Netaudio London & Music Hackspace present

Artist Talk with Robin Fox

Sunday, 16 September 2012, 2pm, duration 1hr.

Free to attend, but limited places. Please RSVP.

Robin Fox Laser Show from Robin Fox on Vimeo.

From neurobiology to cochlear implants, from analog synthesizers to audio controlled lasers, Robin Fox’s work knows no boundaries and no borders. He works across the spectrum from live interactive computer music performance to the creation of synaesthetic audio-visual environments.

He’s made soundtracks and video/light works for numerous dance companies, has exhibited large-scale photographic works and recently conducted a residency with the Bionic Ear Institute in Melbourne. Currently Robin Fox is working on a giant Theremin style public interactive instrument installation.

Far from a simple description of his practice Fox’s artist talk serves to contextualize his work through the lens of synaesthesia, audible and visible electrical signal equivalence and the history of electronic and visual musics.

Synesthesia and Netaudio London present Robin Fox live, alongside Sally Golding and Tom James Scott at Cafe OTO on  Sunday, 16 September 2012, 8pm.
Full info and tickets available at
http://cafeoto.co.uk/robin-fox-sally-golding-tom-james-scott.shtm

Robin Fox – Biography
Robin Fox is an artist straddling the often artificial divide between audible and visible arts.

As an audio-visual performance artist his work has featured in festivals worldwide. Recent appearances include a commissioned performance for the Henie Onstad Kunstcenter, Oslo (March 2010), Mois Multi Festival, Quebec City (Feb 2010), Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz (Nov 2009), Musica Genera Festival, Warsaw (June 2009) and the Yokohama Triennale (September 2008).

His audio visual films for the cathode ray oscilloscope are documented on the DVD release Backscatter (2004) with more recent works Volta and 5 Creation Myths being exhibited as video works at the RoslynOxley9 gallery in Sydney, The Asian Art Biennale in Taipei, the Miniartextil International exhibition in Como Italy and most recently at the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung in Bonn as part of Geometric Form seen in Recent Sound.

His groundbreaking work with Chunky Move has contributed to the recent piece Mortal Engine winning a Helpmann award for Best Visual Production and an Honorary mention at the illustrious Prix Ars Electronica. He also scored the critically acclaimed work Connected with Oren Ambarchi and has produced two works, RGB and Drift, with groundbreaking new choreographer Antony Hamilton.
http://robinfox.net/

Thursday 6th of September 2012, 7pm.

Musician Steve Beresford discusses his use of low-grade electronics on the context of decades of free improv.

Internationally known as a free improviser on piano and electronics, Steve Beresford has also composed scores for feature films and music for various TV shows and commercials.

Steve has worked with hundreds of musicians, including Derek Bailey, The Slits, Han Bennink, Christine Tobin, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Ray Davies, Ilan Volkov, Christian Marclay, David Toop, Najma Akhtar, Evan Parker, Adrian Sherwood, The Flying Lizards, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

He was born in Wellington, Shropshire in 1950. In 1974 he moved to London, playing piano with improvisers like Derek Bailey and also trumpet with the notorious Portsmouth Sinfonia, which included Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars.

 

He has had a long association with Swiss artist/musician Christian Marclay, performing realisations of Marclay’s ‘Screen Play’, ‘Ephemera’, ‘Graffiti Composition’, ‘Shuffle’, ‘Pianorama’ and ‘Everyday’, sometimes solo and sometimes with groups.

 

This year sees the second tour of ‘Indeterminacy’, in which comedian Stewart Lee reads one-minute stories by John Cage whilst Beresford and fellow pianist Tania Chen play music.

 

He plays with and conducts the London Improvisers Orchestra every month. He also regularly collaborates with musicians such as Elaine Mitchener, John Butcher, Satoko Fukuda and Shabaka Hutchings, playing at venues like Café Oto in Dalston, London.

Beresford has an extensive discography. Recent releases include a quartet convened by saxophonist Evan Parker – ‘Foxes Fox’ – (which includes drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, bassist John Edwards and guest Kenny Wheeler on trumpet) and new solo recordings on CD and cassette, following up 1980’s ‘Bath of Surprise’. He is also producing a series of CDs of material from the archives of guitarist Derek Bailey.

This Thursday we chronicled the evolution of ZS-1 Amen. From an experiment in instrument design, to a dynamic live audio visual experience.

Originally written by Ziad in 1998, Amen started as GUI design experiment. In 1998 most music software was written to emulate existing hardware. Ziad’s aim was to start with a prevalent compositional technique, then design software around it.

The compositional technique chosen was the beat making popularised by the Drum and Bass genre. Here drum loops are chopped into smaller parts and resequenced. Originally this was a laborious process as there was no dedicated software for it. Amen was designed to remedy this.

Algorithmic composition is a major part of Amen. In our presentation Ziad explained the motivation for and approach behind this functionality. Algorithmic composition is also a great catalyst for experimentation and can produce some very surprising results.

Amen was left in the public domain. Several years later the project was picked up by Daniel.

Amen was redesigned and rewritten for the Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS inspired a generation of audio hackers. Daniel was one of those hackers. He re-imagined Amem, reworking the GUI to take advantage of the DS’s unusual hardware configuration. Notably the touch screen.

Daniel went on to implement Amen’s most requested feature; a live performance mode.

Daniel walked through his realtime-focused changes using a new Flash version of Amen, made specially for this demonstration. Often he got sidetracked, filling the room with funky beats and delighting the audience. Daniel’s Amen is a dynamic live audio and visual experience, multichannel sequencer and a ton of fun!

The future of Amen is exciting… watch this space…

 

Daniel Lopez and Ziad Khouri

http://www.sonicspot.com/zs1amen/zs1amen.html

http://www.samplestation.net/forum/zs-1-amen-rearrangement-de-boucles,topic27807.html (in French)

Thursday 23rd of August, 7pm.

Our presentation will chronicle the evolution of ZS-1 Amen. Originally written by Ziad in 1995, Amen started as GUI design experiment. In 1995 most music software was written to emulate existing hardware. Ziad’s aim was to start with a prevalent compositional technique, then design software around it.

The compositional technique chosen was the beat making popularised by the Drum and Bass genre. Here drum loops are chopped into smaller parts and resequenced. Originally this was a laborious process as there was no dedicated software for it. Amen was designed to remedy this.

 

Algorithmic composition is a major part of Amen. In our presentation Ziad will explain the motivation for and approach behind this functionality. Algorithmic composition is also a great catalyst for experimentation and can produce some very surprising results.

Amen was left in the public domain. Several years later the project was continued up by Daniel. Amen was redesigned and rewritten for the Nintendo DS.

The Nintendo DS inspired a generation of audio hackers. Daniel was one of those hackers. He re-imagined Amem, reworking the GUI to take advantage of the DS’s unusual hardware configuration. Notably the touch screen.

Daniel will walk through his realtime-focused changes partly by way of a new Flash version made specially for this demonstration, while possibly getting sidetracked into filling the room with funky beats for short bursts of time.

Ziad Khouri and Daniel Lopez

Links:

http://www.sonicspot.com/zs1amen/zs1amen.html

http://www.samplestation.net/forum/zs-1-amen-rearrangement-de-boucles,topic27807.html (in French)

Thursday 16th of August, 7pm.

Neil Smith is a composer based in Oxford.

Praxis is a Java-based modular framework for live creative play with video, images, audio, and other media. Its primary focus is on the easy development of generative and interactive media installations, as well as live performance. Praxis LIVE is a graphical, patcher-style interface for developing Praxis projects ‘on the fly’. It is partly inspired by projects such as AudioMulch, Bidule and Isadora, and to a lesser extent Pure Data and Processing; however, it is not intended to be a clone of any of them.

Praxis and Praxis LIVE are released under the GPLv3 licence, and can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/praxis/

Thursday 9th of August, 7pm.
John will describe a number of music hacks he has wasted energy on over the years. This will include a project to make a synthesiser only from materials available to the Victorians, explorations of the musical potential of random combinations of electrical components, various attempts at translating image to sound and vice versa, amongst other diversions. John will also give an account of his work with the Rambert Dance Company realising David Tudor’s score to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest, as well as a clue to his current projects. A performance with Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut will complement the talk.

J. M. Bowers works with homebrew electronics, reconstructions of antique technologies, and digital media to combine sound, image and embodied action as fundamental material energies. He has performed at international festivals including Electropixel Nantes, Piksel Bergen, and BEAM London. He co-founded the Onoma Research label, playing guitar in the noise band Tonesucker. He is part of the Interaction Research Studio, Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London, and was a contributor to the Studio’s Prayer Companion, which has been acquired for the permanent collection of MoMA, New York.

On the weekend we hosted the first Music Hackspace workshop. Martin Howse, visiting from Berlin, instructed a dozen eager hackers in the construction of their very own micro_blackdeath noisemaker.

The small pitch surface mount soldering involved didn’t prevent it to be a success all around – and everyone left with a working device! Big thanks to Martin Howse and to Susanna for organising.