In July 2019 Modulisme was born, Bana Haffar and I contributing the very first 2 Sessions. It was very important that my first guest be a woman, and I’d so much like more Ladies to respond to my invitations, for Modulisme to offer more of a female presence… And fully document our Electronic Music community…
Over the years, I’ve heard it said that the platform offers so much information that the newcomer doesn’t know how to take it in, where to start, that there’s too much to read… A simple reply would be « take your time » because Modulisme wants to share information, give composers a voice and make sure they have the opportunity to be well presented. The fuller their message, the better off I am, so here it’s all about transmission, and of course it may take time to digest… For the better !!!
We are celebrating 5 years of activism and offering more than 1 000 exclusive works showcasing the importance of analog electronic music !
For this series I wanted to emphasize the alliance of acoustic and electronic with a collection of works showing that Modulisme isn’t dealing with Modular synthesis only and that what matters is the composition rather than the tools.
ACOUSTRONIQUE features music composed of sounds artificially created using the modular instrument, enriched with natural sounds (field recordings/voices) or acoustic material (instruments).
This is volume 4 which I chose to limit to 2 hours so as to keep it digest…
01. Oculus Tapageur (Magali Sanheira) – Falaises (05:13)
Field recordings, Master Keyboard, Make Noise 0-Coast, Yamaha TX-81Z, Stereoping, loop pedal and reverb.
A sudden appearance at the edge of the cliffs. Stones, footsteps, the sea, quickening breath, the spectre of the wind…
Magali Sanheira trained as a visual artist, graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy and is a self-taught musician. Her research focuses on the relationship between sound and the visual arts.
Her music is based on improvisation. Her compositions superimpose various takes of acoustic sounds that generate spectral resonances, against an electronic F.M. synthesizer background.
She creates a singular universe, at once noisy and imbued with “Saudade” – nostalgia for the future.
She began experimenting with sound through performance, amplifying various objects and scenographic elements. Her work focuses on the search for spontaneous, intuitive and rapid gesture, to question the systems of a society founded on speed, violence, disenchantment and the industrial destruction of nature.
Her instrumentation is a mix of salvaged material and new technologies: microphones, a corpus of arranged objects, vehicle suspensions, an FM synthesizer, another modular one, an old guitar, analog effects…
Her solo project is Oculus tapageur. She has collaborated with artists such as Pascal Battus, Damien Schultz and Z’EV, and forms the duo Carbon sink with Gaël Angelis.
Magali Sanheira exhibits and performs in France and abroad.
I compose from field-recordings and aim at creating a multi-movement narrative.
Then I improvise according to this structure.
02. Eriksson-Strandhag with Holm & Wiese – EMS Finissage (03:54)
Håkan Strandhag: bass, clarinet and glockenspiel.
Martin Wiese: Mandola.
Mikael Holm: online mixing.
Martin Eriksson: Mutable Instruments.
EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) Stockholm celebrates 60-year anniversary this year with an exhibition of their activities during the years at Scenkonstmuseet. The finissage of the exhibition consisted of a number of performances and Martin Eriksson and Håkan Strandhag, together with Martin Wiese and Mikael Holm performed this piece ”Sektion D1” with improvised acoustic instruments, loopers and granular samplers. Martin and Håkan has been working for some time with a method that is thought to allow surprising interaction and demands a focused listening, sensivity and awareness from the performers as well as the audience. Patterns emerge and disappears. The path in a sunny and well kept garden forks and forks and you do not notice until you are far out in the woods and it is getting late.
Due to technical difficulties there were no recording of the actual performance but this is one of the retakes that were made. Håkan Strandhag plays bass, glockenspiel and clarinet. Martin Wiese plays the mandola. Mikael Holm were mixing the different instruments and Martin Eriksson plays the looper and granular sampling. Martin Eriksson and Håkan Strandhag have been playing in many different configurations in the past. Överklassen for instance that used a more structured approach.
Since 1964, Elektronmusikstudion EMS is the centre for Swedish electroacoustic music and sound-art. EMS is run as a part of Statens musikverk (National Collections of Music, Theatre and Dance). EMS mission is according to Ordinance SFS 2021:1275 with instructions for Musikverket to: “provide studios to professional composers and sound artists in the field of electroacoustic music and sound art for production, development work and educational activities.”
https://www.elektronmusikstudion.se
Besides making professional studios available for the production of electroacoustic music and sound art, EMS’ aim is to support artistic development of electroacoustic music and its integration within other artistic areas. EMS represents electroacoustic music from Sweden in various international contexts and sees as one of its main tasks to act as an informer, both nationally and internationally. International composers regularly come to EMS to work and may be granted a working period by submitting an Artist in Residence application.
Scenkonstmuseet, the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts is in central Stockholm, housed in one of Northern Europe’s oldest preserved industrial buildings, the beautiful Kronobageriet, dating back to the 17th century. Over the years, it has been used as a bakery, an armoury, and liquor cellar. It’s as much a part of the museum as the objects and installations. The exhibition is based on the museum’s extensive collection of close to 50.000 objects which have bee naccumulated over more than 100 years. There are both Swedish and foreign objects here, including one of the world’s most important collections of musical instruments.
03. Robert Worby – Sleep Hags (03:43)
Robert Worby is a composer based in London. His work in electronic music and musique concrète is made through obsessive listening with close attention to the fine details that make up rich, complex structures. He is a member of the Langham Research Centre who use abandoned technology – tape recorders, sine wave oscillators, and other analogue devices – to make music. His works have been performed throughout the UK, in Europe and in Japan and are available on records by Langham Research Centre and on his solo LP ‘Factitious Airs’ which was released in 2019.
« Sleep Hags » is an attempt to resonate with the dark, magical powers possessed by the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is their supernatural capabilities that drive the forces within the drama. One of their most chilling lines is, ‘The charm’s wound up.’ Once this has happened nothing can undo it.
The piece uses multilayered pitches enriched by numerous feedback systems with different types of filtering that shape timbre. A contralto, singing a simple improvised melody, contrasts with the predominant electronic tones. Breath and arbitrary noise-based sounds colour the action.
Once the music gets underway, and the feedback systems begin to take over, the witches ‘charm’ weaves its magic and nothing can stop it until it has run its course.
04. Isotta Trastevere – Altro Mondo (19:19)
Composed in January 2019.
Isotta Trastevere first studied cinema, then electroacoustic music, until she obtained her PHD in practice-based research, studiyng the musical temporality of creative processes in sound art. This subject has become the main issue, the heart of her work. She plays the modular synthesizer and studies drums and percussion. She is developing a radio practice with Radio Nunc, a sound creation web radio.
« Altro Mondo » is a work comprising recordings I had made on a trip, I used a combination of sound recordings, synthesized sounds and manipulations of studio-recorded objects.
I remember isolating myself at home to finish it. I had set up the studio in the middle of the living room and for two-three days I did nothing but compose, ordering takeaway meals… In my opinion, the power of the piece comes from the particularity of the recorded landscapes – such as a marathon, a Nepalese farmer ploughing the land, a Tibetan temple gong – and their dialogue with the electronics. The electronics inhabit the space of the sound recording, creating depth. In concrete terms, I improvised on the soundscape, looking for sounds that would resonate with it, allowing me to express a color, a state of mind…
I wanted to find a humanistic, intense and elevated dimension of the real world.
The sensations I experienced after finishing the piece were both satisfaction and liberation at the same time.
05. Philippe Petit – The thoughts of a cephalopod in the throes of excitement (08:38)
Cymbalom / Piano Soundboard + Buchla 200 Analog Synthesizer
Petit has been supporting left field music since 1983 (animating radio programs, editing ‘zines + running his labels Pandemonium Rdz. and BiP_HOp Music).
Feeling lucky to release on several international labels he likes to be introduced as a « Musical-Travel-Agent » and has been performing all over Europe, Russia, Poland, Canada, USA, Mexico, Australia & Asia…
One fine Spring morning, I wanted to create a piece whose sound would be produced by setting one or more strings in vibration, simply and casually, with nothing at stake other than lending myself to the exercise.
Of course, to be able to practice easily, each instrument and a patch for the synthesizer must be well prepared. So I positioned my Cymbalom and my piano Soundboard (both amplified with multiple recessed piezzo pickups) close to the Buchla so as to be able to pull their outputs towards the envelope follower and thus generate pulses anytime I’d touch a string.
Sliding various stripes, clothespins or other objects on & between the strings.
While, on the other (synthetic) side, patching a couple oscillators into Filter, Waveshaper, Frequency Shifter, Time Domain Processing short delays, Resonator and arranging some panning actions…
The afternoon was a hectic one, punctuated by playing, and after an hour or 2 of searching for sounds, I felt the urge to develop a flexible form in the manner of those favored by composers of the early Sixties, in 2 sections whose order could easily be reversed… Keeping in mind a desire to leave space rather than occupy it, I went ahead rubbing paper, wood, knocking with mallets, rubber, metal, coton fabric and other tools to develop percussive sounds.
Caressing the resonant bodies, letting them breathe while jumping from one instrument to another, moving my arms in all directions like a horny octopus…
The thought of a cephalopod in the throes of excitement remains a concept I can only imagine, fortunately you might say… 😂🤗😏
06. Simone Keller und Martin Lorenz – Cranked Resonances (14:02)
Recorded live at Kulturhaus Helferei Zurich, Switzeerland. October 20, 2023.
Mixed by Martin Lorenz / Mastered by Rupert Clervaux.
The classically trained pianist Simone Keller moves across various styles and genres, seeks the experimental, and maintains tradition. As a bridge-builder, she is particularly committed to broadening societal access to music.
Martin Lorenz has worked as a percussionist, electronic musician, and composer in the contemporary and experimental music scene. He is the founder of the record label Dumpf Edition, which he curates together with Luc Döbereiner.
Martin Lorenz creates instrumental music and media-specific works such as sound installations, analog video works, and compositions for hand-cut vinyl. This focus on the medium characterizes his approach to the modular synthesizer.
Simone Keller and Martin Lorenz have been collaborating for a long time, whether in contemporary music, where they interpret the new compositions of microtonalist Edi Haubensak, or in the pop-oriented Trabant Echo Orchestra, with which they perform the lost compositions of Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell.
Their new project unites Simone Keller on the grand piano and Martin Lorenz on the modular synthesizer.
While Simone amplifies the inner magnetic vibrations of the piano frame using guitar pickups through a cranked guitar amp, Martin operates a compact analog modular system of oscillators, filters, and spring reverbs.
The synthesizer tracks the pitch of the piano through oscillator synchronization, a technologically archaic method rarely found outside the modular realm. In this way, the idiom of early electronics resonates in these immersive sound textures full of noise feedback and interference. The sounds of the instruments interact intensely and ultimately merge completely with the rich room acoustics.
07. Mattias Petersson – Vactrol Keys (04:26)
Mattias Petersson is a composer and performer based in Stockholm. He works with electronic music in different forms, but has also written chamber music, several operas and music for dance. His music moves seamlessly between electroacoustic, drone and noise, often with a rhythmically driven ground. In parallel with his freelancing he works as a senior lecturer in electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Petersson has been working with modular systems since 1999 and takes particular interest in combining the tactile aspects of the instruments with custom-made software and live coding.
This piece started out as an attempt to simultaneously play my piano and the Easel Command. It is an improvisation with the idiosyncrasies of the connection between the polyphonic, acoustic qualities of the piano, and the monophonic, shape-shifting sonic territories of the Easel. The two instruments are also cross-modulated with each other and fed through a cheap mixer with various feedback connections.
08. Joao Orecchia -The Littlest Bridge (08:12)
João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga was born in Brooklyn, NY to Peruvian mother and an Italian father. He grew up in the city’s mixed immigrant communities, in all their contradictory beauty, displacement and unsettledness. With a strong connection to an elusive somewhere else, Orecchia had always been drawn towards unfamiliar territory. He has become increasingly concerned with the nature of sound itself, how sound acts and how our bodies are affected by the movement and vibration of sound. This is the starting point for most of Orecchia’s current musical output. He seeks to uncover the relationships between individual sounds in movement and observe their interaction. Drawing on processes in the vein of Lucier and Reich as well as the concrete of Varése and Schaeffer, Orecchia is interested in relinquishing total control in favour of surprise and discovery, allowing music to unfold through the tactile, physical engagement with a system set into motion by a process.
My first guitar pedal was my entry into electronics. In the 90’s, I stumbled on a little looping delay that acted like a tape looper. No start and stop points, only length, from 1 – 4 seconds controlled by a knob. I would loose myself in creating little sound worlds of texture, fragmented melody and accidental rhythms. Of all the gear and instruments that have come in and out of my life over the decades, this one thing stays with me and every so often I put it in new contexts. This piece involves capturing fragments of bass clarinet, then running it through the modular synthesizer, where the sound is manipulated and the sound also triggers the synthesizer.
09. Stelios Giannoulakis (Schema Musicalis) – Waaaa! Sa-Ba-T-imp-a! (10:48)
Composer, sound designer, performer, improvising multi-instrumentalist, engineer, creative music technology researcher and educator. He holds a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition (University of Bangor Wales UK), where took place this unique project for percussion band, electroacoustic tape, and improvisation ensemble.
It was commissioned by Bangor New MusicFestival for Samba Bangor and the IMP improvisation ensemble featuring:
Rob Mackay: flute
Huw MacGregor: piano & cello
Stelios Giannoulakis: el. guitar & VCS3
Matias Strassmueler: classical guitar & keyboards
Glyn Williams: drums
Phil Lucking: trumpet
Rick Nance: trumpet
10. Fuzzybunny – Bonus Track (cut, spliced, overdubbed and remixed) (10:53)
The trio fuzzybunny is an electronic improvisation ensemble consisting of three members:
Chris Brown
Scot Gresham-Lancaster
Tim Perkis
They were formed to explore live electronic improvisations.
All three members were previously part of The Hub, a pioneering computer network band. Fuzzybunny is their latest collaborative project, focusing on high-energy, dense live improvisation and composition using an assortment of homebuilt electronic and software-based instruments.
The name for the group came from the unsuccessful idea that if they took on a “cute” name, they might be able to get a tour to Japan out of it. A naive and unsuccessful plan, but at least they released a self-titled album « Fuzzybunny » in 2001 on the Sonore label.
This was a final “Bonus Track” that the trio put together using the olded 70’s and 80’s technique of “trading tapes” and doing a remix. They passed various sound files back and forth over the course of a month or so.
Cut, spliced, overdubbed and remixed this track was not made like any other “fuzzybunny” one, but rather, constructed out of real time in their three separate home studios.
A decade before the pandemic they were training for what many were doing during the Covid crisis of 2019-2021.
11. Thomas Bey William Bailey – Live at Flotation Tank Rooms, 1st Perfect Vacuum Festival – Madison (15:47)
Thomas Bailey is an author, electronic composer, audio documentarian and occasional educator who has been active with independent music since the mid 1990s being a “multi-role” participant in the experimentally-oriented sonic subcultures of Osaka, Tokyo, Central Europe, Austin Texas and elsewhere. In addition to recording and performance duties, he has acted as a concert organizer, DJ, and radio programmer.
His personal sound work is characterized by intense, cinematic pieces that interrogate notions of utopia, social conditioning, anthropocentrism, and media saturation. Increasingly, his focus has been on re-imagining the “therapeutic” uses of sound, particularly its potential to increase a sense of agency and integration within a passive, fragmented, visuo-centric culture.
Thomas has collaborated with an array of international artists on record, live, and in other capacities (e.g. as a publisher of recorded material via his new “Fifteen Minutes of Anonymity” label). These include, but are not limited to: Francisco López, Zbigniew Karkowski, Kazuya Ishigami, Roel Meelkop, Susana López, Reverse Image, Maurizio Bianchi, Ralf Wehowsky, Alan Courtis, Leif Elggren, Rick Reed, Marc Behrens, Barbara Ellison, David Lee Myers / Arcane Device, and more.
This is part of a series of mine (now three volumes’ worth of material forthcoming!) based on notes that I took about dreams, and nightmares, in which I am performing live. These never took place in an exact facsimile of a “real” venue, but in strange confabulated spaces, some of which were dreamed up more than once. So, I’ve titled everything in this series “Live from Oneiric Spaces.” These are not “live” recordings in a traditional sense, since a lot of editing is involved, but I aimed for them to have a somewhat warm, intimate, improvised feeling and to give the impression that multiple players were involved. Because, again, that was how things were in this parallel reality.
This piece in particular was inspired by a dreamed visit to some music festival in my birthplace (Madison, Wisconsin), where I was playing music for an audience of people all confined within those sensory deprivation “flotation tanks” that have become sort of a popular spa treatment. Only in my dreams could something like this actually be a form of “spa” music….
This one features a lot of electronically treated improvisations on metallic objects (bicycle wheel spokes, a metal “fidget spinner” spinning against the strings of my bass guitar, etc.) as a counterpoint to random CV generation on my modular system and odd vocal noises generated through several different means. For the last part, I have samples of “actual” human speech, speech synthesized via a wavetable synthesis module and some created with a fairly bizarre A.I. plugin meant to convolve existing sounds. This all sounds very similar to how I hear the human voice in my dreams – people seem to communicate to me telepathically and yet still make audible speech patterns, but they are just unintelligible sounds having nothing to do with the communicated thoughts.
I think my general outlook on life involves questioning the artificial divisions created between “deep” and “superficial,” or perhaps “meaningful” and “meaningless” approaches to creativity. Applying this to audio involves finding the common qualities that are shared between our revered objects of technology and with materials and interactions that don’t seem to have any utility whatsoever. I don’t set out with any polemical reasons for working in this way, to me it’s an activity that just has to be done – like farming or gardening!
It’s fascinating, for example, to take recordings of mundane activity such as bursting bubble wrap and weave it together with some sort of pulsar synthesis. Whatever else one accomplishes with that kind of simple experiment, I think we increase our own sense of connectedness and immersion into life by finding aesthetic affinities where none were thought to exist.
12. Vosh/Moore/Barbiero – Continuous Arco for trio (06:51)
Dave Vosh: analogue modular synthesizer.
Daniel Barbiero: double bass.
Ken Moore: crystal bowls, bronze singing bowls, Strymon NightSky reverb pedal, assemblage.
Dave Vosh has been exploring electronic music since the 70`s and draws his influences from the pioneers of the 50`s, 60`s and 70`s. He has performed widely in D.C., Maryland and Virginia as a solo artist and with artists such as Ken Moore, Chris Videll, John St. John, Bev Stanton and Art Harrison. His recordings are available on the Zeromoon, Pan y Rosas and Anvil Creations netlabels.
Ken Moore: Born in Baltimore, Ken began his interest in music at age 7 with piano lessons. He began recording toy instruments, started a rock band, and wrote music for organ until college. By 1980 he was selling his music on cassettes, then quit rock for electronic music, continuing experimental music by releasing albums on Bandcamp in 2010. In Audion #5 Alan Freeman said, “His tape manipulation and avant-garde electronic works seem to be his most known style. »
Daniel Barbiero has been active in improvised and experimental music and dance in the Baltimore-Washington area as a performer, composer and ensemble leader since the early 2000s. His music is inspired by the chromatic vocabulary, open-form compositional structures, and extended performance techniques of mid-20th century Modernism. His verbal, graphic, and other scores employing nonstandard notation have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in North America, Europe, and Asia.
The initial track for “Continuous Arco” is an improvisation I recorded on 19 April 2024 for the trio project. The performance is a harmonically free and melody-driven solo played conventionally with the bow on the double bass. I felt it would provide balance for some of the other recordings I’d made, in which I’d used various extended techniques or played the bass modified with preparations – foreign objects attached to the instrument and strings. After listening back to the piece I found a passage from an April 2023 soundscape Dave had recorded on his modular rig, and mixed them together. I sent the resulting track to Ken, who took a copy of Dave’s modular synth recording and changed the pitch in order to add harmonics. He felt it needed the change to further separate it from the modular synth track on one of the other recordings we’d made. He then played bronze singing bowls and added them to the piece using the Strymon NightSky reverb pedal.
13. Richard Scott & Axel Doerner – Centrifugue 2024 revisit v2 (08:31)
AxelDörner is one of the most unique voices in free improvisation. Hedeveloped a new language for the trumpet in the late 1990s. Most of the ensembles he is part of are characterized by a non-hierarchical collaboration of the musicians involved.
Richard Scott is recognised as one of the first wave of composer-performers who helped set the scene for the recent resurgence of interest in analogue modular synthesis. For the past two decades he has been working intensely with a variety of synthesisers, technologies, methods and musical forms.
Both have been collaborating intensively since 2015 and since then have released four recordings of their work. Live concerts have featured in unusual and atmospheric locations; the giant echoing brick water tanks in Prenzlauerberg, a badly converted accountacy office in Neukölln, the tiny arched cellar of an ex-butchery, a dilapidated 19th century theatre and the smallest public cinema in the city. This piece was recorded in the celler of that cinema, and a version of it was included on their first duet release, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Sound Anatomy). Richard remixed this extended version in August 2024. Axel is playing trumpet, stereo microphones and self-processing with Max MSP and a self-designed controller. Richard plays a eurorack modular and guitar pedals, he is not processing Axel.
Richard, with a background in electroacoustic composition and improvisation, works with analogue synthesisers and processors, often in multichannel formats. Axel, for many years one of Europe’s most curious and experimental trumpeters, performs with a remarkable extended instrument, with customised hardware and software created by Sukandar Kartadinata. Over the last few years he has developed a considerable and often surprising virtuosity on this new instrument. The music they make together does not conform to any expectations of improvised or electroacoustic music, drawing freely from both and seeing no contradiction between composition, improvisation and installation, electronic and acoustic; it is simultaneously all of these. Each performance being a unique response to the particular character and detail of the space it is created in.
14. Rick Reger – Gamelan Dream (06:41)
Rick Reger lives in the Chicago area and makes music using vintage-based keyboards and synthesizers: Arp 2600, VCS3, Hohner D6 Clavinet, Fender Rhodes, Mellotron Mk. VI, Mellotron M4000D Mini, Moog Voyager, Hammond organ. From 2012-2015, he was a member of The Margots, with Ken Vandermark and Tim Daisy. He contributed a wonderful Session for us, #80 and early in 2025, the label Aural Terrains will be issuing a CD of his original soundscapes titled: “Textures and Tonalities for Analogue Synthesizers and Percussion.”
I’ve been working with acoustic percussion and modular synthesizers for a number of years. For me, both instruments can generate very interesting harmonics and overtones. I’ve found that blending those sounds together can create amazing symmetries and contrasts. I had recently purchased an acoustic tongue drum called an Electro-sphere from Azzam Bells in Italy. I loved the sounds it made, which reminded me a bit of Indonesian gamelans. So I was eager to start recording it.
A number of years ago, I composed some music that used Indonesian “slendro” scales, and I had downloaded rain forest sound samples to accompany that piece. I realized I still had those samples and that again made me think of creating a soundscape with an Indonesian vibe.
I then started patching my VCS3 and Arp 2600 to see if I could find some compatible sounds. Sometimes when I approach synthesizers with particular types of sounds in mind, I hit dead ends and have to go in a different direction. But in this case I quickly started to come up with what seemed like very usable sounds.
Everything seemed to come together very smoothly, and it resulted in “Gamelan Dream.”
I used the VCS3 and the Arp 2600 because they never fail in helping me come up with interesting new sounds. As I mentioned above, I used the Azzam Bells Electro-sphere primarily because I had just purchased it. I loved the sounds and was eager to start recording with it. I also used my 32” heng gong because it seemed very compatible with the concept behind the piece. It also provides wonderful low-end harmonics, and there was definitely low frequency space available in the mix given the other instruments involved.
I typically record long (six-to-10 minute) blocks of sound with synthesizers and percussion instruments. Then I look for places to weave them into and out of a mix so that they merge or contrast in a way that sounds pleasing or interesting and creates a narrative momentum for the piece.
Sometimes I end up having to delete a track because it’s just not working with anything else in the mix. Other times I’ll play various percussion instruments over a recorded synth track to explore how they sound together and see if something appealing emerges.