---

UEA STUDIOS

The electroacoustic music studios of the University of East Anglia (in Norwich, UK) have maintained a position with regard to music’s engagement with technology out of all proportion to their scale. From the early 1970s the studios promoted multi-loudspeaker sound diffusion for the performance of electroacoustic music, initiating the longest continuously-running concert series of such music (still running today as the Sonic Arts series). During the 1980s the then studio director Denis Smalley introduced the notion of ‘spectromorphology’ which was to provide critical and descriptive tools for the genre. In the 1990s under new director Simon Waters the studios were quick to adopt new approaches involving both high-tech (real-time and networked performance) and low-tech (hardware hacking) solutions to musical problems. The introduction in 2009 of a new undergraduate programme in Music and Technology has brought the combination of experiment and rigour which characterised the studio’s research programmes to a much wider audience of potential students.
 
Associates and alumni of the UEA studio have a history of association with Ars Electronica, most notably Denis Smalley’s Golden Nica in 1988 (for Clarinet Threads) and Jonathan Impett’s prize for Mirror-Rite, a work for metatrumpet, in 1994.
 
The programme for the Sonic Intermedia concert includes new work for cello and electronics by current studio director Simon Waters (featuring Anton Lukoszevieze, cellist and director of new music ensemble Apartment House) and works by current Phd students as well as alumni.
 

---

Programm

Die Augenblicke in seinen Händen / Dichte4Dichtl

Rotary/lateral (Rondo)


Wayang Listrik

 Block Groove

Momentum

---

die Augenblicke in seinen Händen / Dichte4Dichtl
audiovisuelle Kompositionen
Se-Lien Chuang

Die  Komponistin und Medienkünstlerin Se-Lien Chuang lädt zur Präsentation ihrer aktuellen Kunstprojekte die Augenblicke in seinen Händen und Dichte4Dichtl im Rahmen der Konzertreihe Sonic Intermedia im DeepSpace des AEC. Die beiden audiovisuellen Arbeiten sind mit Unterstützung der Augenabteilung des AKH Linz entstanden.

Die Augenblicke in seinen Händen (2010) von Se-Lien Chuang

Die Lichter rinnen
rinnen wie von weit,
als flüsterten sie in die Tiefe ferner Teich’;
sie rinnen mit vertrautem Geist.

Aus all dem dunklen Nichts
winkt das rote Ich,
das seine Spuren hinterlässt
in solch sanftem Winkelrest.

Wir alle rinnen,
die Zeit verronnen,
als rönne sie in die Herzen fernen Geists.
Es ist in allen, in unserem Fallen ...
Die Augenblicke zerfallen
im unendlichen Valet.

Doch ist da einer,
der vertraute ferne Geist,
welcher die Augenblicke meiner
in seinen Händen hält.

Se-Lien Chuang



ist Komponistin, Pianistin und Medienkünstlerin, 1965 in Taiwan geb., lebt seit 1991 in Österreich.   

Studien in Komposition KUG/Graz 2005 (B. Furrer), in Musik- und Medientechnologie ABPU/Linz 1999 (A. Roidinger, K. Essl), in Klavierpädagogik MHS/Graz 1996 (W. Groppenberger), Lehrgang für Elektroakustische Musik MHS/Wien 1996 (T. Ungvary, W. Musil). Zahlreiche nationale/internationale Aufführungen von Kompositionen und Musikprojekten in Europa, Asien, Russland, Kanada, Süd- und Nordamerika in den Bereichen: Computermusik, audiovisuelle Interaktivität, elektronische Musik, Ausstellungen bildender Kunst und virtueller Realitäten, zeitgenössische Musik, algorithmische Komposition, zeitgenössisches Instrumentaltheater, Tanzperformance, Kunst-Video-Musik. Institutionelle Produktions- und Forschungsaufenthalte in Österreich, England, Nordirland, Deutschland, Frankreich und Japan. Workshops, Gastvorträge und Lehrauftrag in Österreich, Deutschland, USA, Japan, Süd-Korea, Taiwan. Publikationen in Deutsch, English und Japanisch.
1996 war Se-Lien Chuang Gastkomponistin der UEA Studios in Norwich.
Gemeinsam mit Gerfried Stocker, künstlerischer Leiter des AEC, und dem Komponisten Andreas Weixler begründet sie Sonic Intermedia.

http://avant.mur.at/chuang

Rotary/lateral (Rondo)
realtime audio processing for cello and wine glasses
Simon Waters

Rotary/lateral sets out to investigate a series of musical issues which seem pertinent to the composer in 2010. The first of these is how one makes a performance – the shifting balance between the composer’s issuing of an instruction set (in notation or in other coded forms) and trusting the musicianliness of the performers engaged in each specific performance characterises much of Waters’s post-acousmatic work. Here there are numerous ‘states’ of determination from relatively fixed to relatively improvised. But even the most improvised material is consistent in its requirement that the players consciously explore the rotary and lateral gestural qualities associated with their various instruments. The ‘Bach’ bow used by the cellist at various points forms a sort of hybrid between the two types of physical input. Likewise the signal-processing software utilises agents which control granulation parameters in lateral and rotary virtual space. So the second concern is with the gestural – the paradoxical sense of ‘touching at a distance’ which musically-produced sounds can invoke. The third is with how one integrates material which has historical references (the rondo form, the wine glasses representing the glass-harmonica, references to tonal material including the viola da gamba repertoire) with a ‘contemporary’ sonic sensibility.

The piece is scored for cello, wine glasses, whirling tube, and laptop (simple granular synthesis techniques).
Performers: Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Ed Perkins and Bill Vine (wine glasses) and Simon Waters (computer)


Simon Waters
Simon Waters has been since 1994 the director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios at the University of East Anglia, although his association with the studios began in 1980 when the studios were directed by Denis Smalley. Much of his most well-known work involved the characteristic multi-loudspeaker diffusion of electroacoustic music, often for contemporary dance companies, his ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ of 1983 becoming one of the most performed such works because of its association with Ballet Rambert and the choreography of Richard Alston. His more recent work has returned to an interest in the proxemics of sound (whether sound occupies intimate, local, environmental or virtual space) and with live perfomance. In addition to composing and performing Waters has curated the Sonic Arts concert series in the UK since its inception, and has guest curated events for many festivals and conferences including Ultima (Oslo), Fylkingen (Stockholm) and SARC (Belfast) and the ICMC.



Anton Lukoszevieze: Cello
 Cellist Anton Lukoszevieze is one of the most diverse performers of his generation and is notable for his performances of avant-garde, experimental and improvised music. Anton has given many performances at numerous international festivals throughout Europe and the USA (Maerzmusik, Donaueschingen, Wien Modern, GAS, Transart, Ultima) and BBC Radio 3. Deutschlandfunk, Berlin produced a radio portrait of him in September, 2003. Anton has also performed concerti with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 2001 Aldeburgh festival and the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, as well as performances with contemporary vocal ensemble Exaudi and King’s College Choir, Cambridge. He is unique in the UK through his use of the curved bow (BACH-Bogen), which he is using to develop new repertoire for the cello. From 2005-7 he was New Music Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and Kettle’s Yard Gallery. Anton is the subject of several films by the renowned artist-filmmaker Jayne Parker. Anton is also a member of Zeitkratzer, Automatic Ensemble, Agnes Nixon (an obscure duo with Jennifer Walshe) and in 2008 he made his contemporary dance debut with the Vincent Dance Company in Broken Chords, Dusseldorf.
Anton has premiered and commissioned new works for cello by a multitude of contemporary composers, including Christopher Fox, Gerhard Staebler, Amnon Wolman, Kunsu Shim, Laurence Crane, Richard Ayres, Sven Lyder Karhs, Jennifer Walshe, Claudia Molitor, Rytis Mazulis, Arturas Bumsteinas, Juste Janulyte, James Saunders, John Lely, Tim Parkinson, Alwynne Pritchard, Peter Eotvos, Bryn Harrison and Mathew Adkins.
As an educator has taught at many UK Universities and abroad, in addition he has given workshops on creative music skills, contemporary music performance, improvisational and compositional skills. From 2006-7 he was on the Music Faculty of Cambridge University and has regularly led courses for the Aldeburgh Young Musicians Course and has recently given lectures at Brunel University, Durham University, the Slade School of Fine Art and the Vilnius Music Academy, Lithuania.

In June 2009 he was awarded the ‘Millennium Star’ medal, for services to Lithuanian culture, by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania.

Wayang Listrik
improvised audiovisual piece for two performers and their avatars
Ed Perkins

Taken from the Balinese term meaning ‘Electric shadows’, Wyang Listrik is an improvised audiovisual piece for two performers and their avatars. Two lovers meet beneath the boughs of a forest lit only by stars and the gain of video feedback. The scene unfolds as the two interact, communicating through non-verbal vocalizations and body posture. 
Using real-time animated silhouettes; the piece draws its visual style from the paper cutout animations of Lotte Reiniger and its sonic elements from male and female vocal utterance. Each performer uses their interface to control sound and image simultaneously, playing out an improvised narrative between their shadow characters. The cross mapping occurs on a number of levels from sound/object relationships to grains of sound synchronizing with video frames.

Ed Perkins
is an experimental artist specialising in creating electronic instruments and real-time interactive audio-visual systems. His work focuses on the cognitive relationship between sound and image in a performance context and the cultural relationship between media objects and their audience. These areas are explored through mythical themes and archetypical characters, with a strong literary influence from fairytale and poetry.

Ed Perkins and Bill Vine (performers) are current PhD students studying with Simon Waters at UEA.

Block Groove
electroacoustic composition and sound diffusion
Nick Melia & Ed Kelly

In the early 1990s many composers reacted against the smooth professional surface which digital technology allowed, concerning themselves with the signifying possibilities of noise, dirt and distortion. An additional discursive dimension (analogous to the spatial - to direction, or proxemics) emerged as musicians (and other digital artists) explored a continuum of resolution from distorted to clear reproduction, from deliberately compressed or reduced dynamic or spectral range to ‘professional’ polish. As an expressive device this continuum was well used by artists who emerged from the Bristol club scene in the early 1990s, notably Tricky and Portishead, and was rapidly adopted by practitioners in electroacoustic music around the same time.

This continuum was articulated partly through the collision of digital ‘hi-tech’ technologies with resolutely ‘lo-tech’ solutions to musical problems, and with the profusion of (often simultaneous) formats. Many artists adopted ‘lo-tech’ approaches as part of an explicit political agenda: avoiding implication in ‘corporate’ music making by utilising turntables, garage electronics and cheaply available (often deliberately archaic) domestic music technology. Such issues, along with a pragmatic economic sense, informed the use of turntables as performance devices in the urban subculture of the US in the 1980s, and their use by experimental musicians (Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck) intent on drawing attention to the medium of the recording. A typical electroacoustic work from the UEA studios in the 1990s, Ed Kelly and Nick Melia’s Block Groove uses shellac, vinyl and digital recordings and the interventions, treatments and ‘degradations’ characteristic of all three, to construct a piece in which there is play between an ‘acousmatic’ sensibility, the performed interventions, and intrusions from the material support of the recording which frequently emerge as ‘content’. This might be interpreted here as a deliberate McLuhanesque signalling of the mode of representation, of the means of encoding, as inseparable from ‘what is represented’. (SW)

Nick Melia and Ed Kelly were PhD students studying with Simon Waters at UEA in the 1990s. Both are still practising musicians in the UK.

 

Momentum
audiovisuelle Transformation
von Andreas Weixler und Se-Lien Chuang mit allen Performer


Every performance of our interactive audiovisual works, even of the same title, is unique not only because of the inherent  concept of improvisation and changing performers, but also because the computer system and the artistic concept are further developed for every event and last but not least the room and architecture of the venue effects the appearance of the composition.

Programmed in Max Msp Jitter (graphical and object oriented progamming environment)
interactive video by Se-Lien Chuang
SpectraSonic System (multichannel spectraly delay, granular synthesis, FFT filtering and sound diffusion) by Andreas Weixler



Andreas Weixler



ist Komponist mit Spezialisierung in Computermusik. Seine Konzepte und künstlerische Arbeit fanden internationale Anerkennung in Festivals und mehrmalige Auswahlen zu bedeutenden Konferenzen der elektronischen Kunst und Computermusik wie NIME, ICMC und ISEA und zu einer regen Konzert- und Lehrtätigkeit in Europa, Asien, Nord- und Südamerika. Seit 1997 betreut Andreas Weixler die Musik- und Medientechnologischen Fächer an der Anton-Bruckner-Privatuniversität und unterrichtet seit 2004 an der Kunstuniversität am Institut für Medien im Studienzweig InterfaceCulture audiovisuelle interaktive Projekte.
1996 war Andreas Weixler Gastkomponist der UEA Studios in Norwich.
Gemeinsam mit Gerfried Stocker, künstlerischer Leiter des AEC, und der Komponistin Se-Lien Chuang begründet er Sonic Intermedia.

http://avant.mur.at