with students and colleagues has resulted in museum exhibits at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Zeum in San Francisco, Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Laboral in Gijon, Spain and Give Kids the World Resort in Orlando, Florida. Blaine co-founded the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (NIME.org) in 2001 and looks forward to discovering each year`s whimsical inventions.
http://www.jamodrum.net/
Stranger - an electronic composition
Stranger is conceived as an electronic composition as well as a research in the composition process. It started with basic questions of life: How do we control our lives? Can we control our lives? Does anything matter? What really is empathy? What does it mean to be human? What can it mean to know another person, to understand another life? Is it possible to break free from the bonds of the familiar, from existing concepts and beliefs?
Similar questions are applied to the composition process in the choise of sounds and the structure of composition itself: How do we choose sounds and processes out of many? Can that process be arbitrary, even random, or should every sound and every process be weighted again and again until we know it’s right? What does that mean, ‘it is right’? What is it to create a piece of music? Should the judgement of others be considered in making a composition? Is it even possible to create a unique piece of music? Does it matter whether is it unique or not?
The obvious metaphor: a composition as a life.
Both the composition and the sounds used are structured using the family tree concept. The axioms (or roots) for the tree will be source material taken from the already much sampled film Bladerunner. Audio processes will be defined as basic operations on the axioms, performed in a number of iterations as to grow the family tree, as to create a collection of sounds. Finally the tree itself will structure the composition and dictate the order of the sounds by taking vertical cross-sections in the tree. During the compositionprocess various degrees of randomness and concious selection by the composer were used, as well as sometimes just rigidly following of the tree structure.
Stranger is inspired by Albert Camus` L’Étranger and Philip K. Dick`s Do androids dream of electric sheep. And as always by L.E.J. Brouwer.
A blog is kept about the composition process: Sound clips at http://hardhatarea.com/sounds.php. http://hardhatarea.com/stranger/. Sound clips at http://hardhatarea.com/sounds.php.
Thanks to EMS (Stockholm), Culturelab (Newcastle) and STEIM for offering residencies to develop Stranger (then called Vreemdeling).
The multi-channel version of Stranger was premiered at Culturelab on June 13 2008 using the Resound system.
Mem1 (Laura + Mark Cetilia) seamlessly blends the sounds of cello and electronics to create a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. Their improvisational performances move beyond melody, lyricism, and traditional structural confines, resulting in organically revealed narrative. Mem1 has performed at Roulette, REDCAT (Disney Hall), the Orange County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and numerous venues throughout Southern California and the East Coast. In 2007, they were awarded an artist residency at Harvestworks in New York for the creation of a new surround sound piece, Sonodendron. In Summer 2007, they traveled to Tel-Aviv to create a visual component for this work with video artist Liora Belford. Throughout the next year, they will travel throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East to take part in residencies at STEIM (NL), Kunstenaarslogies (NL) and USF Verftet (Norway), and to perform and create a sound installation for the Museums of Bat Yam (Israel). Their third album, entitled Mem1 +1, consists of collaborations between Mem1 and artists such as Steve Roden, Jan Jelenik, and Frank Bretschneider. It will be released this fall by Interval Recordings.
www.mem1.com/