An Evening of Spatialised Electronic Music
Sentralen Oslo, December 5th 2018
Curated by Cristian Vogel
Hosted by Electric Audio Unit
Nordic Premiere
Shapeshifter
SØS Gunver Ryberg
Commissioned by director Evelyn Hribersěk for her Augmented Reality installation ‘Eurydike’, this music was originally spatialised in realtime on head sets as an intimate experience for individual visitors.
For this concert, one of the pieces from the installation has been transcoded into an immersive composition for a full audience to experience together.
Composition and Sound Design: SØS Gunver Ryberg
Spatialisation: SØS Gunver Ryberg
Mixdown at EMS, Stockholm.
Duration 3 mins
Format: HOA2D
Nordic Premiere
Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco (1980)
Jonathan Harvey
“From 1976 to 1980 my son Dominic was a chorister at Winchester cathedral. During that period, and ever since, I have written a number of works associated with that wonderful building and choir. Listening to the choir rehearse, as I often did, with the bells simultaneously ringing above, was one of the mingled impressions which started me on this work: it is entirely based on the boy’s voice and that of the largest bell. On this huge black bell is inscribed in beautiful lettering the following text: HORAS AVOLANTES NUMERO, MORTUOS PLANGO, VIVOS AD PRECES VOCO (I count the feeling hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer) The bell counts time (each section has a differently pitched bell stroke at its beginning): it is itself a ‘dead’ sound for all its richess of sonority: the boy represents the living element. The bell surrounds the audience; they are, as it were, inside it: the boy ‘flies’ around like a free spirit.”
- Jonathan Harvey, 2005.
‘Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco’ is an 8 channel tape piece that was commissioned by IRCAM in 1980 and completed there using the most advanced spectral processing of the time. It remains a significant piece for many reasons, not least for the remarkable compositional language that emerges from the manipulation of spectral analysis data. The original audio stems for an octaphonic speaker arrangement have been re-spatialised especially for this concert. This rare performance has been made possible by Faber Music and IRCAM archives with the kind permission of Rosa and Anna Harvey.
Composition: Jonathan Harvey
HOA Spatialisation: Cristian Vogel at EMS Stockholm
Duration: 9 mins
Format: HOA2D ( 8 virtual speakers )
“And the ticks turn into tocks and the tocks turn into ticks”
Anders Tveit
The title of this piece is taken from an answer given by free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey to the question
“What happens to time awareness during improvisation?” The title refers not only to my fascination with how we experience and perceive time and duration.
The sound material is based on a number of recordings of mechanical clocks, timepieces and percussion. The piece was composed in 2013/14, commissioned by EAU (Electric Audio Unit) with funding from The Norwegian Composers Fund.
Composition and Spatialisation: Anders Tveit
Monologues: Andrew Hill and Myfawny Moore.
Duration: 12 mins
Format: HOA2D.
World Premiere
Cristian Vogel
Acceleration Morphosis
Beings that mesh out time
From deep within the Amazon
Have methods of acceleration
Which far exceed our own.
Composition and Sound Design: Cristian Vogel
Spatialisation: Cristian Vogel
Duration 10 mins Format: HOA2D
Special thanks to EMS, Stockholm where this piece was mixed.
World Premiere
The Heart of a Stone
Koenraad Ecker
…and the vitals hardened to rock, but still she weeps,
and she is carried,
Caught up in a whirlwind,
to her native mountains,
Where, on a summit, a queen deposed, she rests,
Still weeping : even to this day, the marble Trickles with tears -(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI, 295–323)
What if a stone could speak — would we listen?
A stone : a metaphor for the most mundane of things — deaf, cold, inanimate matter. Yet, it is anything but. Never inert, a stone is in a state of constant transformation, a historical witness, inscribed with the traces of successive ecologies. As the anxious relation between humans and lithic matter takes centre stage, we are obliged to try to think in geological terms once again.
Special thanks to the „ Studio fur Elektroakustische Musik” at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, where the sound material used in this composition was recorded in October 2018.
Composition and Sound Design: Koenraad Ecker
Spatialisation: Koenraad Ecker
Duration: 10 mins
Format: HOA2D
World Premiere
WokeSeq
Cristian Vogel
What happens in time and space when Global Sequences overlap?
You’ll hear the music of the Higher Orders of Progressive Warriors.
That’s what.
Re-activate space and time.
Dis-activate hate and bigotry.
Live in the contest of the moment.
Wake up!
Composition and Sound Design: Cristian Vogel
Spatialisation: Cristian Vogel
Duration 3.5 mins
Format: HOA2D
Nordic Premiere
Banrei
Cholalcho
Banrei’s work makes use of impulses, bursts, and sirens, constructed from the rejectamenta of the music sampling process. Sources are obscured and listeners are confronted with the primal qualities of the wavelines — roughness, harmonies, shapes. Bursts are an imperative to break apart the authoritatively linear narratives of sound into a collection of simultaneously possible states.
The Corrido is a traditional Mexican ballad that rose to popularity during the Mexican revolution. The Corrido became a method of disseminating news, depicting the heroic feats of Pancho Villa and his rebel fighters. Subverted by the drug trade, a new genre has emerged called the Narcorrido. These songs detail the exploits of the cartels and their employees as heroes facing impossible odds.
Cholalcho is a burst study on the popular Narcorrido “El Karma”. The moral of the song is roughly: Karma comes and goes, but nobody can escape the Reaper. Ironically, by the time the song rose to #1 on the Mexican pop charts, its singer, the 22-year old Ariel Camacho, had been slain one week prior in a suspicious car accident.
Concept and Burst Selection: Banrei
Arrangement and Spatialisation: Cristian Vogel
Duration: 6 mins
Format: HOA2D
Nordic Premiere
Tine Surel Lange
W O R K S F O R L I S T E N I N G (2017- )
№2: Roof work
№10: Water and stones from arctic landscape
In Works for Listening there is a strong focus on listening aesthetics and our psychological categorisation of sound. Surrounding sound environments are created with material taken from everyday life: organic sound sources to a varying degree reconstructed by tone, percussion, noise, resonance and voice layers. The sonic material in “Works for listening” appears as physical and tactile, and often abstracted from their original state.
Surel Lange’s work with ambisonics is based on mono sound sources placed in space where the development in the material (pitch, filters, frequencies, dynamics) often are connected and emphasised and with vertical movement.
Works for Listening is a series of electro acoustic works developed at Notam (Norway), MISC (Lithuania) and EMS (Sweden).
Composition and Sound Design: Tine Surel Lange
Spatialisation: Tine Surel Lange
Duration: 2'20 / 5'
Format: HOA3D
Music Film
Agnete and The Merman
Cristian Vogel & The Automatic Message
What can unite us when we come from different worlds?
This film is an adaptation of an immersive sonic theatre production originally staged by the composer Cristian Vogel. The story is loosely based on a Scandinavian supernatural folk ballad of the same title. In the staged version, the actors and audience were immersed in the music as it played through a 24 channel Funktion-One sound system set up in a theatre in Aarhus, Denmark.
The parallel film project was filmed on set during rehearsals and edited into a movie by Tanya Goehring and Trevor Jacobson aka The Automatic Message. The cinematography and resulting film capture in detail many sensations of the original piece whilst extending the narrative in a surprising way. The music score of the film is an adaptation of Cristian Vogel’s original wave field synthesis score, but has been recomposed entirely in Higher Order Ambisonics at Notam Studio Sirius in Oslo.
The cinematographic content of the film captures in detail the sensations of the immersive theatre performance, filmed on location with the performers using high definition cameras and lighting. The film was premiered in December 2017 on the famous ZKM Kubus spatial sound system, as part of the InSonic2017 official selection.
Composition and Sound Design: Cristian Vogel
Spatialisation: Cristian Vogel
Video: The Automatic Message
Duration: 55 mins
Format: Video and HOA3D
