Posts Tagged ‘Bitpanic’
Review: People Inside Electronics @ Boston Court
People Inside Electronics (abbreviated PIE) performs and promotes electroacoustic music in LA. Often, concerts go beyond music and present interdisciplinary multimedia collaborations with dancers, actors, scientists, and so on. PIE focuses on the artists, and electronic synthesizers and modulators are the media. The more time passes, the more I appreciate the name of the series. Today, we live in a world where music can be created entirely by programs and algorithms, without people at all. Furthermore, an increasing portion of the population has electronics inside them, from pacemakers to RFID implants (yes, really). To turn the lens from the machines’ ability to the people’s, and what they can make the machines do, is something to behold.
Beginning the concert on a fantastic note was The Deep State by Isaac Schankler (2017), performed by Scott Worthington on bass and Isaac Schankler on electronics. Right from the start, I could hear Pauline Oliveros’s influence and inspiration on the piece. She is one of my favorite pioneers in electronic music, and I know she is an influence to Schankler as well. Her pieces change slowly, like delicately bending metal into a sculpture. Like Schankler, she often provokes contemplation.
Schankler writes in the program note, “This piece is ‘about’ both the necessity and seeming impossibility of this kind of contemplation in our…current situation.” It is not difficult to interpret what he was getting at by ‘current situation.’ The ambiguity of the phrase also allows the listener to turn to any other situation, perhaps one more personal and probably less dismal. Regardless of any narrative one applies to the piece, Schankler’s genius composition, performed by my favorite bassist in southern California, is sure to stimulate a deep state of contemplation and peace in anyone who hears it.
Next on the program, pianist Aron Kallay and percussionist Yuri Inoo performed Elliptic by Caroline Louise Miller (2012). Elliptic paints the landscape of a “particularly beautiful dream” Miller had about “our pre-apocalyptic, neoliberal world.” (Compared to Schankler’s The Deep State, we can infer that the apocalypse has occurred sometime between 2012 and 2017.) Miller’s program notes describe an enchanting ellipsoid planet with a golden moon, orbiting a pink star. Monoliths appear on the water and break the spell.
The monoliths were the harbingers of change. The Earth appears on the horizon and destroys the reverie with an onslaught of media noise. In the music, Kallay’s otherworldly electronic piano depicts the beautiful planet, while Inoo’s bombastic snare and gong invoke the Earth’s cacophony. The Earth vanishes, and the music freezes for a second…and then quietly resumes, as if tip-toeing through the wreckage. The third movement, “Exodus,” sounds like flying into the unknown. It is different than the beginning, but there is a similar sense of being, of existing. I would recommend listening to this piece on its own once, then with the program notes, and then a third time on its own again. Close your eyes if you wish to visualize the alien landscape, just don’t forget to open your ears to the sonic landscape Miller crafts.
After intermission, PIE introduced BitPanic, a computer music collective based in LA. In a computer music collective, performers improvise on networked composition systems on laptops. Mark Trayle cofounded The Hub, the godfather of computer music collectives, dating back to 1986. BitPanic took on Trayle’s semi-aleatoric piece Pins and Splits (2004). In this piece, the background sound is fixed, and the foreground allows improvisation. The players affect each other’s timing, like a music game of duck-duck-goose. The result of the game is a constant transformation from chaos to order and back again. The program note says the title comes from an email thread with Trayle’s Hub-mates. To me, this is delightfully meta. Like an email thread, in Pins and Splits each participant takes turns at the lead, asking questions and resolving conflicts.
After Trayle’s piece, BitPanic concluded the concert with a totally improvised set. The quartet set loose on keyboards, knobs, and violins. Each player seemed to exist in their own little bubble. Sometimes they coincided with another player, and sometimes seemed like polar opposites. One performer played the violin normally, albeit hooked up with wires to the laptops for sound processing. Another performer laid his violin on the table and treated it no differently than the laptop. The other two stared stoically at their screens, clicking and typing and twiddling away. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before. That’s the beauty of electroacoustic music. The limit is your imagination, and my thoughts and experiences were certainly not the same as the members of BitPanic. New music, in the hands of PIE and BitPanic, will continue to surprise and delight.
Scott Cazan on Bitpanic
.On Saturday, March 18, People Inside Electronics present the computer music collective Bitpanic at Boston Court, as well as pieces by Isaac Schankler and Caroline Louise Miller. While prepping for the concert, Bitpanic member Scott Cazan had a minute to answer a few questions.
Bitpanic
I’ve seen Bitpanic’s name floating around for a while now and unfortunately haven’t had the chance to catch a show yet. Could you describe a bit about what you do?
Sure! Bitpanic is a computer music collective based in Los Angeles that explores networked compositional systems, experimental sound practices, and improvisation. The group follows the computer music lineage pioneered by groups like The Hub (who have been doing this sort of things since the 70’s). In fact, the current members are all former students and colleagues of one of the co-founders of The Hub, the late Mark Trayle and includes Casey Anderson, me, Clay Chaplin, David Paha, and Stephanie Smith. We perform new works for networked electronics as well as repertoire and improvised music.
As a networked computer ensemble, I’m sure you have some thoughts on the challenges of live performance in electronic music. How do you ensure your performances are engaging?
Well certainly there has been a lot of talk in the past about electronic performers and their stage presence but I think, luckily, we are moving past the idea that someone on stage with a laptop is not engaging (in any case there are five of us on laptops!). It has become pretty common to do so and I would only say that perhaps laptop performance has a really nice focusing effect for the ears (although we do have many more LEDs than your typical instrumental player). Certainly I hope that we can create a space for listening and that the music, itself, is central to do what we do and engaging on its own terms. Particularly in a network piece like the Trayle piece we’ll play this Saturday, “Pins and Splits,” where there is a palpable sense of urgency as we find ourselves reacting in real-time to prompts thrown out by other members of the ensemble in real-time.
As to improvisation, or even the simpler “playing together on multiple computers,” I have two questions I’d love your thoughts on. The first is how you think the traditional materials of music making figure in what you do, if they do at all. The second is more technical – are you using a live coding environment? Just syncing your clocks and on your own setups beyond that?
Well, it depends on which tradition one might be speaking of. We draw from a number of musical traditions. Electronic music has had a particularly fascinating tradition (roughly since the 40s) of highlighting timbre and gesture as a prime musical parameter and I think we, as individuals, each approach our own sounds with a careful attention to timbral detail.
Our predecessors, The Hub, certainly found a lot of inspiration in David Tudor and Cage and their ways of working with emergence (there is a really wonderful article by Tim Perkis on this subject called “Complexity and Emergence in the Experimental Music Tradition” that you can find on his website). In a lot of ways what Tudor experimented with was to move the compositional idea from a fixed score into a system/circuit. In other words, the circuit itself becomes the score and network music takes that to an ensemble setting. Of course, you see a lot of that type of thinking present in earlier and later works of Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, John Cage, and many others as well. Bitpanic certainly carries on from that tradition of creating systems in which people are able to interact in very specific ways over a network. It is actually a pretty rich musical tradition of experimental music, from Tudor, The Hub, the cybernetics of Bebe and Louis Barron, and even all the way back to early electronic telemusic experiments such as Thadeus Cahill’s Telharmonium (1895) among others. And that is not even touching on the long history of improvised music that is worth an entirely separate discussion of its own.
How does the concert this weekend stand out, to you, from other performances you’ve done?
Every concert is different given the nature of pieces. Its really wonderful that we can be assured of that as the scores themselves, while specific in their interactions, allow new things to always emerge in the course of performing it. Every concert we do is preceded by reworking our own setups and finding new ways to explore the works so I’m really looking forward to see how this will evolve come Saturday. The last performance of “Pins and Splits” occurred at REDCAT so I also think it will be interesting to hear it in the more intimate setting of Boston Court.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Big thanks to People Inside Electronics for including us on the program. I’m also very much looking forward to hearing a new Isaac Schankler/Scott Worthington piece and a Caroline Louise Miller piece performed by Aron Kallay and Yuri Inoo. It should be a pretty diverse concert!
Tickets are available at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10123260.