Cover Art : BAS MANTEL / Conception - Layout : P. Petit
Reciprocess is about collaborating!
A series featuring the work(s) of two or more sound-designers and documenting the process of musical reciprocality between them and “Non-Lounge Piano Bar Modularity” is our ninth entry.
Palle Dahlstedt: Grand Piano, Moog/Buchla Piano Bar, and Piano-controlled Modular
It is not the first time these musicians meet, but every meeting is new !!!
Swedish pianist, composer and electronic musician Palle Dahlstedt started coming regularly to the San Francisco Bay area in 2007, both to perform, but also for artistic research collaborations with local musicians and universities, thanks to the area’s strong improvisation scene and tradition.
Around 2010, Gino Robair started becoming a regular collaborator, and is from 2015 a fixed member in Dahlstedt’s improvisation research group (together with Per Anders Nilsson and Tim Perkis, not featured in this recording).
Sometime during the mid 2010s, Dahlstedt also met Tom Djll, who is a strong character in the local scene, and they have performed together several times, and Djll has also contributed to the improvisation research workshops. Robair and Djll are both well-known contributors to Modulisme (as is Dahlstedt), and they have done numerous collaborations together.
This particular live performance was triggered by Dahlstedt’s visit to the area in December 2023, during which Tom Djll organised a concert for the trio in the legendary Berkeley venue Tom’s Place, which has a great Yamaha concert grand. Even though Palle Dahlstedt is a trained pianist, and has worked with modular synthesizers for decades, this is the first time he performs with acoustic piano together with modular synthesizers. He has previously done a number of works for electronically prepared grand piano and various performance and improvisation algorithms, mostly using the Nord Modular as signal processing platform, but this is the first works for proper hardware modulars.
The main idea behind his approach here is one of live musique concrète, in the sense that all sound materials are captured live from the piano, stored in various buffer-based modules (primarily Instruo arbhar and Lúbadh). This is combined with what Dahlstedt calls ‘entangled musicianship’, where the playback is directly controlled by the keyboard interaction, so the pianist (Dahlstedt) navigates a situation where sound production and playback control are completely entangled. It is impossible to control granular/sample playback without also playing a piano note, and vice versa. So every note played has three simultaneous functions:
It is heard acoustically in the room.
The sound of it is stored in buffer modules for immediate or future use in the sound processing/synthesis engines.
The keyboard interaction data, captured by the Piano Bar sensor, is mapped to control voltages through a rather intricate (but ‘non-designed’) mapping implemented in the modular, affecting how the synthesis/processing engine behaves.
If there are no keys pressed, the modular is silent, so it acts as an augmentation of the piano.
And as all source sound material comes from the microphone inside the piano, the electronic part really merges with the acoustic sound of the piano, which sometimes can be deceiving. There is a lot going on!
Also, the microphone inside the piano is sometimes hijacked by percussionist/object virtuoso Gino Robair, intentionally feeding other sounds into Dahlstedt’s modular. This is especially prominently featured in track 3, where Gino Robair uses a whole chair (see the video) as an implement inside the grand piano, rubbing it against strings and the piano lid, creating all kinds of sonic mayhem captured by Dahlstedt and exploited in his playing.
Tom Djll is known for his innovative explorations of chaotic behavior in his modular musicianship (check his Modulisme Session #13), and further into dynamic improvised music, often combined with his trumpet. In this concert he left the trumpet at home, and manhandles devices notorious for being unpredictable and hard to control: The Meng Qi Wing Pinger, the Landscape Noon, and the Lorre-Mill Double Knot, mixing these with sampled fragments and field recordings.
Gino Robair, himself an accomplished modularist (check his Modulisme Session #12!), here plays a small drum and percussion setup, as well as using found objects from the room. He is also playing inside the piano.
He has performed and recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Nina Hagen, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. He is one of the “25 innovative percussionists” included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001), as well as a founding member of the Splatter Trio and Pink Mountain. His opera, I, Norton, based on the life of Norton I, Emperor of the United States, has been performed throughout North America and Europe.
Palle Dahlstedt is a Composer, sound artist, improviser and researcher. He grew up in Stockholm, studied instrumental and electronic composition at the academies of Malmö and Gothenburg. He finished an interdisciplinary PhD in advanced algorithms for computer music at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg in 2004. His music, ranging from piano solos over orchestra pieces to interactive software installations, has been performed on six continents, and been awarded several international prizes (for example with the Gaudeamus Prize 2001). In his research he develops new technologies for electronic improvisation and composition, and studies computer models of artistic creativity. He is professor of interaction design at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology, and lecturer in electronic music at the Academy of Music and Drama, Gothenburg.
The session was recorded December 17th, 2023, at Tom’s Place, Berkeley, California, using the venue’s fixed ceiling stereo microphone setup. Mastered by Palle Dahlstedt at Brännö island, Sweden.
Special thanks to Joel Davel for lending his Moog/Buchla Piano Bar sensor, and to Tom and Tim Duff for hosting the concert and for the recording.
Reciprocess is documenting the process of reciprocity !
A series based on collaborations. Some of us collaborating with other from our Modulisme community…
Giving a new life to the series initiated in the early 2000s on my defunct label BiP_HOp, in collaboration with Fällt Publishing.
Bas Mantel is in charge of designing cover artworks… See his page please:
