Category: Tom Arthurs

Flat Home

Created for the Not Applicable Artists Festival in Berlin this summer by Martin Hampton (shot in and around his native Somerset, navigating the shores of the Bristol Channel and further afield), Flat Home received two screenings with different combinations of instrumentalists improvising to it on each night. The resulting soundtrack is a hybrid of the two:

Flat Home – A film by Martin Hampton

Music improvised to the film on two successive nights during the Not Applicable Artists Festival of Experimental Music and Film, Berlin 2010.

Finnlandzentrum – Tuesday 7th September 2010

Stevko Busch – piano
Lothar Ohlmeier – bass clarinet
Tom Arthurs – trumpet
Isambard Khroustaliov – computer

Babette – Wednesday 8th September 2010

Tobias Klein – bass clarinet
Kai Wolff – computer
Roy Caroll – electronics
Lothar Ohlmeier – bass clarinet
Maurizio Ravalico – percussion
Rudi Fischerlehner – drumkit
Tom Arthurs – trumpet
Isambard Khroustaliov – computer

Recorded and mixed by Isambard Khroustaliov.
Music edited by Isambard Khroustaliov with Martin Hampton.

Long Division @ NK

Saturday 4th September 2010 @ 21:00

Isambard Khroustaliov / Lothar Ohlmeier / Ollie Bown / Tom Arthurs

Long Division – a series of pieces for two performers and autonomous electronics

Tom Arthurs – trumpet
Lothar Ohlmeier – bass clarinet
Isambard Khroustaliov, Ollie Bown – software design and development

NK
Elsenstraße 52,
2.Hinterhaus Etage 2,
12059 Berlin-Neukölln

0049(0)176 2062 6386

€5.00

Long Division is a collaboration between Arthurs, Bown, Khroustaliov and Ohlmeier for two instrumentalists and two computers pre-programmed from afar, that was originally commissioned for a performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival. Only Arthurs and Ohlmeier will be on stage for the performance, interacting with a computer system that has been programmed to react and improvise with them.

Simultaneously a challenge and a proof of concept, the computer will act autonomously without a score or a determined progression, orchestrating a path around and through the music developed by Arthurs and Ohlmeier whilst also proposing structures and themes of its own. The software’s autonomy is needless to say of a limited sort, and encodes the creative decision-making of its programmers.

The collaboration is both a continuation of the free improvised electroacoustic performance styles explored by Arthurs, Bown, Britton and Ohlmeier in the various onstage incarnations of the Not Applicable Artists, and a more formal, albeit risky, set of software studies carried out by Bown and Britton into generative and interactive music systems, for which Arthurs and Ohlmeier are the willing and highly capable subjects.

The groups interest in and exploration of autonomy is multifaceted, viewing it in the light of new approaches to the structuring of a live musical work, experimentation in interactivity, and also novel approaches to remote collaboration, where one or more participants contribute to a performance by proxy, in the form of the behavioural software created by them.