Thursday
February 7, 2013 @ Vox Populi Gallery Aux at
Vox Populi Gallery, 319 N. 11th St.,
3rd Floor, Philadelphia,
PA, $7-10, 8:00pm. (map)
Jeff
Carey (Baltimore)
Keroaän
(Philly)
AP Vague
(Philly)
A night
of sensory delights, as three computer music
acts complement their audio with live
visuals. Baltimorean
Jeff
Carey's music is hardcore digital
instrumental music. It is computer based
synthesis, noise, and improvisation combined
with a no-safety-net aspect of gestural control
that makes his music totally physical and
visceral. Local favorites Keroaän
absent the stage of humans, allowing their
laptop-based artificial intelligence system to
generate sweeping glissandi, chaotic noise,
terrifying silences, lasers, and flashing
lights. You might find yourself
giddy. Finally, relative newcomer AP Vague brings
a (mildly) gentler touch to glitchy computer
music and abstract video.
"He's
acting on raw instinct here - he refuses the
clinical approach to programming software or
composing music, and strives to throw himself
bodily at his machines, replacing all
mechanical moving parts with human flesh,
blood, and bone. In pursuit of this
all-organic goal, virtually everything else is
jettisoned, starting with recognisable notes
or melody." -- Ed Pinsent, Sound Projector on
"Impulse"
In
2002, Jeff Carey co-founded the Amsterdam
based N-Collective with fellow musicians to
explore the intersections of contemporary,
electronic, and improvised music at their
outer limits. His ensembles SKIF++, USA/USB,
and Office-R(6) garnered critical acclaim for
their approach to structured improvisation and
integration of acoustic and digital elements.
Nearly a decade later, Carey's first solo CD
"Impulse" was released dubbed "fragmentary
noise", "speaker damaging", and
"breathtaking." His new ten track CD
"interrupt, decay" continues to explore the
dynamism in physically controlled sound
production while expanding his palette of
expression.
Carey
holds a Bachelors of Science in Audio
Technology from American University (1994) and
studied computer music at the Instituut voor
Sonologie at the Koninklijk Conservatorium of
Den Haag, The Netherlands (2002) and has been
recognized twice by the Maryland State Arts
Council with an Individual Artist Award in
Non-Classical Music Composition.
Keroaän
http://ianmfraser.wordpress.com/keroaan/
KEROAÄN is a musical artificial
intelligence developed by Ian M Fraser and
Reed Evan Rosenberg that performs by
implementing various non-standard
synthesis techniques. The synthesis is
played in real time by the KEROAÄN
program. Pushing and pulling between
sections of hard noise, singing
glissandos, jagged melodic scribble and
other sonic curiosities, the program
liberates the computer from its position
as a mere tool of hyper-productivity and
transports the machine into a state of
creative and performative being. Operatic
in scope, a live diffusion of KEROAÄN
features lasers, strobe lighting, and fog
synched to both audible and structural
qualities of the music as an infinitely
morphing chorus of digital voices croon,
cry, scream and everything in between. AP
Vague
Kansas
native and Rutgers MFA alum A. P. Vague
uses handmade electronics and custom
software to form a musical language free
from traditional instrumentation. Often
paired with contemporary dance and
nonobjective videos, Vague uses gallery
spaces as points of departure into an
alien aural landscape, addressing loss and
placelessness with digital sound.