Sound // Technology // Politics //
Ensemble Decipher will be wrapping up our tour of New York with a performance of works commissioned for the tour in addition to a world premiere by Darian Donovan Thomas. We’ll also have violinist, composer, and technologist, Mari Kimura on for a US and New York premiere of her work KISMET.
Ensemble Decipher is going on a tour of New York! We already have one show down, but will also be performing at Purchase, Oswego, in Albany for the SUNY PACC Prize finals, SUNY Buffalo State, SUNY Fredonia, in Brooklyn at Roulette, and in Manhattan at the Alchemical Studios. We are playing an INSANE amount of rep, and it is always an honor to have such amazing friends willing to play my music so often.
You can find out more here: ensembledecipher.com/sunypacc/
NowNet Arts Conference 2021 Program
The Territory of Telematic and Networked Music: Dreams of the Singularity and Insurmountable Space
12:00PM EST
This was added late to the program—but toy_5 was performed at Earth Day Art Model. You can see the performance archive in the link along with other works from the Ensemble Decipher repertoire
Ensemble Decipher will perform toy_5 at the Penn State New-Music Festival and Symposium, Saturday, March 20th, 1:00PM EST. Check it out here! http://bit.ly/psnmf
Next up Ensemble Decipher will be performing toy_5 by myself, COAT by Robert Cosgrove, Remember Me by Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Overshare by Lainie Fefferman. Concert will be at 1:00PM EST this Saturday, March 6th 2021. Performance will be live-streamed on YouTube here.
Ensemble Decipher was awarded the SUNY PACC Prize for Performing Arts, Creation, and Curation to tour multiple campuses in the SUNY system and commission new music from SUNY students and faculty alike! Through the prize, Ensemble Decipher will commission student and faculty composers and sound artists from SUNY Fredonia, Purchase, Oswego, Stony Brook, and Buffalo State College. The ensemble will then tour each SUNY institution as well as perform at venues like the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.
Earlier this month toy_5 was performed at the NowNet Arts Conference. It was performed by Ensemble Decipher, and there were works by Yaz Lancaster, Lainie Fefferman, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, and Sam Beebe. Next up, the Decipherists will be putting some recordings together to be presented on the Stony Brook University Music Department’s Feature Friday and then toy_3 will be played on December 18th on WUSB.
On the 24th, I’ll be working on the AVINA Stiftung funded project, Hyperobject: Intersubject with Yris Apsit at a workshop called Eco Art Lab «Climate & the city». Here we’ll be exploring how the particularities of the project we proposed—information obfuscation, transdisciplinarity, and transmediality—can infer the subject of the project: Anthropogenic Climate Change. There are an array of events, and they’ve set up a really cool website where everything will be documented during the course of the week at work. We are really looking forward to collaborating with the other artists and scientists in the lab!
Here is the about:
The Eco Art Lab is a transdisciplinary think and do tank at the Bern University of the Arts, which aims to initiate collaborations between artistic researchers, scientists, and the public.
With regard to Sustainable Development Goals 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and 13 (Climate Action), the Lab’s goal is develop and test innovative methodological approaches to ecological issues and to create mediation formats that promote environmentally conscious action.
https://ecoartlab.ch/about/
Super excited to perform, alongside the rest of the folks at SynthBeats on the 2020 Network Music Festival; Taylor Long, Joey Bohigian, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Rob Cosgrove and Sam Beebe. Full concert line up is here.
Sam Beebe’s Pretty Saro taps into telematic latency and unstable home internet and wifi systems in order to generate a lush, glitch-rich fresco of sound played to a shared (albeit erratic) metronome, which remains silent to the audience. Similar in its minimalist aesthetics yet distinct in both its mode of production and sonic world, Eric Lemmon’s work creates an ethereal texture of bells and crunchy bass tones that slowly give way to a harmonically and visually threatening climax.
Nourbakhsh’s piece remember me draws on excerpts of Nayyirah Waheed’s poetry: Aftrica’s lament, and is sung by SynthBeats members while being harmonized through a vocoder. This piece will express a narrative journey that begins with vocoded sounds and returns them to the original voice, in order to remember the past and our ancestors. In the era of COVID-19, our day-to-day experiences have shifted from embodied to mediated interactions. It is in this way that the meta-figures of the vocoder and the natural voice also serve as a metaphor for our contemporary experience and thus demonstrate the value in not only remembering today, but also our past.