Acous­tron­ique V

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 5 which I chose to limit to 2 hours so as to keep it di­gest…

01. Kathryn & Scot Gre­sham Lan­caster – Sexus (06:28)
Kathryn Gresham-​Lancaster is a writer, play­wright, per­former, and teacher cur­rently liv­ing in Brunswick, Maine. She co-​founded a pup­pet troupe and wrote and per­formed chil­dren’s pup­pet shows in schools fes­ti­vals and pri­vate homes. She has spent much of her life in Oak­land, CA where she taught pro­grams in pup­petry, play­writ­ing, and an on­go­ing arts pro­gram for par­ents and chil­dren. She has writ­ten and acted in per­for­mance art pieces in the SF Bay area + has pub­lished poems, short sto­ries and flash fic­tion in a num­ber of lit­er­ary jour­nals and two print an­tholo­gies.
Scot Gre­sham Lan­caster is a com­poser, per­former, in­stru­ment builder and pi­o­neer in the use of Mod­u­lar Syn­the­sizer (work­ing for Buchla and Serge back in the early days) and ed­u­ca­tor work­ing at the bound­ary be­tween sci­ence and art, specif­i­cally de­vel­op­ing ad­vanced tech­niques in soni­fi­ca­tion. He does re­search and per­for­mance using the ex­pand­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties of com­puter net­works to cre­ate new en­vi­ron­ments for cross-​discipline ex­pres­sion. His in­ter­est is in the be­hav­ior of in­ter­con­nected music ma­chines to cre­ate in­no­v­a­tive ways for per­form­ers and com­put­ers to in­ter­act. Gre­sham Lan­caster has col­lab­o­rated in »co-​located« per­for­mances in real time over net­works. He has worked with mul­ti­me­dia pro­to­typ­ing and user in­ter­face the­ory.

« Sexus » was first pub­lished in 1949. It is the first vol­ume of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Cru­ci­fix­ion tril­ogy. This au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal novel ex­plores his tu­mul­tuous re­la­tion­ships, cre­ative strug­gles, and sex­ual ex­pe­ri­ences, delv­ing into themes of de­sire, free­dom, and self-​discovery.
This was a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Kathryn and Scot Gresham-​Lancaster in the fall of 1983. Al­though the voice sounds like a man, this was voiced by Kathryn and pitched down an oc­tave to make it sound more in a man’s voice range. Richard Zvonar, of Dia­manda Galas fame, lent the Even­tide H949 Har­mo­nizer to do this task. The ex­cerpts were cho­sen by Kathryn from var­i­ous parts of the book and recorded by her in the liv­ing room of their Oak­land home. The voice track was then used in a live per­for­mance at the In­ter­sec­tion Gallery on Union St. in San Fran­cisco.
Later the ma­te­r­ial from that per­for­mance was ex­cerpted and remixed at the Mills Cen­ter for Con­tem­po­rary Music with some as­sis­tance from Ed­ward Ty­wa­niak. The in­stru­ments used were a Buchla 400 sys­tem pro­to­type on loan from Don Buchla to CCM, Scot’s six panel Serge Mod­u­lar, Lex­i­con Super Prime­Time and PCM70 and the afore­men­tioned Even­tide Har­mo­nizer.
This piece is the recorded part of the live per­for­mance. Kathryn per­formed the sec­tions re­gard­ing the char­ac­ter “June/Mara” live with the slides, set pieces and shadow pup­pets which were, un­for­tu­nately, not recorded.

02. Om­lopp (Astrid & Mar­cus Wrangö) – Abra­sive Surge (09:04)
Serge 73-75 Mod­u­lar sys­tem: Mar­cus Wrangö
Bowed Cym­bal and Ac­cor­dion: Astrid Wrangö

Om­lopp is a duo that con­sists of Astrid and Mar­cus Wrangö, based in Avesta, Swe­den. Heav­ily in­spired by the sur­round­ing dark wood­lands and the aban­doned in­dus­trial premises of local mines and in­dus­tries.
Astrid is a graph­i­cal artist and il­lus­tra­tor who has stud­ied art and de­sign at Kon­st­skolan in Stock­holm. Cur­rently she ex­plores ink draw­ing and em­broi­dery fo­cus­ing on the body as a shape. She plays the ac­cor­dion, gui­tar and lately the banjo. Astrid is fas­ci­nated by sound char­ac­ter­is­tics of acoustic in­stru­ments and likes to ex­plore the am­bi­gu­ity of noise.
Mar­cus is a com­poser and au­dio­vi­sual artist work­ing with mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers, pro­gram­ming and spa­tial audio. He has stud­ied Elec­troa­coustic music at Royal Col­lege of Music in Stock­holm. Mar­cus teaches elec­troa­cousti­cal music at Got­lands School of Com­pos­ing in Visby and works as ton­meis­ter at Au­dio­rama in Stock­holm. He has al­ways had an urge to ex­plore the outer re­gions of whats pos­si­ble to hear, do or per­form. Mar­cus loves pure sinewaves, bass and super high fre­quen­cies.
He plays Serge mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers and builds his own soft­wares.

We usu­ally stum­ble on cer­tain sounds dur­ing late night ex­plo­rations, and often we work with a com­bi­na­tion of im­pro­vi­sa­tion and com­posed forms. In « Abra­sive Surge » the waves of mod­u­lar sounds is coun­ter­pointed by Ac­cor­dion and cym­bal and evolves into a grow­ing surge of calm un­du­la­tions.
Astrid plays the ac­cor­dion and we find it fas­ci­nat­ing how it blends with elec­tron­ics, some­times al­most seam­less, but at the same time of­fers the phys­i­cal ran­dom­ness of the acoustic in­stru­ment. The cym­bal on the other hand was a sud­den dis­cov­ery. Mar­cus showed her how to use the bow on it and it was love at first sound! The noisy screeches mixed with dark sus­tained hums were ex­tremely sat­is­fy­ing. Also the un­pre­dictabil­ity of the sounds made it al­most im­pos­si­ble to stop ex­plor­ing.
Usu­ally Mar­cus be­gins with an idea or a vi­sion for the elec­tron­ics. Astrid then joins with acoustic in­stru­ments, im­pro­vis­ing and ex­plor­ing ef­fects and sounds that ei­ther fuses or con­trasts against the elec­tronic sound­scape. We often choose to ex­plore sound worlds in the twi­light zone where the aural dif­fer­ences be­tween elec­tronic and acoustic sounds melt to­gether or get dif­fuse.

03. Philippe Petit & Mar­tin Archer – aba•dum raba•dum ba•dum (7:58)
P. Petit plays Pre­pared Piano Sound­board + Buchla 200 Syn­the­sizer
M. Archer plays Sax­o­phones

When I work solo it is very im­por­tant that I be per­form­ing every in­stru­ment (whether record­ing the world around me or play­ing mod­u­lar, blow­ing in some processed Ka­zoos or pluck­ing strings) any­thing the lis­tener would hear com­ing from my play­ing. Though It may hap­pen that I am after a spe­cific color or sound which I can­not pro­duce my­self, and in search of such di­ver­sity and ex­change I feel lucky to be able to count on some tal­ented friends.

Mar­tin Archer draws in­spi­ra­tion from both free-​jazz and con­tem­po­rary avant­garde music. He plays so­pranino, so­prano, alto, tenor and bari­tone sax­o­phones, clar­inets, recorders, key­boards, and mod­u­lar in­stru­ments.
A com­poser and im­pro­viser equally at home on stage or in the stu­dio, di­vid­ing his en­er­gies be­tween jazz and non jazz projects. He op­er­ates Dis­cus Music label, and amaong other col­lab­o­ra­tions is in a long stand­ing duo with vo­cal­ist Julie Tip­petts, the 2 piece nu-​jazz and elec­tron­ics trio In­clu­sion Prin­ci­ple, im­pro­vis­ing left­field rock groups Das Rad and Or­ches­tra Of The Upper At­mos­phere, and 30 voice per­for­mance art choir Jux­tavoices… And he’s been re­leas­ing records since 1987…

Rather than think­ing in terms of scores or other fixed struc­tures, I wanted to take a FREE ap­proach; not nec­es­sar­ily Free-​Jazz which over the years has be­come clas­sic in forms, but sim­ply a leap onto the in­stru­ment, if I can put it that way.
I pre­pared the piano frame and po­si­tioned my Buchla 200 syn­the­sizer in front of it so as to be able to pull ca­bles to its en­ve­lope fol­low­ers, and so that at every “touch of string”, the mod­u­lar could be trig­gered. Of course, this prepa­ra­tion took a cer­tain amount of time, which al­lowed me to re­flect on my mu­si­cal de­sire, its rhythm, in­ter­vals, si­lences and noise zones, but at the same time there re­mained an un­cer­tainty, an artis­tic vague­ness al­low­ing me to lose my­self wher­ever and when­ever I wished… Once I’d found my way back, I could pass it on to Mar­tin who graced my work adding 3 takes play­ing Alto, So­pranino and Bari­tone Sax­o­phones… 

04. Felix Kubin with En­sem­ble Res­o­nanz – Tele­pho­bie (04:51)
2020 (ex­cerpt). For string en­sem­ble and elec­tron­ics
Elec­tron­ics: Felix Kubin
Strings: En­sem­ble Res­o­nanz
Recorded at Res­o­nanzraum, Ham­burg
Record­ing en­gi­neer: Karola Parry

Felix Kubin’s artis­tic uni­verse com­prises fu­tur­is­tic pop, Hörspiele (radio plays), elec­troa­coustic music, lec­ture per­for­mances and com­po­si­tions for or­ches­tra.
Since the end of the 90s he runs his own vinyl label Gagarin Records and has per­formed at hun­dreds of in­ter­na­tional fes­ti­vals, un­der­ground clubs and art in­sti­tu­tions in­clud­ing MoMA PS1, Sonar, Trans­me­di­ale/CTM, Un­sound, Moers Fes­ti­val, Märzmusik, Présences Elec­tron­iques, Ga­lerie na­tionale du Jeu de Paume and Ars Elec­tron­ica.
In 2019, the French film maker Marie Losier por­trayed him in her docu-​phantasma “Felix in Won­der­land” which ran on ARTE TV. Two of his most es­tab­lished re­cent col­lab­o­ra­tions are the sequencer-​duo CEL with the Pol­ish drum­mer Hu­bert Zem­ler and a se­ries of mul­ti­phonic au­dio­vi­sual works in pub­lic space with the video and per­for­mance artist Josephin Böttger.

« Tele­pho­bie » was com­mis­sioned by the Hamburg-​based renowned string or­ches­tra En­sem­ble Res­o­nanz. I com­posed the piece dur­ing the be­gin­ning of the Covid lock­downs, and I be­lieve it is un­con­sciously tinted by the un­easy si­lence and threat­en­ing un­cer­tainty that came with the pan­demic. The orig­i­nal ver­sion is about 15 min long and con­sists of four parts. What we hear in this ex­tract is part III.
The piece is based on a hand-​drawn graphic score that is used in a dou­ble way:
On the one hand, I play it with a custom-​built in­stru­ment called “Lichtscan­ner“, a de­vice that can turn black and white im­ages into dig­i­tal data by mov­ing it over the draw­ings. In this piece, the data con­trol a va­ri­ety of gran­u­lar sam­ples.
On the other hand, the score is si­mul­ta­ne­ously in­ter­preted by six string in­stru­ments. The play­ing tech­niques of the graphic sym­bols were de­vel­oped to­gether with the En­sem­ble Res­o­nanz.
The first read­ing of the score is non­lin­ear, the sec­ond one lin­ear. In order to achieve a more ho­mo­ge­neous blend of acoustic and elec­tronic tim­bres, I in­cluded both sam­ples of the strings them­selves in the gran­u­lar sam­pler and asked the play­ers to cre­ate some ab­stract, quasi-​electronic sounds.

05. An­to­nio Russek – Tla­j­paloli (15:04)
An­to­nio Raúl Russek Martínez is a Mex­i­can com­poser of elec­troa­coustic music and con­sid­ered a pi­o­neer of sound art in Mex­ico.
In 1973, he moved to Mex­ico City and started to com­pose music for plays + began the con­struc­tion of ‘mu­si­cal ob­jects’, mo­ti­vated by the de­sire to unite the sound and the vi­sual. In 1974 Russek set up his per­sonal elec­troa­coustic music stu­dio in the Con­desa neigh­bour­hood, be­com­ing the first of its kind in Mex­ico. He founded the Cen­tro In­de­pen­di­ente de Investigación Mu­si­cal y Mul­ti­me­dia (CIIMM) in 1978 and there he car­ried out mu­si­cal pro­duc­tion, sound set­tings for ex­hi­bi­tions, record­ing, as well as pub­li­ca­tions, ed­i­to­r­ial and aca­d­e­mic work.

Tla­j­paloli” means gift in the Nahu­atl lan­guage and is ded­i­cated to my col­league and dear friend Roberto Morales, cel­e­brat­ing our most re­cent col­lab­o­ra­tion with more than 40 years of friend­ship and shared projects.
All sound ma­te­ri­als were ob­tained di­rectly from the eu­ro­rack mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer I’ve been build­ing re­cently, sourced with orig­i­nal acoustic sam­ples cre­ated from field record­ings and sound ob­jects.

06. Kumo (Jono Pod­more) – Fruits de mer (Santé du fer) (09:01)
Jono Pod­more aka Kumo is Pro­fes­sor of the Prac­tice of Pop­u­lar Music at the pres­ti­gious Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, Ger­many.
He has been work­ing under his Kumo alias across mul­ti­ple re­leases, live per­for­mances and DJ sets world­wide; col­lab­o­rat­ing with artists as di­verse as Can, The Shamen, Jamiro­quai, Meta­mono, Swan­tje Licht­en­stein, Johny Brown and Jhe­lisa An­der­son. The lyri­cal strains of Pod­more’s theremin, more re­cently the san­shin, and his work with writ­ers, vi­sual artists and in the film in­dus­try, all con­tinue to push bound­aries.
He’s a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to music and cul­ture mag­a­zines incl. The Qui­etus, co-​wrote and edited the book Jaki Liebezeit (2020) about the mas­ter drum­mer, and co-​hosts Talk to the Chip, a pod­cast and monthly radio show on Res­o­nance FM.
Jono hails from Liv­er­pool and lives with his synths in SE Lon­don where he teaches Tai Chi. He is cur­rently writ­ing a major book about drugs and the music in­dus­try, and de­vel­op­ing a fea­ture film based on Byron’s epic poem The Gi­aour.

In Jan­u­ary I met my friend Toby Izui for lunch in Hara­juku, Tokyo. He told me a friend of his, Gen­shi, had died and left him his col­lec­tion of in­stru­ments, and that he was hav­ing trou­ble find­ing homes for them all. Who in Tokyo would want a set of bag­pipes, for ex­am­ple? An­other dif­fi­cult one was the Ok­i­nawan Jamisen. Un­known to Toby I’d wanted one of these in­stru­ments for many years, and so a lit­tle later I was in his flat tak­ing the Jamisen (or San­shin) off his hands.
“The san­shin is held in great re­spect among the Ryukyuan cul­ture, and is often viewed as an in­stru­ment that car­ries the voice of the deities, and is re­garded as a deity it­self.” It’s a 3 string in­stru­ment, the top and bot­tom strings an oc­tave apart. Its ori­gins are an­cient, per­haps Egypt­ian, and it came to Ok­i­nawa from
main­land China, later to end up in Japan to be de­vel­oped in to the Shamisen. In sharp con­trast to my other main in­stru­ment the theremin, the dy­namic pro­file of the San­shin is all about at­tack and short decay. In « Fruit de Mer, Santé du Fer » I used a va­ri­ety of tech­niques to make con­tinua from this al­most per­cus­sive sound: stretch­ing, loop­ing, tonal re­ver­ber­a­tions from pi­anos and gongs, dis­tor­tion, feed­back, etc., cre­at­ing a se­ries of con­stantly chang­ing lay­ers, not un­like how the sea ap­pears to peo­ple liv­ing on is­lands such as Ok­i­nawa. These con­tinua I then fed through Low Pass Gates which I trig­gered with rhythms from is­land cul­tures, not just Ok­i­nawa but also the Caribbean and be­yond, hence the title.

07. Eriksson-​Strandhag with Holm & Wiese – EMS Finis­sage 2 (09:02)
Mar­tin Eriks­son is an Ar­chi­tect work­ing in many fields. He is con­nected to Elek­tron­musik­stu­dion in Stock­holm, EMS.
Håkan Strand­hag is a film pro­ducer liv­ing in Gothen­burg and play­ing with many dif­fer­ent bands. Per­haps most no­table with Re­fused for some time in the nineties. Mar­tin and Håkan have been play­ing in many dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions for years.
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 was a num­ber of per­for­mances by among oth­ers Mari Kretz, Paul Pignon and Eva Sidén.
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.

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.”
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.

08. Bush Fash­ion (Mathew Wat­son & Dave Brown) – C (06:30)
Bush Fash­ion is an im­pro­vi­sa­tional duo made up of Dave Brown (Pa­t­eras/Bax­ter/Brown, Can­dlesnuffer, Buck­etrider, Brown.Buck.Mayas) & Mat Wat­son (Solar Cells, ULMD, Taipan Tiger Girls). The seed of Bush Fash­ion grew from their in­fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tion over the past decade in Mel­bounre’s ex­per­i­men­tal music scene. Bush Fash­ion ex­plores non-​conformist, col­lab­o­ra­tive mu­si­cal lan­guage util­is­ing a treated hol­low body gui­tar and ma­trix pro­gram­ma­ble portable mod­u­lar sys­tem. Their per­for­mances are a wash of nu­anced alien lan­guage, call and re­sponse, and en­tan­gled human en­ergy, re­veal­ing new re­al­i­ties to the lis­tener.

Our col­lab­o­ra­tions have usu­ally con­sisted of treated gui­tar and Syn­thi Aks.
These pieces were recorded in one pass a few months ago using a semi-​acoustic Gib­son ES135 elec­tric gui­tar in con­junc­tion with a range of the Gamechanger brand gui­tar ped­als and an Erica Syn­trx.
We ap­proach our record­ings the same way we ap­proach a live per­for­mance: no talk­ing, just lis­ten, re­spond and ex­plore.
Though there is some tonal con­tent and fret­ting, Dave Brown uses the elec­tric gui­tar as more of a tone gen­er­a­tor and then plays the stomp boxes.
Mat Wat­son only works with elec­tronic sources but loves the sense he gets from hear­ing strings res­onat­ing and mem­branes vi­brat­ing in the room.

09. Car­bon Sink (Ma­g­ali San­heira & Gael An­ge­lis) – End­less Sum­mer (10:53)
Car­bon Sink s a duo formed by Ma­g­ali San­heira and Gael An­ge­lis.
They in­vite us to enter in an elec­tric world, crossed by AC high volt­ages, and by elec­tro­mag­netic waves of lu­mi­nous gases.

This im­pro­vi­sa­tion piece was first per­formed at Bruis­tisme fes­ti­val, in Le Meine, France.
We wanted to re­turn to our ear­li­est in­spi­ra­tions, the ones that led us to make music in the first place.
Drum­ming in­flu­enced by Ed Black­well, Rachid Ali and Mil­ford Graves, and a deep, in­ti­mate elec­tronic sound with a cer­tain touch of grav­ity that draws on Tan­ger­ine Dream, Noc­tur­nal Emis­sion and Brume. The idea was to cre­ate a kind of free jazz that was both dark and psy­che­delic, with drums and synth in­stru­men­ta­tion. An FM tape gen­er­a­tor cou­pled with a mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer set the scene, over which the drums, trig­gered by a mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer, were ac­ti­vated.
Syn­co­pated, er­ratic rhythms, fol­low­ing the rhythm of a so­ci­ety that takes one step for­ward and two steps back, of a tragic psy­chol­ogy, the kind that goes be­yond melan­choly.
And as in all tragedies, it’s the end that gives mean­ing to the story, that of an end­less sum­mer.

10. Wil­fried Thierry – Do­de­ca­phonic Tones And Lay­ered Per­cus­sions (05:54)
Sound and vi­sual artist, Wil­fried Thierry ex­plores dif­fer­ent mu­si­cal ap­proaches and com­poses for the­ater and cin­ema, cre­ates art per­for­mances and in­stal­la­tions.

I chose to use acoustic drums with my Buchla sys­tem. The drums are the in­stru­ment that led me to music by chance when I was a teenager. Even though there were pe­ri­ods in my life when this in­stru­ment was more or less present, I al­ways came back to it when­ever I could.
For the past two years, I’ve been ex­plor­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of recre­at­ing the har­monic and phase-​shifting ef­fects of acoustic per­cus­sion using the Buchla syn­the­sizer (for in­stance in Per­cepts pub­lished in « Buch­laisms V »). When Philippe Petit in­vited me to cre­ate a piece mix­ing acoustics and elec­tron­ics, it seemed ob­vi­ous to me to pur­sue this work on the acoustic prop­er­ties of per­cus­sion, and the two pieces cre­ated on this oc­ca­sion are two dif­fer­ent ex­plo­rations of the same sub­ject.

11. Jack­son White – 8.244 for Pri­mordium and Mod­u­lar Syn­the­sizer (05:39)
Jack­son White was born into a fam­ily of mu­si­cians in Toronto. Jack cur­rently lives in Mon­treal with Anna and his 2 cats. Jack at­tended Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity’s Elec­troa­coustic Stud­ies pro­gram and earned a BFA Spe­cial­iza­tion in Elec­troa­coustic Record­ing Arts. His mu­si­cal in­ter­ests and pur­suits are an eclec­tic mix of hard core elec­tron­ics, psy­che­delic rock, song­writ­ing and per­form­ing with his brother Max and their band Har­mony on Mars.
As an elec­tronic music com­poser and per­former his music has been heard in dance, film, an­i­ma­tion and as a mem­ber of CLORK (Con­cor­dia Lap­top Orkestra). As a drum­mer and bass player he is a reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tor in Montréal and Toronto’s indie club scene.

In­spi­ra­tion for this piece came from the in­stru­ments and many hours I’ve spent in Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity’s music stu­dio 8.244. The piece opens with phrases played on a cus­tom in­stru­ment called the “Pri­mordium”. It is an acoustic per­for­mance sound­board con­sist­ing of piano strings, bolts, metal rods, small nails, sand­pa­per with var­i­ous other pieces and tex­tures at­tached to a res­o­nant board at­tached to a wall in the stu­dio. It can be ac­ti­vated with fin­gers, sticks, brushes, gui­tar picks etc. As the music pro­gresses, sounds and phrases from the stu­dio’s mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer join in and begin to in­ter­act with the open­ing acoustic sounds. By the end of the piece the two streams merge cre­at­ing an ac­tive drone which is a syn­ergy of the acoustic and elec­tronic sounds. The elec­tronic sounds were cre­ated with the stu­dio’s mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer which is a mix­ture of mod­ules from Make Noise and Mu­ta­ble In­stru­ments that are aug­ment­ing the orig­i­nal pure Doepfer sys­tem from my first years. Truly a fun and won­der­ful in­stru­ment to play. The evo­lu­tion of this synth over the past few years has been guided and crafted by both stu­dents and in­struc­tors of Con­cor­dia’s Music De­part­ment. The in­ten­tion of the piece is to merge the two worlds of acoustic and elec­tronic sources and ex­plore the small de­tails that the col­li­sions and lay­ers of sound the Pri­mordium and synth cre­ate.
The piece is ded­i­cated to the pro­fes­sors and stu­dents I was for­tu­nate to meet and learn from while study­ing at Con­cor­dia.

12. Ilia Be­lorukov – The Road Was Slightly Down­hill (6:33)
Eu­ro­rack mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer, Nord Mod­u­lar G2 Demo, flu­teo­phone, drums, radio, field record­ings, soft­ware pro­cess­ing.

Ilia Be­lorukov is a mu­si­cian from Saint Pe­ters­burg, Rus­sia, now based in Novi Sad, Ser­bia. He works in im­pro­vised, noise and elec­troa­coustic music. Ilia prac­tices an ex­per­i­men­tal ap­proach to sound ex­trac­tion using sax­o­phone, mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers and
other in­stru­ments. His works have been re­leased on la­bels such as Clean Feed, SOFA, Mov­ing Fur­ni­ture, As­tral Spir­its, No­tice Record­ings, Raw Tonk, Mikro­ton and many oth­ers. He founded the In­tonema label and was one of cu­ra­tors of Spina!Rec label.

So far my main ap­proach is to con­struct sound pieces with­out some­thing else be­hind.
Very rarely I use some nar­ra­tive from other sources, and only after pieces are cre­ated I can give it some ‘po­etic’ title.
I used record­ings I made on my re­cent Eu­ro­rack mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer, Nord Mod­u­lar G2 Demo, flu­teo­phone, se­lected drums and also in­cluded radio and processed field record­ings. Al­most all the sounds were processed in one way or an­other. Usu­ally I start to cre­ate a new piece by lis­ten­ing to what record­ings I have on the com­puter. It can be dif­fer­ent sound sources and not only re­cent record­ings, but some­thing from the past. After that I try to find a good match of two-​three sounds of raw ma­te­r­ial. When I catch the very basic skele­ton of sound con­text, I begin to work on de­tails, add more sounds and lay­ers and cre­ate a form of the piece. Usu­ally the final re­sult is quite far from the first ver­sion, but the core idea is still present.
One of the most in­ter­est­ing tasks is how to cre­ate a space for all the sound sources I’m using. All of them have dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics, dif­fer­ent acoustics and in the case of elec­tron­ics usu­ally no acoustics at all, only line sig­nals. Lately for syn­the­sizer I’m work­ing to shape the sound with IR im­pulses of dif­fer­ent gui­tar or bass amps and com­bine source line sig­nal with mod­i­fied sound with im­pulses. It makes a big dif­fer­ence al­ready, and lately I need to do less post-​processing for the syn­the­sizer’s sig­nal, it sounds more ‘acoustic’ and nowa­days I like it more.
Next step is to add proper re­ver­ber­a­tion to it, to make it sound even more acoustic and place it in the space. In this piece acoustic in­stru­ments, flu­teo­phone and drums, were processed quite a lot, and the idea was to make it sound more ‘elec­tronic’ than it is in re­al­ity. Also I used mul­ti­lay­er­ing tech­nique for flu­teo­phone.

13. Thibault Au­the­man – Oc­tavia has stolen the horse of her Mas­ter to see Jesus (03:21)
Hack­ing the in­vis­i­ble, sub­vert­ing sci­en­tific mod­els, de­vel­op­ing the tech­nol­ogy of use­less­ness are some of the di­rec­tions that Thibault Au­the­man is fol­low­ing in his sound and art prac­tice. A re­search ini­ti­ated by the frag­mented re­al­ity of tech­nol­ogy and the urban com­plex­ity sur­round­ing the giant mega­lopo­lis that is now col­o­niz­ing the space in be­tween the in­hab­ited world. Sound ex­per­i­ments re­lated to emerg­ing phe­nom­ena, en­tropy and chaos the­ory rep­re­sent the core of the artist re­search.
In re­cent years the prac­tice has shifted to­wards al­go­rith­mic com­po­si­tions and AI de­vel­op­ment.
After liv­ing for 17 years in Lon­don the artist has cho­sen a more no­madic ap­proach, pre­sent­ing ARW Ac­ci­den­tal Radio Waves, an itin­er­ant project using the speci­ficity of the phys­i­cal data present on every site to com­pose and im­pro­vise a sound per­for­mance.

A closed cir­cuit be­tween the out­put and input on a small audio mixer is mod­u­lat­ing the noise of a small AM/FM re­ceiver tuned in be­tween sta­tions. Dur­ing the ex­per­i­ment the sound sug­gest­ing a horse gal­lop­ing be­came ap­par­ent. I thought of a men rid­ing first then I saw a woman. The rides sounds both des­per­ate and hope­ful, then I un­der­stood that she must have been run­ning away and equally wishes to reach for some­thing else. I don’t know if she will suc­ceed, it is the in­ten­sity of the rides that mat­ters. The story came after, once I lis­tened to the record­ing. I be­lieve she must have been a slave to risk death for some­thing still quite un­cer­tain. A means to test her faith. At the same time she has stolen and must see to be­lieve and that’s given her flesh and bones, human with flaws….a strong char­ac­ter. The drone like fre­quen­cies ris­ing in the back­ground are made with a small mod­u­lar set up on the same note but dif­fer­ent oc­taves, Hence Oc­tavia, At the time of Jesus she would have been a Roman slave. Slave wouldn’t have names but they could have num­bers maybe in posh fam­ily or she had a name be­fore and she was made a slave…Don’t know.
Has she found Jesus ? Don’t know. But with that ride she made her life worth liv­ing.

14. Thanos Chrysakis – In­side For­est Sum­mer Rhap­sody (09:04)
Thanos Chrysakis is a Greek com­poser, mu­si­cian, pro­ducer and sound-​artist. He is best known for his work in elec­tronic and con­tem­po­rary music, im­pro­vi­sa­tion, and electro-​acoustic music who has re­leased sev­eral al­bums and per­formed in nu­mer­ous coun­tries.
He op­er­ates the Aural Ter­rains record label since 2007 + has writ­ten music for mu­si­cians of the Hy­pe­r­ion En­sem­ble, the Stock­holm Sax­o­phone Quar­tet, the Her­mes En­sem­ble, the Nemø En­sem­ble, the Konus Sax­o­phone Quar­tett, and the Shadanga Duo among oth­ers. Close col­lab­o­ra­tions with Tim Hodgkin­son, Vin­cent Royer, Chris Cundy, Yoni Sil­ver, Lori Freed­man, Jason Alder, Julie Kjaer, Hen­ri­ette Jensen, William Lang, Wil­frido Ter­razas, Philippe Brunet, Wade Matthews, Ernesto Ro­drigues, Ove Volquartz to name but a few…

I’ve spent a few weeks over the sum­mer liv­ing very close to a for­est where I did a lot of walk­ing while there. It felt so ex­u­ber­ant to be part of this land­scape. Upon re­turn­ing back to my place I con­tin­ued work­ing on some music and among other pieces I worked on In­side For­est, Sum­mer Rhap­sody.
In­cor­po­rat­ing some record­ings of alto flute and acoustic gui­tar as well as some small per­cus­sion in­stru­ments.
In ad­di­tion, record­ings play­ing Clavia Nord Mod­u­lar G2, Moog Voy­ager rack and some processed field record­ings.
I wanted to con­trast an elec­tronic part with a some­what sub­ter­ranean qual­ity to a more ges­tural and sparky acoustic part. I knew that I had made sev­eral record­ings in the past ex­per­i­ment­ing with the flutes and I wanted to fore­ground those against a more gritty earthy tex­ture.

15. Rick Reger – Sum­mer of the Ci­cada (09:33)
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’s been play­ing key­boards since he was 12 years old. 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.”

When I was asked to con­tribute to Acous­tron­ique, I was de­lighted be­cause my work typ­i­cally blends elec­tronic and acoustic sounds. I have a num­ber of per­cus­sion in­stru­ments I often use, and I was eager to use some for this piece.
But I had a small prob­lem. It was the sum­mer­time, and the area where I live was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the emer­gence of 17-year and 13-year ci­cadas. That’s a mas­sive num­ber of ci­cadas, and I knew from ex­pe­ri­ence that record­ing per­cus­sion with mics would be dif­fi­cult be­cause the ci­cada “singing” would in­evitably bleed into the record­ings.
Then one day it oc­curred to me that I shouldn’t see this as a prob­lem. I should ac­tu­ally record the ci­cadas and use them as one of the sounds in a piece. I was able to get a fairly clean field record­ing of them, and I was off to the races in terms of build­ing a piece around that sound.
Aside from my ci­cada field record­ing and my VCS3 and Arp 2600 synths (which are a stan­dard part of my process), I used a gong with very small fric­tion mal­lets, a rain­stick and a clavinet played through wah, cho­rus, flange and delay ped­als.
I wanted the piece to evoke the hot, very humid am­bi­ence of mid-​July in the Chicago area. The rain­stick im­me­di­ately came to mind be­cause it has such a sparse, sandy, desert-​like sound. I tried a num­ber of fric­tion mal­lets on my 32” gong and found that using very small mal­lets elicited a very com­pat­i­ble sound with what I was get­ting from the synths. For me, the gong sounds evoked the image of ra­di­ant heat ris­ing from a side­walk.

To marry the elec­tronic with the acoustic my process is often a mix­ture of know­ing in­stinc­tively what sounds might work well to­gether with tak­ing time to ex­per­i­ment and try dif­fer­ent ap­proaches out.
Often, I just start out with a per­cus­sion sound or a synth sound that seems in­ter­est­ing to me. I’ll record it, and then I’ll play dif­fer­ent sounds on top of that basic track and see how it sounds. So there’s def­i­nitely a hit-​or-miss as­pect to this.
Other times, I’ll have a very clear idea in mind of a sound that would be com­pat­i­ble in an in­ter­est­ing way, and I’ll just put to­gether a synth patch that aims for that type of sound.
I’ve been buy­ing gui­tar ef­fects ped­als for a num­ber of years, and I plan on ac­quir­ing more in the near fu­ture. I enjoy the process of chain­ing them to­gether and run­ning ei­ther synths or per­cus­sion through them to see what comes out.
On this par­tic­u­lar piece, I thought a sound like a dis­tant pedal steel gui­tar would sound good on the outro. And I was able to ad­just my clavinet pedal board so that the clavinet would gen­er­ate long, sus­tained tones in­stead of the usual dry, quick at­tack and decay. The first sev­eral sounds I got from the clavinet weren’t work­ing the way I’d hoped. But I even­tu­ally hit on a sound that I think blends in very nicely. Iron­i­cally, it sounds very much like a piano played through a Leslie speaker.
So my process is a com­bi­na­tion of in­spi­ra­tion, ex­per­i­men­ta­tion and, frankly, dumb luck some­times!