On 10 December 2015, BEAST and composer / instrument-maker John Richards celebrated do-it-yourself music and the inventor’s spirit.
Richards’ ‘dirty electronics’ approach focuses on shared experiences, ritual, gesture, touch and social interaction. In a similar vein, Italian composer Manfredi Clemente performs using ’no input’ mixing techniques, taking the background signals of electronic equipment, and manipulating them into intense and beautiful sonorous fields over the immersive BEASTdome sound system.
BEER (the Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research) gave the Birmingham premiere of their work Switchblade. In this work each participant contributes three layers of sound, live-coded and modified on the fly, which are varyingly folded into or excluded from the music according to decisions made by a master construction algorithm, itself live-coded and running over a network. The result is a sonic assembly that is constantly being de- and reconstructed, but with no one builder in total control.
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