Venues
Annenkirche
Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
Luda gallery
Curated by
Sergey Komarov (Russia)
Participants
Girilal Baars
Félicien Goguey & Yann Longchamp
Alexey Grachev
Vassily K
Ensemble kYmatic
KMPST
Kurt Liedwart
David Rosenboom
Wouter Van Veldhoven
Ilia Belorukov
Kazu Yanagi
Performs live painting for the last 50 years, building his practice around ideas of the Chienergy (universal energy) and putting himself in a neutral state of body and mind, focusingon surrounding environment and then sharing the energy through the means of giantcanvas. Performed live painting around the world, including US, France, Spain, China,Taiwan, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Russia, Japan.
Kazu Yanagi (Japan)
Artist. Born in 1947 in Fukuoka, Japan. Performs live painting for the last 50 years, building his practice around ideas of the Chi energy (universal energy) and putting himself in a neutral state of body and mind, focusing on surrounding environment and then sharing the energy through the means of giant canvas. Performed live painting around the world, including US, France, Spain, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Russia, Japan. Yanagi was also a photographer and stage artist for Kitaro’s world tour; Kent Nagano’s stage artist. Founder of alternative museum Kurogawa INN Museum. Lives and works in Fukuoka.
White Metal is a composition from the Gray Series #2 that gives a listener the opportunity to explore the aspirations of composer Michael Pisaro to create and control captivating textures through an open, but very specific notation. This puts the performers in a particularly interesting position when they maintain control over the timbral quality of the work, while remaining led by the structural specificity of the composition. Although White Metal recognizes and considers the sonic similarity between the worlds of "onkyo" (Onkyōkei) and of the Wandelweiser group of composers, it goes even further, exploring the dichotomy between these calm music worlds and the worlds of noise and metal. The title of the composition implies the semantic similarity between the opposing genres, black metal and white noise, which the composer instantly subsumes into a common denominator. With White Metal, it becomes clear that the extremes of these alternately quiet and loud styles is inextricably linked with the focus towards the white noise at all levels, and Pisaro is making it absolutely clear, skillfully blowing up and reducing noise.
The sound characteristics of the play are dictated by similar esthetic considerations of the UK black metal in the early 80s and the free improvisation of Japan in the late 90s, which nevertheless appear differently due to geographical and social factors. Thus, the genesis of the music is uniform, despite the fact that at the time of its creation composers and performers do not come across each other.
Performers: Sergey Zykov — tape, electronics, keys. Dmitry Remezov — synthesizer, electronics. Anton Izgagin — viola da gamba, synthesizer. Alina Petrova — viola, electronics. Alexey Chichilin — electric guitar. Sergei Khramtsevich — saxophone.
Kymatic is an alternative ensemble of contemporary music which performs new experimental music.The ensemble finds its music in the scores of composers that exist somewhere in the gaps between academic and so-called pop music, ignore genre and style, and conceive the music piece in the categories of performance, spiritual practice, and live experiment. At the same time, Kymatic itself is not just an ensemble which replicates unusual sounds: it is an improvising electro-acoustic group, a creative laboratory, and sometimes even a curatorial team that comes up with interdisciplinary projects on the move.
Kymatic operates outside commercial or institutional contexts, intuitively moving across various artistic territories: rigorous philharmonic programs alternate with improvisational and electroacoustic performances, and established avant-garde scores — with obscure and purely ‘outsider’ compositions.
I. Earth Encomium with Nothingness in Unstable, 2017
This immersive musical wrapping is dedicated to our stressed planet. Two compositions are combined here in an integrated form. In Earth Encomium, the loops are interpreted in a solo for piano and electronics. The piano’s raw acoustic sound is parsed into specific spectral elements, which in turn ring a bank of complex digital resonators that are also tuned to harmonic orbits. In Nothingness is Unstable, delicate natural sounds collected in field recordings made in Indonesia and the US activate the same banks of complex digital resonator circuits. Eventually, more intertwining harmonic orbits are blended in with the piano.
(Music was commissioned by Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center to be presented with the unique Geluso 3D sound distribution object on the 2017 New York Electronic Arts Festival at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn.)
II. Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones (Deviant Resonances), 1972 & 2015
In large measure, this piece is about listening as performance. To materialize that idea, specific features that can be sensed and analyzed in electrical signals emanating from the brains of two active imaginative, listening performers are linked to procedures for generating an electronic sound tapestry. A third performer calibrates a computer system to best follow varying degrees of coherency among particular smooth waves found in the listening performers’ EEGs.
This is newest realization of the piece, first created in 1972. It pays particular attention to goings on inside margins of uncertainty near the boundaries of differentiation that might be associated with recognizable, resonant elements. All this exploration is carried out within the framework of how we might fuse brainwave patterns and musical forms. In the context of performances like this one, our intentions are artistic and inclusive, melding products of scientific investigation and technology with aesthetic inquiries and speculations about the nature of human awareness and our ability to describe what we perceive as self and universe.
III. The Infinity of Things that Don’t Exist, 2019
The program will conclude with a new work developed with Rosenboom’s particular structured improvisation practice for piano, interactive electronics, and compositional algorithms. The poetics of the work invoke thoughts about collapsing distinctions among features we perceive to be distinctive in the universe and the dynamics of human cultures within them.
David Rosenboom (USA)
Composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, educator, pioneer in American experimental music. He explores ideas about the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, art-science research, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system.
He taught or held positions in the California Institute of the Arts; York University; State University of New York; Bard College; Simon Fraser University; San Francisco Art Institute; and Ionian University, to name just a few.
Recent highlights include a fifty-year retrospective of his music presented at the Whitney Museum; Centre Pompidou-Metz; Whitechapel Gallery; Tokyo Opera City Recital Hall; Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires; and numerous publications, recordings, festival performances and keynote speeches around the world.
St. Petersburg musician Ilia Belorukov will conduct a solo performance with a modular synthesizer and field recordings he meticulously makes in trips and back home. Ilia is especially known for his play on alto saxophone in the context of free improvisation and electroacoustics. During more than 10 years of playing on European and Russian stages, he earned a reputation of a responsive partner in all kinds of situations, from radically soft improvisations to noise-grindcore.
Despite acoustic instrumental background, the musician was always interested in electronic arrangements and sound synthesis which has brought him to the use of a modular synthesizer. The instrument allows to create individual modular sequences, which gives him a possibility to improvise and instantaneously react to the environment in real time.
Ilia Belorukov is a musician from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. He mainly works with the improvisational nature of sound, whether it is electroacoustics, noise, reductionism and electronics, or experimental directions of rock, hardcore and metal. Composer (graphic scores, structures, schemes) and performer of contemporary academic music from the Wandelweiser community. Regularly collaborates with dancers, poets, artists, and theater. Founder of the Intonema label, which publishes contemporary improvisational and experimental music, one of the Spina!Rec label curators. Belorukov publishes music reviews in his blog on Syg.ma, wrote reviews for the publications as the Contemporary Music, Topot, Music and Time, GESeta.
For the festival, the sound artist from the Netherlands will install a sonic pile of dissected tape recorders to be shown at the new Luda gallery. On the opening night Wouter will conduct a performance at his installation, manipulating the tape (and more) in his peculiar manner. Wouter is a real prodigy with original findings in tape recorders exploitation, and with every new work he transcends his own borders of the day before. He partly brings the installation with him, and the rest he plans to mine on the flea markets of Saint Petersburg, as he was very inspired by the unknown local assortment of the vintage machines. The surfing of Avito website is now his favorite pastime.
Wouter van Veldhoven (Netherlands)
Wouter van Veldhoven explores the sounds of low-end tape recorders, other defunct machines and acoustic sources. Research in the details of sounds is done by manipulating the machines, taking them apart and reorganizing them or by preparing the sources and interconnecting them in new automated sequences. Thereby the fidelity, pitch, texture and structure of the sounds is altered in ways that are often unpredictable. The intertwining of these objects results in cyclic sequences of often slowly deteriorating sounds.
Ilia Belorukov is a musician from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. He mainly works with the improvisational nature of sound, whether it is electroacoustics, noise, reductionism and electronics, or experimental directions of rock, hardcore and metal. Composer (graphic scores, structures, schemes) and performer of contemporary academic music from the Wandelweiser community. Regularly collaborates with dancers, poets, artists, and theater. Founder of the Intonema label, which publishes contemporary improvisational and experimental music, one of the Spina!Rec label curators. Belorukov publishes music reviews in his blog on Syg.ma, wrote reviews for the publications as the Contemporary Music, Topot, Music and Time, GESeta.
Girilal Baars is a composer and performer based in Uppsala, Sweden. He works in the fields of acoustic and electroacoustic music/sound art and free improvisation.
Vassily K. is a Russian composer and poet. Graduated from the guitar class of the Murmansk Music College and the Faculty of Musicology at the University of Lund (Sweden). Performs, records albums, has a wide range of interests, from folk and experimental rock music to free improvisation. He collaborated with artists as Martin Küchen, Herman Muntzing, Girilal Baars, Kristina Aspeqvist, Halster. For the last fifteen years he lives in Moscow.
“900 MHz is the frequency band used for GSM communications.” The A/V live opens onto a series of cell towers, the only visible and identifiable element of the mobile phone network infrastructure. The image treatment evokes the frequency representation of a radio signal.
The second part draws this infrastructure by listening to nearby local cell towers. This listening allows to get informations on each cell composing the network, the visual and sound interpretation reveals a hidden and usually imperceptible electromagnetic landscape.
The last part focuses on specific cell towers and shows the IMSI* of mobile phones connecting to them. The intercepted data allows to identify the provenance and the operator of phones. This kind of device, called IMSI catcher, is used by intelligence services — among others — for surveillance purposes.
*International Mobile Subscriber Identity: a unique number associated to a SIM card
Félicien Goguey (France/Switzerland)
Media artist and interaction designer. He explores the creative potential of programming languages and new technologies with a preference for open-source tools. His main interests lie in communication networks and their imperceptibility. Works of Goguey involves interactive design methods that question or develop strategies to tackle the connected issues. Goguey uses multiple skills to create interactive installations, live performances, applications and connected objects.
His work has been presented in international museums and events such as Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; HeK, Basel; NeMe Arts Center, Limassol; Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris; Resonate, Belgrade; Vector Festival, Toronto; International Conference for Computational Creativity, Ljubljana; Crypto Design Challenge, Amsterdam. Lives and works in Geneva.
Yann Longchamp (Switzerland)
Media interaction designer, sound artist and DJ. Born in 1993 in Switzerland. He is interested in all interactivities between artists and engineers in the context of digital creation. He uses his multiple skills in the service of art projects mixing different media.
His design work deals with research about the design of interfaces in electronic musical instruments, its impact, and the new forms of expression related to the body and the space. In his musical practice, Yann likes to work with textures by mixing mediums, hardware and software, to create a deep and engaging atmosphere. As a DJ, he lets go all his musical passions and desires from world music, dub techno and classic house.
Alexey Grachev (Russia)
Sound artist, engineer, computer programmer. Born in 1983 in Kaluga, USSR. Graduated from Kaluga branch of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University (Russia). Completed the program “School for Young Artists” at the Pro Arte Foundation (St. Petersburg, Russia). Artist, technical director and chief engineer of CYLAND Media Art Lab. Participant of the World Event Young Artists Festival (Nottingham, Great Britain, 2012), the Cyfest Festivals, special project “Urbi et Orbi” at the 6th Moscow Biennale (Russia, 2015). Since 2015, together with Sergey Komarov, develops the sound project “Subjectivization of Sound” whose basis is the interaction with space and spectators. Lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Radiot is a special project prepared for Cyfest by KMPST (Kompost) art group.
In the ocean of the radio frequency spectrum we haunt and utilize the beacons of unknown satellites, radio pirates streams, signals of unidentified transmitters, data packages, weather faxes, code cables, cosmic bodies of the solar system — everything that exists within the radio range. Recycling is being composted into accurate briquettes of the well- structured sonic landscape. The data for recycling is obtained from the Amateur Studio Club Receiver at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
KMPST (Nikita Tsymbal, Ivan Plevin) is a Moscow free improv art collective founded in the late 2010s by two architects, Nikita Tsymbal and Ivan Plevin, long-time experimental music enthusiasts, and experienced visual artists. For a change, they decided to completely eliminate any visual element from their joint creative output, forced to find common structures and realize images and shapes and forms from their imagination entirely in the sonic field, through a series of self-produced, self-arranged improvisational sessions with minimum overdubs.
Kurt Liedwart (Russia)
Kurt Liedwart is a sound artist, graphic designer and curator based in Russia. He has developed his own art and sound that combine accuracy of technology and imperfection of life, the use of the raw and processed. His diverse body of works — performances, sound diffusions, recordings, graphic design — helps to heighten the audience's awareness of the present moment and enhance their sense of what exists on the edge of perception. As a curator, Liedwart launched Mikroton Recordings in 2008 and Mikroton Live in 2013. His recorded sound works have been released by Mikroton Recordings, Mikroton Digital, Intonema, Hideous Replica, Copy For Your Records, Creative Sources, Untitled Folder, and others.