The Last Place (Left)
Live Music Project + Music Tech Setup
Hybrid Instrumental + Technological Timbre
With Katryn Hasler (strings) and Florine Juvet (accordion)
2011
“THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is a fragile sound world which moves familiar things into a surprising light. The deliberate surrender of virtuosity and melody puts the focus entirely on the inner self of the sound and the rhythm patterns that are derived from prime number permutations. Subtly “handcrafted” electronic sounds mix inseparably with the baritone violin (low violin) and accordion, both instruments used here in a way that is reminiscent of synthesized sound. “THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is at the same time machined poetry and at times a groovy sound world, a richly composed sonic matter oscillating between ambience and beats, realized with advanced music technology, yet implemented all in real-time, on stage.
The record is available at Tonus Music Records.
This project was extensively toured between 2008 and 2012 all over Europe.
Parallel Prints
Live Music Project
Experimental Electronic with Graphic Score
For Yarn/Wire, New York
2020-2022
Sequences of shaded color bars, coded in software, laid the foundation of PARALLEL PRINTS. Each member of the ensemble, for each rhythm fragment, picks a graphic sequence and realizes it against a metronome, by repeating subtle dynamic shades on a single pitch. This process, conceptual in nature, lends itself to iterations across any imaginable sound-making device or instrument, provided they allow the performer to craft subtle dynamic shades on pitched percussion. Its only requirement is that each fragment be played on a single sounding body. PARALLEL PRINTS thus creates space for negotiation in the moment of its realization, as four players closely gather around a single piano, an octave of crotales, or a tiny drum pad. Yarn/Wire demonstrated an unconditional commitment to experimentation across timbres and techniques as they fluidly moved between piano-based and percussion-based sound-makers. Their patience and persistence allowed me to spend an extensive amount of time with PARALLEL PRINTS; it enabled me to spend months, if not years, with the numerous fragments we had produced together – including the months of pandemic lockdown. The conversations with my collaborators deepened, for Yarn/Wire, Dykstra, and Backer encouraged me to take the original idea’s invitation for recombination and reconfiguration seriously. Simultaneously, Backer started shooting durational video footage in rural parts of the US, which she consequently processed with software code, constructing singular artificial composites out of a variety of durational videos. Artifacts of the process characterize her work, including the stills printed on this record. Inspired by my collaborators, after recording PARALLEL PRINTS #1 with Yarn/Wire on piano, we started capturing smaller fragments on drum pads where rhythmic data was recorded without sound, and we went on recording fragments of isolated sound on different instruments, so that endless permutations could be mechanically produced. PARALLEL PRINTS #2 I thus finished by writing software code that recombines the materials while rendering audible the computational processes themselves. Clicks, drop-outs and brisk decays suggest a sonic world that could never have been played by humans, and yet the present rhythms stem directly from Yarn/Wire’s performance. For me, the core of this work is constituted by humans who interact with a piece of conceptual technology. While necessarily some of the original idea was lost, these humans – my collaborators – have given rise to surprising and unforeseen nuances that characterize what PARALLEL PRINTS has grown into.
The record is available on Editions Verde (New York).
Premiered at The Stone at The New School, New York, by Yarn/Wire (2022)
#otherbeats
Web Installation + Artistic Research
Alternative Temporalities: Playing a Participatory Rhythm Archive
2020-2022
For #otherbeats, Marcel Zaes prompted contributors across the world to send him homemade beats, ‘alternative’ metronomes and skewed pulses, recorded from their shelter-in-place locations during the pandemic with lo-fi gear. This archive of rhythm collected via social networks is displayed in a web arts project: an experimental ‘space’ that lives on a website and makes sound.
The piece is involved with different notions of time grids. Using human data for an internet-driven sound project leaves the listener with an ambiguous sonic world that oscillates between periodicity, rhythmic deviance, and what might be called a defiant networked system of arbitrary connections. #otherbeats reflects on contemporary notions of ‘technological/techno’ and ‘organic,’ of ‘grids as resistance’ and ‘otherness,’ ‘broken’ and ‘failure.’ In particular it does so by referencing to the queer, African American musical undergrounds of the 1970s via its visual language. Thereby the piece acknowledges how deeply dance music rhythms are indebted to these scenes and pays tribute to them. Zaes, by way of designing ‘alternate’ systems of networked time grids, proposes an idiosyncratic mode of thinking ‘time grids’ in digital, networked electronic music performance. #otherbeats might be neither ‘techno’ nor ‘organic,’ but in fact, both.
The piece is made exclusively with Web Audio API/JavaScript under HTML5 and uses merely filtering, convolution reverb, synthesis, compression and live mixing as its techniques. #otherbeats takes on to democratize electronic music and sound art since it replaces expensive and specialized software at elite institutions with tools as cheap, ubiquitous and accessible as the web browser.
#Participatory
#Experimental Rhythm
#Online Sound Archive
Made in 2020 as part of the larger dissertation project “Resisting the Grid – Performing Asynchrony” by Marcel Zaes at Brown University, Providence RI, USA.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
In Idle Mode (Noise)
Installation + Artistic Research
Data-Driven Sound
Fish Farming Noise Scapes in the Pearl River Delta
2022 - 2024
In Idle Mode (Noise) thematizes the ambiguous role of noise in large metropolitan areas. The work started with fieldwork in the Greater Bay Area, between the fishponds in the Pearl River Delta (Guangdong). With a computational method, the sound recordings have been analyzed, then handed to a group of professional singers, who interpreted the urban noisescape using their extended vocal techniques. In the exhibition gallery, from a series of hanging, outdated horn loudspeakers, the vocal snippets blend with noisy artifacts. LED screens form the backdrop to the hanging horns. In Idle Mode (Noise) presents a landscape in sound and visuals that is hybrid and ambiguous in many ways to produce a space of poetic reflection.
#Low Tech Sound
#High Tech Transcoding
15 horn loudspeakers, hanging from the ceiling, with cables and amplifiers; 15-channel generative sound, based on a fishpond recording reinterpreted by 7 singers; 3 low-resolution LED screens, 320 x 160mm; 1 low-resolution LED screen, 960 x 160mm; 4-channel generative video work, based on processed landscape panoramas
Production team: Yixuan Jin, Yujing Ma, Yaohan Zhang, Xuehua Fu, Hanyu Qu, Binghuang Xu, Zhaorui Lio (production); Binghuang Xu (desk research)
Singers: Zhang Waner, Xu Yuxuan, Zhang Han, Chen Caiying, Hou Mingrui, Xie Jiajun, Zhang Yujie
Thanks for support and inspiration: Xiao Jian, Xi Lei, Chen Dong, Jin Zhuosheng
Exhibited at Shunde Food Museum (Greater Bay Area), 2022; and at Wuhan Biennale, 2024-2025
Flowing Sound
Mobile Media Installation + Artistic Research
Portable, Low-Fi Sound Sources in Shenzhen City
With a Dictionary of Moving Sound Sources
With Yaohan Zhang and Yujing Ma
2024
“Flowing Sound” takes as its starting point the idea that much of the sound in Shenzhen is dynamic and is “flowing,” that is, it is emitted from portable, moving technological sources that span a provisional sonic network across the city, thereby connecting “low tech” and “high tech” purposes and neighborhoods with one another. What emerges is an “aural economy” (Molina 2020) in which technological sound and media sources can teach us something about Shenzhen-Pingshan. The artwork is based on intense fieldwork to collect, record, and track moving media and sounds in the city. The project team then categorizes the found media and is in the process of developing and establishing a dynamic “working dictionary” of moving media and sound sources of Shenzhen. Collected sound sources are brought back into the street on a provisiaonal cart, enabling conversations with the community around sonic ephemera in the city. The results of both the dictionary and the street performance are exhibited as mobile installation with LED screens and low-fi loudspeaker devices in a gallery. “Flowing Sound” combines sound, video, performance, community-participation, background research, fieldwork, computational data analysis and visualization, and a digital archive building into a multimodal artwork and a body of artistic research.
#Aural Economy
# Urban Sound
#Portable Sound Sources
#Low-Tech Sound
First exhibited at PAM Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2024)
Production team: Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, Xiaoyao Ma, Sihui Li, Ziye Chen