Electronic Frequencies

00:40 Norah Lorway – lock your door.
07:50 Scott Wilson – LOW (Performers: Pestova/Rees/Roche Trio).
10:44 Lawrence Casserley – X.
15:00 Jeff Snyder – Sunspots – 03 Sunspots VIII.
33:02 Jana Winderen – Heated Pt 2.
37:38 Chris Watson – Los Mochis.
43:48 Norah Lorway – day 10.
47:01 Horacio Vaggione – Agon.
55:46 Rafael Toral – Glove Touch.
59:00 Reprise.

About the composers:

Norah Lorway.
Originally from Canada, Norah is a computer musician, composer and researcher who has performed at concerts, algoraves, festivals and installations throughout the UK, Canada, Australia, Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, Greece, Denmark, and Japan, amongst other countries.
Norah’s research intersects live coding, gesture control, digital musical instrument design and new media medicine. She has worked with the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST), founded various laptop ensembles in the UK and Canada and maintains an active performance career in Europe and Canada.

https://xylemrecords.bandcamp.com

Scott Wilson.
Scott Wilson is a Canadian composer. Since 2004 he has lived in Birmingham, UK, where he is Reader in Electronic Music and Director of Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre and the Electroacoustic Studios at the University of Birmingham.

His works include pieces both for instrumental and electroacoustic forces. He is the Director of Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre, for which he has developed custom software, and an active developer of the SuperCollider computer music language.

His music has been performed internationally, with performances at the Huddersfield Festival, the Mouvement Festival, the Trash Festival, Open Ears, the Inventionen Festival[13] in Berlin, and the Cool Drummings Festival, and broadcast on CBC Radio 2, Radio France, Netherlands Concertzender, and BBC Radio 3.

LOW program notes:
Performers: Pestova/Rees/Roche Trio

Amongst the much discussed death toll of 2016, Leonard Norman Cohen stands as notable. As a Canadian his death somehow struck me deeply, not least because shared affection for his work has provided a catalyst for many friendships I’ve had over the years. Cohen, with all his failings and triumphs, had for decades been a sort of unofficial poet laureate for Canada, and through his poems and songs gave voice to the best intentions and darkest intimations of the national psyche of our notoriously understated people.

Throughout his career Cohen’s voice steadily descended in pitch, and in his final recordings it was a nearly inaudible growl. I’d like to imagine that it isn’t so much that he’s died, it’s just that his voice has descended below the threshold of human hearing, and that down there he’s still singing, telling us, ‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’
LOW was inspired (and made possible!) by the amazing abilities of Heather Roche, Carla Rees and Xenia Pestova, and is dedicated to them.

LOW was composed for the Pestova/Rees/Roche Trio, and was premiered on April 28, 2017 in Birmingham, UK.

http://scottwilson.ca

Lawrence Casserley.
Lawrence Casserley is a composer, conductor and performer, to real time electro-acoustic music. Lawrence Casserley was professor of electro-acoustic music at the Royal College of Music in London.

http://www.lcasserley.co.uk

Jeff Snyder.

Jeff Snyder (b.1978) is a composer, improviser and instrument-designer living in Princeton, New Jersey, and active in the New York City area.
As founder and lead designer of Snyderphonics, Jeff designs and builds unusual electronic musical instruments. His creations include the Manta, which is played by over 150 musicians around the world; the JD-1 Keyboard/Sequencer, which was commissioned as a specialty controller for Buchla synthesizers; and the custom analog modular synthesizer on which he regularly performs.

Jeff is a member of experimental electronic duo exclusiveOr, avant jazz group The Federico Ughi Quartet , improvisatory noise trio The Mizries, and laptop ensemble Sideband. He fronts the band Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves as his electro-country alter-ego, Owen Lake. He also composes alternate-reality Early Music for an ensemble of his invented instruments.

In 2009, Jeff co-founded an experimental music record label, Carrier Records , which continues to release strange and exciting experimental music. In 2011, he received a doctorate with distinction in Music Composition from Columbia University. He currently is the Director of Electronic Music at Princeton University, and the Director of PLOrk , the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.

http://www.scattershot.org/news.htm

Jana Winderen.
Jana Winderen is an artist educated in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fish ecology from the University of Oslo.
Jana focuses on audio environments and ecosystems which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally.
Amongst her activities are immersive multi-channel sound installations and concerts which have been performed internationally in major institutions and public spaces in America, Europe and Asia. Winderen lives and works in Oslo.

http://www.janawinderen.com

Chris Watson.
Chris Watson is one of the world’s leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena, and for Touch he edits his field recordings into a filmic narrative. For example. the unearthly groaning of ice in an Icelandic glacier is a classic example of, in Watson’s words, putting a microphone where you can’t put your ears. He was born in Sheffield where he attended Rowlinson School and Stannington College (now part of Sheffield College). In 1971 he was a founding member of the influential Sheffield-based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire. His sound recording career began in 1981 when he joined Tyne Tees Television. Since then he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. As a freelance recordist for film, tv & radio, Chris Watson specialises in natural history and documentary location sound together with track assembly and sound design in post production.

https://chriswatson.net

Horacio Vaggione.
He studied composition at the National University of Córdoba (1958–1961) and privately in Buenos Aires with Juan Carlos Paz (1960–1963), then at the University of Illinois with Lejaren Hiller and Herbert Brün (1966) where he first gained exposure and access to computers. In 1983 he received a Doctorate in Musicology at the University of Paris VIII (thesis director: Prof. Daniel Charles).

Vaggione was born in Córdoba, Argentina, but lives in Europe since 1969. While in Argentina he was a co-founder of the Experimental Music Center (CME) of the National University of Cordoba (1965–1968), and co-organizer of the Experimental Music Meetings of the III Bienal Americana de Arte (1966).[1][2]

From 1969 to 1973 he lived in Madrid, Spain, and was part of the ALEA live electronics music group with Luis de Pablo, the ALEA electronic Music Studio and the Project Music and Computer at the University of Madrid. In 1978 he moved to France, where he still resides, and began work at IMEB in Bourges, INA-GRM and IRCAM in Paris. In 1987–1988 was a resident of the DAAD Berliner Kunstler Program, working at the Technische Universität Berlin. Since 1989 he has been Professor of Music (Composition and Research) at the University of Paris VIII. In 1996 founded the CICM (Centre de Recherche Informatique et Création Musicale).[3]

Composition Prizes: Newcomp Prize (Cambridge, USA, 1983). Bourges Prizes (1982, 1986, 1988). Euphonie d’Or (Bourges, 1992). ICMA International Computer Music Association Commission Award (USA, 1992). Ton Bruynel Foundation Prize (Amsterdam, 2010). Giga-Hertz Produktion Preis (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2011), among others.

Writings and research papers: 54 papers, published in Proceedings, books (MIT Press, Harwoord Academic Publishers, Swett and Zeitlinger, L’Harmattan, Routledge) and specialized journals (Computer Music Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Journal of New Music Research, Musica-Realtà, etc.).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horacio_Vaggione

Rafael Toral
Rafael Toral, born in Lisbon, 1967 has been intrigued by the potential of sound and the functions of music since he was a teenager. As a composer and performer, he has been deeply involved with Rock, Ambient, Contemporary, Electronic and Free Jazz music in different periods of his life.

Working with electric guitar and electronics, in the 1990’s he created a blend of Ambient and Rock and recorded acclaimed albums like Wave Field or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. By the early 2000’s he arrived to a sense of accomplishment about his previous 15 years of work, also realizing the world needed a different creative response. He decided to start something new, as radically different from the previous phase as possible. In a transition to vulnerable action, he launched the alien-sounding Space Program in 2004, using experimental electronic instruments. It’s been an ambitious long-term project exploring an approach to electronic music based on silence, through decision making and physical gesture, in a way inspired by post-free Jazz. The resulting music, “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space”, has been described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers”.

In the last 15 years he’s been thinking and practicing an understanding of silence as “space”, with a clear function in music creation but also as a metaphor for social relationships and a statement on information and sensory overload.

Performing solo or in numerous collaborations (including Jim O’Rourke, Jim Baker, Sei Miguel, Chris Corsano, John Edwards, Evan Parker, Tatsuya Nakatani, Manuel Mota, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, C Spencer Yeh, and many others), he has been touring throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

Also active in visual and spatial arts, Toral has produced video and several installations from 1994 to 2003.
In 2014 he relocated to the mountains in central Portugal for a more sustainable life. In 2017, having concluded the Space Program’s recording series, Toral is entering a wider field with multiple directions and possibilities. From his mountain studio, he also offers mastering services.