– Music for brain surgeons –
Experiments with drums, instruments and other things, pt 23.
Ægir Sindri Bjarnason and Julius Pollux Rothlaender are friends and musicians based in Reykjavík.

Thor MAGNUSSON and Eiríkur Orri:

Threnoscope and Trumpet

Fermata is a piece for a microtonal drone instrument called Threnoscope and an acoustic instrument. It is a framework for improvisation of microtonal music, where both the live coder and the instrumentalist contribute equally to the piece’s development. The Threnoscope is notated through live coding, with sounds being represented on a graphical score next to the coding terminal. Its visual appearance illustrates the harmonics of a fundamental tone, as well as speaker locations. Musical notes move around the spectral and physical space, long in duration, and sculptable by the performer. Fermata has been performed with Adriana Sá (London), Miguel Mira (Lisbon), Iñigo Ibaibarriaga (Bilbao), Áki Ásgeirsson (Reykjavik), Alexander Refsum Jensenius (Oslo), Peter Furniss (Edinburgh), Helen Papaioannou (Sheffield), and Peter Herbert/Hannes Löschel (Linz) and Tommi Keränen (Helsinki). This time Eiríkur Orri will join the piece on trumpet.

Biographies

Thor Magnusson is a Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex. His work focusses on the impact digital technologies have on musical creativity and practice, explored equally through practice (software development, composition and performance) and theory (academic publications, lecturing, talks) . He is the co-founder of ixi audio (www.ixi-audio.net), and has developed audio software, systems of generative music composition, written computer music tutorials and created two musical live coding environments. He has taught workshops in creative music coding and sound installations, and given presentations, performances and visiting lectures at diverse art institutions, conservatories, and universities internationally.

In 2019, Bloomsbury Academic published Magnusson’s monograph Sonic Writing: The Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions. The book explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media, including symbolic musical notation. The book underpins his research in creative AI, where, as part of the MIMIC project (www.mimicproject.com), Magnusson has worked on a system that enables users to design their own live coding languages for machine learning.

Further information here: http://thormagnusson.github.io

Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson is a frequent collaborator with some of Iceland’s most innovative artists, Eiríkur has been a fixture on the alternative and experimental music scene since the late nineties. He spent nine years touring and recording with múm and has collaborat- ed with Sigur Rós as a brass player and also a musical director for their 2012-2013 Valtari and Kveikur tour. Eiríkur has a background as a jazz musician, which leads to him being a sought after improviser in Reykjavík, performing with Skúli Sverrisson, Hilmar Jensson, the Reykjavik Big Band and others. His trio, Hist Og, released its debut album, “Days of Tundra” in 2019. It was well received, including three nomi- nations to the Icelandic Music Awards. His musical approach varies from abrasive and disembodied noise to medita- tive sound weaving, often incorporating electronics. As an arranger, he as arranged strings and brass for Sigur Rós, múm, Sin Fang, Kira Kira and others.

https://eirikurorri.com

Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions

In this lecture I present resent research that explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. I will look at how new digital music technologies trace their origins in traditional instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording. The scope will range from ancient Greek music theory, medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence.

I will point to a bespoke affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the importance of instrument design in the study of new music and projecting how new computational technologies, including machine learning, will transform our musical practices.

Buy the book [35% discount code: GLR MP6]

Biography

Thor Magnusson is a Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex. His work focusses on the impact digital technologies have on musical creativity and practice, explored equally through practice (software development, composition and performance) and theory (academic publications, lecturing, talks) . He is the co-founder of ixi audio (www.ixi-audio.net), and has developed audio software, systems of generative music composition, written computer music tutorials and created two musical live coding environments. He has taught workshops in creative music coding and sound installations, and given presentations, performances and visiting lectures at diverse art institutions, conservatories, and universities internationally.

In 2019, Bloomsbury Academic published Magnusson’s monograph Sonic Writing: The Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions. The book explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media, including symbolic musical notation. The book underpins his research in creative AI, where, as part of the MIMIC project (www.mimicproject.com), Magnusson has worked on a system that enables users to design their own live coding languages for machine learning.

Further information here: http://thormagnusson.github.io

Z is an aspiring electronic composer. You have mainly seen her playing music at the bars in Reykjavik in the night but now is time for a new chapter.

Þorsteinn Eyfjörð Þórarinsson (b.1995) is an Icelandic artist currently living in Reykjavik, Iceland. His practice evolves around time based mediums with focus on sound in dialogue with architectural space and distortion of time.

This is the first performance where Z and Þorsteinn Eyfjörð Þórarinsson merge their sonic worlds together. Their arsenal contains modular synthesis, digital sound manipulation, field recordings and guitar.

In this performance, they will improvise music to the journey a female deep-sea octopus takes to the bottom of the sea to brood. She will stay there to guard her eggs for four and half year without eating, slowly getting weaker and weaker until she eventually dies when the eggs are hatched.

Sound design as a search for novelty:  Anyone online can breed unique sounds at [synth.is] by evolving neural networks and combining them with synthesizer patches.  Interesting sounds can be published so others can further evolve them.  Published sounds can be downloaded as (SFZ) sample packs for use in the various Digital Audio Workstations, such as Ableton Live.  Sonic Pi code snippets are also auto-generated for each sample pack, so it’s easy to bring them to the next live coding session.

“From so simple a beginning endless [wave]forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” — Charles Darwin.

“Melodic possibilities have been exhausted, chord progressions are spent. The natural evolution of music is in exploring novel timbres and experimenting in noise” — The Art Of Noise by pATCHES.

@wavekilde

Daniil Pilchen is a composer currently working on a series of pieces called “Songs.” Each of these pieces investigates different complications a dialogue between musicians may face. Musicians, deprived of their usual means of communication have to come up with new ones during the performance.

“Four songs” look at the disturbances and uncertainties occurring while playing music over the internet. Network latency disturbs the rhythmical precision and makes simultaneity impossible. Each section of the piece presents a slightly different perspective on these qualities. Four songs—four dialogues, four modes of listening, and responding.

Rebekah Wilson (New Zealand) is a composer and technologist who has travelled and lived in many new lands and continents over the last two decades, benefiting greatly from the proliferation of the Internet. She was honoured to hold the position of Artistic Co-Director at STEIM (Studio for Electronic and Instrumental Music, Amsterdam), where her passions for music, performance and technology became fused. She is co-founder and technology director for Chicago’s Source Elements, providing post-production software and services for the film television and radio industry. She continues today the ever-perpetual dis-entanglement and re-interlacing of her many technical, musical and cinematic threads, performing and lecturing in international venues and festivals; most recently her focus is fixed on the emergent field of networked music performance, a topic she will be teaching in at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2020/21. Her research can be found at https://latencynative.com.

Rebekah will perform a live version of Primer I. an electronic program/score with computer graphics, text, piano and electronic sound processing.

Gulli Bjornsson (b.1991) is guitarist and composer from Iceland. Bjornsson’s music typically blends electronics, acoustic instruments and visuals and has been described as “hypnotic” (News Gazette), “a knockout – wondrously inventive” (Soundboard Magazine) and “Virtuosic … modern, occasionally discordant, but still accessible” (Classical Guitar Magazine).

Last summer he released his debut album Bergmál feauturing his own compositions for guitar, strings and laptop. You can find it on all major online platforms. He is a candidate for the Ph.D. degree in composition at Princeton University.

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The idea behind Svart-Hvít Ský á Himni (Black-White Clouds in the Sky) is the beauty and terror of clouds. I wanted to capture this change; how something that initially seems safe and beautiful can turn and become something fearful. I think clouds embody this quite well, as they are forming they seem pretty and harmless but as they grow they can turn the skies black and cause torrential rains.

About the audio processing
The piece centers around an audio effect I created in Max, a kind of step-sequencer that applies a rhythmic envelope to the guitar. All the effects are pre-programmed (pre-programing is deciding in advance how the patch (computer program) will function over the course of the composition) with the performer following a counter to help him be in sync with the audio processing.

About the visuals
The visuals manipulate a short stock-footage clip of clouds drifting in the sky; looping it and spinning it around. The color matrix of the clip is inverted and the amount of this inversion is what is audio reactive. Lastly the clip is fed through a video-reverb to create a ‘wash’ effect.

lives and works in Reykjavík. She graduated from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in 1997, and in a short time she has come to be a prominent figure within the contemporary Icelandic art scene. Working in various media—sculpture, drawing, painting, sound sculpture and music—her work is strongly characterized by what has come to be called the “sweetness of horror.” Gabríela examines the chaos and excesses of society while playing on the borders of dreams and reality, drawing from a fantastic mythology of her own creation. In 2005 Gabríela was Iceland’s representative at the Venice Biennale.

Crepusculum, 2011
photo from the video
photographer Jiri Hroník

Tetralogia North – 2005  (Extract)

Tetralogia East – 2005  (Extract)

www.gabriela.is

Okuma is a duo based in Reykjavik, Iceland. They like to describe their music as post-apocalyptic, sourcing inspiration in reflections about our times.
Saxophone and electric guitar are interfaced with modular synthesizers and computers, fed through real-time processing units. A highly interactive setup providing a very open and intuitive playground. Okuma is constantly exploring ways to unify these elements into a world of sound that leaves room for improvisation – complex harmonies and organic textures, raw electronics, subtle melodies and unexpected rhythms.

Okuma (Tómas Manoury & Daníel Friðrik) er dúó starfrækt í Reykjavík. Þeir skilgreina tónlist sína sem heimsendatónlist – staða mannsins í nútímanum er þeim hugleikin og uppspretta hugmynda. Þeir nota gagnvirkan búnað til þess að tengja saxófón og rafgítar við módúlar-syntha og tölvur fyrir rauntímahljóðvinnslu. Okuma rannsakar ólíka tengimöguleika til þess að skapa hljóðheim sem er opinn og flæðandi en virkar einnig sem rammi fyrir spuna. Akústík mætir elektróník á lífrænum leikvelli þar sem allt getur gerst.