Michael Choi (USA)
Born in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, Michael W. Choi is a Korean-American composer, conductor, and filmmaker specialized in writing music for film, animation, games, and new media. He is currently based in Los Angeles, composing music for film, animation, and other media arts. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music: Valencia Campus, receiving a Master degree in Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games. Also, he proceeded to take classes at the SAIC (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) where he graduated with the Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014, where he studied film, video, new media, sound, and fine art.
One Second in the Light
"The truth isn't always a blinding light. Sometimes it's deep and dazzling darkness, that illuminates - and burns - just as surely."
Albert Einstein
Time is an invention of human that defines the natural phenomenon in repetitive cycles. Nature has the required parameters that helped humans represent time, but on its own time does not exist.
This music portrays an image of great scientists in the grand scheme of their theory of time. With using few selected instruments such as strings, piano, and arpeggiated synthesizers, the music demonstrates a suspending mood and sensation of time with the timbre and specific advanced techniques of the instruments that play a pulse of a second, giving a passive yet immersive musical-inspiration of time.
Omar Del Real (USA)
Born in Zacatecas Mexico, composer Omar Del Real is finding new sounds from everything and nothing. Del Real studied guitar and music theory with Rafel Hernandez Hidalgo. Omar is pursuing his studies to concentrate in Multimedia and algorithmic compositions. Currently student at CSUN composition program under the spectralist composer Liviu Marinescu, Del Real is trying to push the boundaries of timbre with microtonality and electronics. Omar's compositions have been performed in Los Angeles, Zacatecas Mexico, Monterrey Mexico.
Palindrom (Entropy means nothing to me)
A composition that tries to escape the chains of physics by not being constrained by the arrow of time. Inspired by Messiaen non-retrogradable rhythms, this composition tries to make a true sonic palindrome that sounds the same if you play it forwards or backwards in time. In a live setting the percussion would be played against a recording of themselves playing the same thing backwards the second and third time. !A AIA A! with a mirror in the middle..
Sergio Gurrola (Mexico)
Sergio Valente Gurrola Álvarez.
Composer and sound artist. His works address the limits between noise and music, testimony and poetry.
Sergio's pieces undertake an aesthetic exploration and also ethical questions: the relationship between art and the world.
The most recent creation of Sergio has as its central axis the human voice as a sign of resistance.
The project "Vivirvive" includes a series of works based on testimonies from marginal beings: forgotten artists, imprisoned children ...
The pieces explore the micro-tonality. They were composed, interpreted and recorded from the instruments invented by the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875-1965), creator of Sound 13.
The "San Clemente" project is also the soundtrack of the movie "El Premio".
"San Clemente" has been played at "Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival", "New Horizons International Film Festival" in Wroclaw Poland, Radio France and Cinesecuencias radio in Mexico.
The runner without a trace
The ancient rarámuri civilization, mysterious and vigilant of their traditions. Hermits live in ravines and canyons in one of the highest parts of the Sierra Madre mountain range in México. “Men with winged feet”. Their most important ritual is running for days with scarce food. The notion of temporality and trekking through the complexity of the world around us on our own feet is a worldview that has been with them for millennia. This piece is the moving portrait of Silvino Cubesare, a runner experienced enough to make new paths with his own feet.
Despite the massacres and a brutal oblivion, Silvino reappears with a strong step in races to help his own.
The rarámuri know that utopia is on the unreachable horizon and it serves to stay in constant movement. The rhythm is halfway through silence, and conscience is the conjunction of an enigmatic stimulus.
Tim Howle (UK)
Tim Howle is Professor of Music at the University of Kent. He has also worked at the Universities of Hull and Oxford Brookes. He read music at Keele University, studying under Roger Marsh and Mike Vaughan completing a doctorate in composition in 1999. His work centers on electronic music including fixed media pieces, and also for performer and live electronics and pieces involving visual media. His work has been performed throughout the US, Asia and the EU..
False Memory of Normandy
The piece is based on a poem by J M Fox. A man, in the present, remembers playing as a child on a playground in the 1960s pretending that he was at D-Day in 1944. From the present, adult and childhood memories become intertwined. The acousmatic music treats time in a similar fashion by interweaving periodic and aperiodic material over a pulse that shifts throughout the work to suggest the altered past. Some sounds were recorded recently and some 30 years ago to support the approach perceived altered state. It is an attempt the stretch the notion of reduced listening by making the time-based dislocation to what is, in our case, a maximum.
Filipe Leitao (USA)
Award-winning, innovative, highly technical professional with 10+ years of music creation experience, Filipe Leitao is a Brazilian-born composer, music producer, and orchestrator based in Tuscaloosa, AL. Filipe’s works reflect his unique voice originated from a mix of classical music, popular music, Brazilian music, and film music. Filipe received the MFA degree in Music Production and Sound Design for Visual Media at the Academy of Art University (San Francisco, CA). Currently, Filipe is pursuing a DMA degree in Music Composition at The University of Alabama.
Time Goes By
Minimalist, atmospheric soundscape work featuring piano and varied samples of the tic tac clock sound evoking passing of time.
Andres Lewin-Richter (Spain)
(Spain,1937). Teaching assistant at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center (1962-1965), working with V.Ussachevsky, M.Davidovsky and E.Varèse. Co-founder and director of the Phonos Electronic Music Studio in Barcelona since 1974, at present part of the Music Technology Group of the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona (president Xavier Serra), was organizer of the ICMC 2005 and the SMC 2010.
Time Machine with Voices
Any musical piece is a time score, sounds flow along time. In this case I decided to use strict rhythmical patterns with voice samples, after experimenting with multiple recordings produced in our recording studio extracting transients and choralizing single voice fragments, since the choral samples became untreatable due to the frequency dispersion.
Clovis McEvoy (Auckland)
Clovis McEvoy is a 30-year-old composer, lecturer and sound engineer based in Auckland.
Clovis currently lectures at Auckland University School of Music in the field of sonic arts and music production. Clovis has worked with, and has been commissioned to write for, members of the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, and has written soundtracks for short films, documentaries and live theatre.
Clovis’ works have been performed in Seoul, South Korea and Leuk, Switzerland.
Clovis was the 2017 recipient of the APRA-AMCOS Professional Development Award in contemporary composition.
A Study In Virtual Reality Music
This work is designed to be viewed on virtual reality systems such as the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift - however it can be viewed on traditional 2D screens as a study.
Paolo Pastorino (Italy)
Paolo Pastorino (08/12/1983) is an Italian guitarist, sound designer, and composer.
Since 2006 he starts to work as sound engineer for some Rock, Industrial and Nu-Metal bands. He studied and graduated in computer music and sound technology at the Conservatory of Sassari and he is specialized in new music technologies at the Conservatory of Cagliari.
In his compositions, he uses electronic instruments and algorithms realized by software, as well as electronically elaborated traditional instruments and other concrete elements.
His compositions have been performed in Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, UK) and abroad (USA, Argentina, Japan, Mexico).
Velocità limite
This work is triggered by a from a series of considerations: The main one concerns speed in relation to time and its perception (time); The second one concerns the amount of information which we are exposed to in each moment of our lives and of human actions. Less time more speed.
The problem clearly focuses on a very narrow temporal dimension (from the 1980s to the present) which includes technological, and consequently socially very important changes. The path taken by Western societies, ranging from pre-industrial to post-industrial age, seems to be characterised not by a linear trend but by a steep curve.
Speed and time are central parameters in our daily life, but we must take into account the damage that these can cause to our consciousness. Our inner balance is at risk as mankind races towards the future reaching a limit speed, to which we are struggling to adapt; this leaves less time for important processes such as critical attention and thinking.
QUOD (Spain)
Quod is a video music and video art group born in 2016 and integrated by the artist Inés Uribe (Bilbao, Basque Country. Spain) and the composer Miguel Matamoro (Vigo, Galicia. Spain).
Those two artists have participated in various festivals, cycles or spaces such as:
MARCO (Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, Spain), CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), BBVA FOUNDATION (Bilbao, Spain), Cibeles center (Madrid, Spain), Kursaal (San Sebastian, Spain), FMEC (Cadiz, Spain), Sinkro Festival (Vitoria, Spain), University of Houston (USA) or Schola Cantorum (Paris, France), Photomuseum (Zarautz, Spain) or White Lab Galery (Madrid, Spain), Festival PUNTO DE ENCUENTRO (Granada, Spain), Bernaola Festival (Vitoria, Spain), ArteAbierto (Casa Decor, Madrid, Spain) Festival Gaztapiles (Madrid, Spain), ASPA Contemporary (Madrid, Spain) and many others.
Quod has also been a shortlisted project for the BienalSur 2017 (South America).
D E S V E L O
What my virtual self does when I´m not in the virtual world. A lapse of inexistance.
Idea - Quod (Inés Uribe and Miguel Matamoro)
Main Character - Enrique Díez
Violin - Roberto Alonso.
Berndt Schumann (Germany)
Born 1979 in Chemnitz, Germany; currently living in Göttingen. Sound engineering, composition and electroacoustic music studies in Detmold, Bremen, Hamburg and Leipzig; 2004-07 working as a sound engineer for several recording companies, 2007-11 sound engineer at Anhaltisches Theater Dessau, since 2011 at Deutsches Theater Göttingen; mainly working in electroacoustic and instrumental fields, occassionally also theatre music, short texts and experimental films; several prizes e.g. Czech Society of Electroacoustic Music, Innova Musica Competition and Counterpoint Composition Competition. Performances in Western Europe, Russia, Mexico and the USA.
Planquadrat II
A short cinematographic essay about the absurdity of human ambition in the face of time.
David Snow (USA)
The compositions of David Jason Snow (b. 1954) have been performed in concert by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, La Banda Municipal de Bilbao, the New Juilliard Ensemble, and other artists and ensembles internationally. His Das Lied von der Magnetosphäre was one of ten electroacoustic works selected by MAARBLE, the European‐American space research project, as winners of its “Sounds of Space” musical composition contest. Snow has also been the recipient of composer fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an ASCAP Foundation grant, composition awards from BMI, and composition prizes from Musician magazine and Keyboard magazine, and he has been an artist resident at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs and the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York. He holds degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music and the Yale School of Music..
La relativité pour les nuls
La relativité pour les nuls is a poetic depiction of time dilation. Passengers on a spacecraft accelerating away from earth are subject to time passing at a slower rate relative to those who are earthbound, the effect becoming more radically pronounced as the vehicle approaches the speed of light. The subjective experience of the passage of time will be the same for both classes of observers, but a clock on the spacecraft will fall behind that on the ground. The composition depicts this temporal disparity by means of accelerating tempi and accumulating density of musical events: to the earthbound observer, the tempo and event density do not change; relative to the listener, who symbolically assumes the role of near-light-speed cosmic traveller, the passage of earth time accelerates.
Simon Šerc (Slovenia)
Simon Šerc (b. 1972) is a sound and video artist, recording engineer, performer and label founder. He studied philosophy and computing, and has been active in the field of experimental music since 1990. He has participated on various festivals with his audio-video projects: Sound Thought (Scotland), New Texture (South Korea), Gravity Assist (U.S.A.), Black & White (Portugal), Kiblix (Slovenia), Lieblichkeit und Sexualität (Austria), Art & Music (Croatia), Expo 2000 (Germany), Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques (France), Sguardi Sonori (Italy) etc. As a sound and video artist, he has collaborated with other artists/collectives from various fields of art and he is also active in a number of different musical projects (PureH, Cadlag, KSVLKSV etc.) He is the founder of the Pharmafabrik production and label, which, according to music critics – significantly enriches Slovenian audio diversity with its consistent and clearly defined methodology of sound explorations.
Martina Testen (Slovenia)
Martina Testen was born in 1976 in Postojna, Slovenia. She works in visual and sound communication through video, soundscapes (field recordings) and digital photography. Recently Martina participated at the festival Numérique et Poétique in France, Videofestival Natures in Slovenia and presented her sound sculpture at the World Listening Project. She lives in Nova Gorica.
Before The Time
The premonition of spore power and fragility of giants creates a feeling of weakness and a fear of being trapped into multilayered systems. The stringing of events almost runs out of time to make an impression. The connection of particles is not interrupted by the jeopardy of solitaires. What is the place of man in this sequence, characterized by the destruction of the environment, genetic engineering and perception of life as a very short period of time?
Fredy Vallejos (Ecuador)
Fredy Vallejos, musician of Columbian origin, holds degrees in percussion, musicology, computer music and composition (Columbia, France, Switzerland). His aesthetic preoccupation, characterized by the exploring of a multiple and heterogeneous sound universe, is based on ethnomusical research formalized using CAC tool (Computer assisted composing), and on the relationship betwee sound and other forms of art. Currently he is lecturer at the School of sound art of the Equatorial University of the Arts.
Relative Patterns 4
« Si rien n'a précédé la répétition, si aucun présent n'a surveillé la trace, si, d'une certaine manière, c'est le « vide qui se recreuse et se marque d'empreintes », alors le temps de l'écriture ne suit plus la ligne des présents modifiés. L'avenir n'est pas un présent futur, hier n'est pas un présent passé »
(“If nothing has preceded repetition, if no present has kept track of the trace, if, in a certain way, it is “emptiness that deepens and gets marked with fingerprints”, then the time of writing no longer follows the line of altered presents. The future is not a future present, yesterday is not a past present”.)
J. Derrida: L’écriture et la différence
The series Relative Patterns is the fruit of a rhythmical analysis of traditional music of oral Afro-Colombian origin. The material will be used to construct a mechanism originating in the opposition of contrasting timbres which evolve and attain a complex polyrhythm - calculated entirely with the aid of Open Music - and also an almost imperceptible transformation of the durations which make up that polyrhythm. The result follows a process of vague periodicity by way of complex polyrhythms which remain ever mobile.
David Ventura (Portugal)
Cizus is a visual label focused on light, video and sound works, with the purpose of stimulating and influencing the human perception, opening new approaches in the universe of optical and sensory illusion.
.hexakai
Audio visual installation / performance
The relation between space and time and its deconstruction, creating volumetric forms of light, and consequent patterns.
an ecosystem of light that exceeds human perception, giving us a perspective composed by several dimensions.
inspired by the gravitational system that surrounds us, through science, physics, as a unified geometric entity.
Vortichez (UK)
Electroacoustic composer Vortichez is from the UK and has lived in several countries in Europe, Asia and Africa over the last 8 years. She attended the Rarescale Electroacoustic Composition course with Michael Oliva, and the Stockhausen Kürten course in Sound Projection. Her piece Hatshepsut’s Harem for octophonic setup premiered at BEAST FEaST April 2018 in the Elgar Concert Hall. She’s opening a music venue in Brazil next year.
Want Water
The electronics in this piece are entirely the manipulated sounds of thirsty trees, as recorded with highly sensitive acoustic sensors and generously shared by physicist Alex Ponomarenko.
Trees under drought emit short ultrasound "clicks" whose origin is not clear, but discovered by Alex to be linked to the appearance of bubbles. The short clicks have been expanded by the composer in order to engage with the tree’s slower timescale.
As we communicate with trees, their thirst can be made known to us. Indeed, scientists can use these findings to reconcile stressed trees to long periods of drought brought on by climate change.