Handmade Music

Giacomo Lepri – ‘Chowndolos’ – The Chowndolo is an Interactive Sonic Sculpture based on a Magnetic Pendulum: an oscillating stick whose trajectories are altered by magnets placed underneath the device. The magnets below the pendulum can be arranged to compose new shapes: different configurations will modify the pendulum oscillations and the generated sonorities. The unstable patterns produced by the pendulum oscillations are transformed into sound, articulating a music that evolves based on the pendulum’s dance. The sounds generated are entirely based on FM synthesis. The Chowndolo is a tribute to John Chowning, a pioneer in the field of Computer Music mostly known for his electroacoustic compositions, the discovery of FM synthesis and research on voice and instrument synthesis. For this performance, two Chowndolos will be played along with a mechanical metronome.

‘Of Aran’ – Síle Denvir, Úna Monaghan and Ceri Owen have identified an unusual sound world merging classical piano, Irish traditional séan nós singing, harp and concertina, live electronics, soundscape and noise. The trio was formed in March 2019 when Docs Ireland commissioned them to produce a new soundtrack to the classic Irish documentary Man of Aran. This soundtrack, like the film, was a juxtaposition of elements: some fabricated, some imagined and some true. They continue to make improvised music with influences and material from Irish and Welsh traditional music, as well as 20th Century avant garde composers.

Shane Latimer – ‘best laid plans’ – Improvisation exploring the in between spaces of accidental and intended gesture. Cultivating sounds from instrumental sources, Shane Latimer wrangles with an array of samplers, sequencers, modulations and audio effects to create a dialogue probing the inherent instability of improvisation.

Léa Boudreau – ‘this performance is no longer available due to […]’ is a live electronics performance based on circuit bending. It uses primarily old toys circuits in order to create sounds that are composed and modified with the help of open source coding program Pure Data. The main idea of this project is to reuse second-hand material and to embrace the DIY ideology while keeping a ludic approach to experimental music creation, using every glitch as valid material.

Barry Joseph Cullen – ‘Drone & Drama (Sonorities 22 Version)’ 

Koi Fish (Chihiro Tazuro and Elik Harpaz) – The show includes live music with movement, drawing and performance motifs. The essence of our project is to experience and explore sound; we’re playing with it in order to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of sound; how it emerges from the body, how it is created, what influences it, etc. In order to do that we use improvisation as a key tool, thus resulting in a slightly different show each time we perform. We aspire to take in the sounds from the immediate environment that surrounds us at the moment, and let it manifest into something new through us.

Adam Pultz Melbye – ‘A continuously receding horizon of understanding’ – The FAAB is a feedback double bass with embedded signal processing, developed as a collaboration between Adam Pultz Melbye and Halldór Úlfarsson. Throughout the past three years, Adam Pultz Melbye has been exploring the instabilities, resonant peculiarities and precarious behaviours of the instrument, in addition to developing new approaches to composition and improvisation, technical skill building and performance tactics. “… what was talked about itself extended what was talked about, providing a continuously receding horizon of understanding to be accounted for.” -Lucy Suchman

Jonathan Higgins – ‘Glitch Turntablism’ – Noisy, glitchy free improvisation using hacked CDJs and a DJ mixer. This project came from a frustration with the limitations of digital DJ equipment which, predominantly imitates vinyl. Modifying CD players uncovered a world of noise usually hidden within the circuitry which can be utilised to warp and glitch the content of the CDs live. This results in a form of digital, glitch based, turntablism that exploits the noise of digital audio, producing results wholly unlike conventional turntablism using vinyl.

John Bowers and Owen Green – ‘The Brazen Head’ – Featuring in many mediaeval stories of intellectual hubris, the brazen head was an artificial head, typically connected to mechanical and chemical processes, which could answer questions put to it. In one version, Roger Bacon and Friar Bungay, having built a head, fall asleep exhausted. Bacon’s servant keeps watch but panics when the head speaks enigmatically and explodes. Our brazen head is a binaural listening head analysing ambient sound and generating responses over a set of small loudspeakers. Amongst these multiple feedback loops, we improvise on small synthesizers and acoustic noisemakers and follow Bacon’s servant in failing at the necessary vigilance.

Joel McMordie – ‘Feedback Dream’ – Improvised noise using a physical mixer, a children’s tape player, guitar pedals and patches from the album ‘experiments in digital feedback,’ all working together in a circuit. This circuit consists of – a) A physical mixer drawing together sound sources from a mic, contact mics picking up vibrations on a table and the tape player using tapes picked at random, and b) A laptop which uses the physical mixer as an input and an output, manipulating and interacting with the sound from the mixer through digital feedback loop patches. The focus is to generate a wholly random, but musical, wall of noise and to become as much of an audience to my own music as the audience itself.

Kate Smith and Laurel Pardue – Bitchlovsky Storms the Castle brings together two exciting cutting-edge improvisors from disparate musical realms. Laurel Pardue hails from the Augmented Instruments Lab where she developed the award winning svampolin, a hybrid electro-acoustic violin, that is a functional decomposition and recomposition of the violin designed to play, present, feel like, and even sound like a violin, but can equally sound completely unlike a violin. She teams up with master vocal improviser Kate Smith.  Kate uses her voice as a dexterous instrument that traverses all the way from melody to sonic textures while using movement and space to inspire sound from an embodied perspective, often creating performances that toe the line between music, dance, and theatre.  The end result is an interdisciplinary improvisation crashing through traditional walls spanning the range from fully acoustic to fully electronic, and much in between. For this gig, Bitchlovsky Storms the Castle will perform together with Adam Pultz Melbye on double bass.

Approximate Set Times

BB = Book Bar (1st floor)
TH = Theatre (ground floor)

(1) 6:10-6:30 – BB Giacomo Lepri

(2) 6:40-7:00 – TH Úna Monaghan, Ceri Owen, Sile Denvir

(3) 7:10-7:30 – BB Shane Latimer

(4) 7:40-8:00 – TH Léa Boudreau

(5) 8:10-8:30 – BB Barry Joseph Cullen

(6) 8:40-9:00 -TH Chihiro Tazuro and Elik Harpaz

(7) 9:10-9:30 – BB Adam Pultz Melbye

(8) 9:45-10:30 – TH Okkyung Lee (headliner)

(9) 10:40-11:00 – BB Jonathan Higgins

(10) 11:10-11:30 TH John Bowers and Owen Green

(11) 11:40-12:00 – BB Joel McMordie

(12) 12:10-12:30 – TH Bitchlovsky Storms the Castle

The full event will be live streamed on our home page, and a video only (no audio) version of the stream will also be shown across most rooms in Lavery’s Bar which in next door to Accidental Theatre.