Isambard Khroustaliov, Lothar Ohlmeier, Ollie Bown and Tom Arthurs will be showing work at this years North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam on Sunday 11th July 2010 courtesy of Juha at Non-Fiction. I say ‘showing work’ because, although Lothar and Tom will actually be performing at the event, Ollie and I will not be there … instead, we will be sending software to perform with Lothar and Tom, the aim being to have it run autonomously without any human intervention during the performance.
As Ollie muses on his blog, it’s a somewhat strange scenario, but not altogether without precedent. In many ways, I like to think of it as a kind of ‘v.2.0’ re-reading of traditional music notation, where the score has moved off the the page and into the world of code, when you think of it like this, sending a bunch of embedded ideas and concepts for someone else to realise as a performance has evidently been going on for centuries.
However, what is nice, is that it feels like the world of non-determinist scores and strategies (as cooked up by 20th Century composers such as Cardew and Cage) are finally finding what feels like a new home of sorts in the form of computer music, where these type of abstract strategies and procedures are the norm rather than the exception.
Above, you can find a video of Ollie explaining a similar concert we were both involved in along with a crack team of computer programmers as part of the Live Algorithms for Music Network last summer. Below are the details of our forthcoming performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival.
Sunday 11th July 2010 @ 19:15
Isambard Khroustaliov, Lothar Ohlmeier, Ollie Bown and Tom Arthurs
New series of pieces entitled ‘Long Division’ for two performers and autonomous electronics.
musical assistant: Roy Carroll
North Sea Jazz Festival 2010,
Volga Hall,
Rotterdam.
