19.30 EAM parkscenen

Internationell konsert med elektroakustisk musik

Spelordning
Lars-Gunnar Bodin - The enigma engines (the first configuration)
Miguel Azguime (P) - Le Dicible enfin Fini
Sten-Olof Hellström - J’ADOUBE del 1
Ambrose Field (US) - One hell of a place to lose a cow

The Enigma Engines
For quite a long time I have been fascinated by the sounds produced by mechanical devices and machines. In most cases it is rather difficult or even impossible to figure out what these things actually manufacture, judging only from their sound output. Their purpose and "history" is not revealed just from the audition.
When Pierre Schaeffer launched his ideas about the "ecoute reduit"-concept(reduced listening) it was a major step forward towards to the usage and incorporation of the entire sound world in musical composition. One should learn to listen to the sounds without taking any consideration to their production "history", e.g. what caused them to sound.
I my composition "The Enigma Engines" I have tried to the opposite, to create or imitate sounds from imaginary "mechanical" objects that have no obvious purpose. Instead of producing real artefacts they may give rise to fantasies, mental states, transcendental experiences, etc. They may become mimetic in a more abstract, Platonian way.

Le Dicible Enfin Fini
 "Le Dicible Enfin Fini" is a two channel sound text composition.
It is about words and digital signal processing of phonemes, words and phrases.
The starting point is just a small sentence spoken in portuguese, from a text by the composer himself, which meaning is hidden through cutting and splicing, arranjed in a fast counterpoint at the beginning of the piece. This short sentence is the only material used for the whole piece. Can it be told?
"Le Dicible Enfin Fini" was awarded the EMS prize 2003.

J’ADOUBE del 1
J’adoube är resultatet av ett experiment där jag försökte komponera ett stycke enligt följande regler
1. Inga samples eller inspelade ljud.
2. Inga ljud redigerings eller mixnings program typ Pro-Tools, Peak , Cue-Base,
Ableton-live etc.
3. Alla ljud , gester kort sagt hela stycket skall vara resultatet av en algoritm.
När det kom till kritan lyckades jag inte följa någon av reglerna utom den första. Men för att gör misslyckandet totalt spelade jag in några ljud som jag sen infogade i stycket.
Regel 2 stupade på att jag inte hade tillgång till tillräcklig dator kraft för att följa regel 3. Jag var tvungen att generera allting i små bitar och sedan sätta ihop dem med hjälp av ett förbjudet program.
Sammanfattningsvis var jag egentligen inte i ens i närheten av mina ursprungliga (och förmodligen idiotiska) intentioner

One Hell of a place to lose a cow
Drawing on ideas explored in Expanse Hotel (Centaur Records 2552) One hell of a place to lose a cow plays on the interaction between sound, context and emotion. High-octane designed sounds meet sonically mangled rock guitars head-on in a large stadium. Strap yourself in, you're in for quite a ride! There are 7 short movements in this stereo version of the work. It’s perhaps a little like ‘Hollywood vs Pierre Schaeffer’, weaving together music, sound design, and action-movie style effects.
1. Introduction: Fairy Castle
San Francisco: another hot day : Environments become subtly coloured with tonal resonances. After playing with your expectations, our digital world finally intrudes.
2. Thor’s Hammer
West coast packed arena. Ageing guitar hero ‘make it large’ Joe plays final burnt-out and overblown gig. Crowd go wild in adoration. We lurch from one excess to the next -- but what’s driving the music? It’s not Joe.
3. Chinese Wall
A long division. Woman arrested by Los Angeles police department claims that her employer forced her to dress in costume.
4. Silent City
All the charm of the city, but no city sounds. Textures circulate, interrupt each other, jostle for space, light and air.
5. The Alligator
A tiny tribute to McLaren’s Swamp Thing. Featuring: chopped-up guitars and damp environments. Here everything’s biomechanical - even the birds. Perhaps this landscape’s better seen on TV.
6. The Cathedral
We’re back with Joe and the boys. Crowd not paying attention. Instead, they’ve got other things on their minds: guns, violence, wars, guitars: are they getting enough?
7. Wall of Windows
Fragments of reality intrude in a seamlessly simulated environment.
What about the title? Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA. Amazing shapes called 'hoodoos' rise up from the arid landscape. With a bit of imagination, you can turn them into anything you like. People are reported to have seen Queen Victoria, alligators, Chinese walls, Cathedrals and even London's Tower Bridge from which the rock formations take their name. The 'rock formations' in One hell of a place to lose a cow (the musical work) have certain similarities. The phrase itself is attributable to Ebenezer Bryce, who on seeing the canyon, couldn't imagine grazing his bovine herd in such an inhospitable location.
The work was 12 months in the making and was realized in the studio of the composer.
Prize of the electroacoustic tape music without instrument in the 2003 Bourges Competition.

Lars-Gunnar Bodin
Bodin is basically a composer of electro-acoustic music, but has written works for instruments and various mixed combinations with electronics and conventional instruments. He is also a visual artist in parallel with his music activity. In the early sixties he was influenced by the music of John Cage. He has also performed together with John Cage and David Tudor a couple of times. His artistic output has very often been inspired by ideas and phenomenon found in the natural sciences. Since the early sixties he has a strong interest in poetry and in "composing" texts. Together with the famous Swedish poet/composer Bengt Emil Johnson he coined the term "Text/sound-composition", an internationally accepted label for this kind of verbal/sonic art. Bodin has written all the texts he has used for his own works. As a text-composer he is influenced by the concrete poetry in general and of Öyvind Fahlström´s concrete poetry in particular. He has combined text, music and visual elements in several works, for example "Clouds" from 1976 which is a full evening intermedia composition for dancers, singers, film and slide projections and eight channel of sound. Bodin has composed many works for radio.
His works "For Jon- fragments of a time to come" (1977), "Wonder-void" (1990), and "Bobb, the lifemanager" (1997) were commissioned by the Swedish National Radio as being their "Prix Italia"-entries the years respectively. In many works one finds elements of Science Fiction in his texts. This is especially the case in the above mentioned compositions. He has also received several commissions from The Nationwide Concert Institute in Sweden and GMEB in Bourges, France. His music is published by a number of record-companies, such as WERGO, Folkways,etc. 1994 Bodin finished a commissioned work for the Nationwide Concert Institute honoring the 25-anniversary of EMS and 1995 he was commissioned by the Ultima festival to compose an eight-channel electro-acoustic work for the Astrup-Fearnley Museum in Oslo with the title "Mare Atlantica". 1996 he was honored the Magisterium Prize in Bourges, France.
He has also written a great number of concrete poetry texts that he performs himself live.

Miguel Azguime (Portugal)
Was born in Lisbon in 1960. A Composer, poet, and percussionist, he founded the Miso Ensemble in 1985, a flute and percussion duo recognised by the public and by the critics as one of the most important Portuguese contemporary music groups. Besides giving numerous concerts in Portugal, the Miso Ensemble has been presented regularly abroad, namely in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Finland, France, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Italy and China.
He has obtained various awards for composition and performance, has composed for diverse formations, instrumental and/or vocal with and without live electronics, electroacoustic music, including music for exhibitions, installations, theatre, dance and cinema. He has received commissions from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Casas de Fronteira a Alorna Foundation, Descobertas Foundation, Centro Cultural de Belém, R.D.P. 2, Europália, Lisbon Municipality, Festival dos 100 Dias, Expo'98, Orient Foundation, Ministery of Culture, Heidelberg Festival, Porto 2001, CRFMW. His works are published in three monographic records and two books of poems. In the press for 2002, the release of a new record and the publication of "Parfaire Le Bleu", a collection of the last ten years of his poetic works.
His music has been selected twice for the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers, for the ISCM World Music Days in Luxembourg 2000 and for the ISCM World Music Days in Yokohama - Japan 2001.
Besides his activity as a composer, poet and percussionist, he remains actively dedicated to the promotion and diffusion of contemporary music, either as artistic director of the independent label Miso Records and of the MÚSICA VIVA International Electroacoustic Music Festival.
Also for 10 years Miguel Azguime was the producer of the radio broadcast Música Hoje devoted to contemporary music at Portuguese National Radio - RDP- antena2.
He has developed since 1997 the first Portuguese Loudspeaker Orchestra and as a researcher he has been working in the development of real time computer music, giving lectures and courses on this field.

Sten-Olof Hellström
Sten-Olof har varit yrkesverksam som tonsättare sedan 1984 och hans stycken har spelats runt om i världen. För närvarande har han en forskaranställning på KTH i Stockholm där han bl.a. arbetar med dator-gränssnitt för blinda. Parallellt med forskartjänsten doktorerar Sten-Olof i EAM komposition med nya ljudsyntes metoder vid City University i London.

Ambrose FIELD (UK)
Ambrose Field is a composer and sound designer. He specialises in the creative use of mutlichannel surround-sound, working on both commercial and arts projects for DVD, cinema and live performance. Described in 2000 by the BBC's ‘Hear and Now’ Radio Programme as "Music pushing against its boundaries and aspiring to the visual", Field integrates the outside world into his music to create drama, tension and impact through the use of sound-design materials. Field’s music has since been the recipient of a number of prizes, and is available on cds from Centaur Records, the ORF, and Memnosyne Media/IMEB and Sonic Arts Network UK. His work has been performed live at major contemporary music and electronic festivals in the USA, Europe, Russia, Brazil, Poland, South America and China. Field is currently the director of the University of York Music Studios
where he lectures in composition.

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