Handmade Music

Line-up to include:

Lisa Conway & Helena Hamilton
Joe Sorbara & Norm Adams
Meoark (Michele Cheng & Hassan Estakhrian)
Rebecca Minten & Luz González
AUUF (Tian Fu & Antuum)
Sylvia Hinz & Julie Herndon
Kasey Pocius & Tommy Davis
Tullis Rennie
Federico Reuben & Franziska Schroeder
LARGE TIN (Phil Maguire & Paul Margree)

Lisa Conway & Helena Hamilton – Signal Erosion

Helena Hamilton (NI) and Lisa Conway (Canada) met a decade ago while both in the MA in Sonic Arts program at SARC, bonding over troubleshooting Max patches. In the years after graduating, they have each continued to expand their respective sound and visual practices – exhibiting, performing, and attending residencies internationally, before returning to academia for further doctoral research.

Thrilled to collaborate and perform in an official capacity for the first time, Helena and Lisa will explore the concepts of audible erosion, decay, and human-machine collaboration, using a bespoke generative audio-visual system.

Joe Sorbara & Norm Adams – Cello & Percussion

Norm Adams and Joe Sorbara are passionate performers and community organisers forging their collective experience and sonic curiosities into a distinctive duo music. Their unusual stage setup offers audiences an intimate view of their work while creating a container for the musicians that challenges them to approach their instruments in new ways and pushes them to ask important questions: With “everything on the table,” quite literally, what becomes possible? What sounds can I make? What sounds are rendered unreachable?

Further, their face-to-face configuration engenders a tight physical connection such that the questions become mutual: What is possible for us in this configuration? What sounds can we make? How are they interrelated?

Finally, projections and proximity deepen the audience’s presence in the space, and so: What are the sonic possibilities for these people, in this space, in this moment? What can we find together?

At Sonorities, Norm and Joe will perform surrounded by witnesses with a projected “bird’s-eye-view” of their tabletop play. For twenty-minutes, the duo will create a new work that draws the audience close and inspires connection and community fed by sound. A discussion will follow to share impressions, explore curiosities, and get to know one another.

Meoark (Michele Cheng & Hassan Estakhrian) – Foreign Earth

Our earth may be foreign, but we too have fruit, we too have narwhals, and we too have helmets. We communicate through our soundboards and regurgitaters, and this is a letter to you.

Rebecca Minten & Luz González – Zones limitrophes

Zones limitrophes starts from the desire to create a common language beyond a certain aesthetic line or tradition, as well as from the conviction that musical understanding goes beyond these categories. In this project Luz González (live electronics) and Rebecca Minten (bass clarinet) provoke and support each other in equal parts by the use of multiphonics,live processing, sinus tones and pure noise.

The aim of the research is to make music together, to shift and expand the meeting points between the two instruments and to explore their sonic potential, and this is only partly achieved through programming and sonic research.

Not less important is the use on stage of the material created, to exploit to the maximum the musicality and the interaction of the two musicians on stage, always at the service of the joint result.

The multiple and varied influences of Minten & Gonzalez shine through in their uninhibited music. Zones limitrophes reflects the spontaneity and authenticity of their artistic language. The sound material they have created serves as a support for improvisation on stage. Each version of the performance is a world premiere that finds its way into the given environment and sound space.

AUUF – 白鹤神牛

AUUF is an improvisation duo, which is centered around the concept of creating bridges between unfamiliar cultures through improvisation. By embracing differences and fostering collaboration between different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the project promotes cultural exchange and mutual understanding. It is an exploration of interconnectedness, flexibility of language, and non-attachment through openness to new situations.

Tian Fu, the Chinese freestyle rapper, and Antuum, who creates beats from scratch on a semi-modular synthesizer, come together to create a spontaneous experience, through which, the rapper and synthesizer player focus on the importance of being present and aware of the music as it unfolds in the moment. This requires them to be open to new and unexpected directions, rather than being attached to preconceived ideas or plans. Each performer is both influenced by and influencing the other, but also allowing the space for their own expressions creating a web of interconnectedness.

Sylvia Hinz & Julie Herndon – Corresponding

Corresponding is an ongoing collaboration between Sylvia Hinz (recorders & effects) and Julie Herndon (keyboard+). These collaborative works take the form of postcards, letters, photos and videos exchanged over the course of several weeks as part of a Virtual Residency with the Goethe-Institut. In this project, sound and movement / image are corresponding, as well as the two sound producers, Julie Herndon and Sylvia Hinz. The relation has been built through layers, inspired by the movement of moss, water, and instrumental sounds.

Kasey Pocius & Tommy Davis – eTu{d,b}e for spatialised improvising agents

eTu{d,b}e is a performance series including improvising musical agents and a performer on the eTube, an augmented instrument utilising a saxophone mouthpiece and custom controller interface. The eTube is light, flexible, and directional, producing guttural growls to sonic bursts, it demands the immersive and gestural soundscape supported by the agents. Our work reimagines what interactive improvisation practices encompass through performance with improvising musical agents alongside a human performer. The agents are trained on audio corpora and then (re)combine, (re)cycle, and (re)use the audio into newly generated musical phrases in response to a live microphone input.

Tullis Rennie  – Fixed Freedoms: Belfast Mix

Tullis Rennie’s most recent studio release is Fixed Freedoms on Accidental Jnr’s ‘Room 2’ – a series for Matthew Herbert’s label dedicated to electronic music outside the main thoroughfare of club tracks. The music of Fixed Freedoms explores and reflects on themes of constraint: musical, personal, political. ‘Freedoms’ include the indeterminate nature of field recording, and of improvisations through equally unpredictable analogue circuits and patches. These are combined and juxtaposed with the ‘fixed’ notion of one-take recording as an immutable entity, and limits on choices – musical, technical, and of personal movement/travel in contexts both local and global.

For Sonorities, Fixed Freedoms is reimagined in a brand new solo electronic performance – Belfast Mix – which draws on field recordings made the same day as the performance in the city, for Tullis to improvise with, around and against in real time with analogue electronics.

Franziska Schroeder & Federico Reuben – AI Improvisation

This is a duo of live improvised music using AI generated music materials and Machine Learning techniques.

We trained the PRiSM SampleRNN neural audio generation model using a dataset of original saxophone recordings by Franziska to generate new AI-generated audio materials. The original dataset, as well as the (pre-rendered) generated audio materials, are accessed during the improvisation through stochastic and machine listening techniques. We also trained the RAVE model using Franziska’s saxophone input and we use the RAVE UGen (ported by Victor Shepardson) in SuperCollider for real-time processing.

Both approaches will be used in the improvisation, and the laptop improviser will interact with the saxophonist by intuitively accessing these AI-generated materials and techniques, as well as mixing them with other effects, samples and algorithmic processes, depending on what is happening during the improvisation. For the performance, we will be using the SuperCollider programming language with libraries by Federico, as well as other well-known live coding libraries such as JITLib.

Visuals using #StableDiffusion will be projected. The visuals are based on a prompting technique developed by Franziska, and that connect intimately to the performance, the specific performers, and their instruments.

LARGE TIN (Phil Maguire & Paul Margree) – Raffle Snake

This is a new collaboration involving a 20-minute interactive game piece. The piece is inspired by works such as John Zorn’s Cobra, which use preset rules to create unpredictable and mischievous outcomes.

The duo will build on cards-based approaches such as Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies to provide an open performance structure by way of audience-selected performance prompts that maintain momentum while generating unpredictability. In addition to these action-based cues and abstract statements, the duo will deploy cut-up techniques to generate new textual prompts from existing written sources.

Large Tin will utilise an eccentric range of tools to deliver the performance, including electronics, simple handmade instruments, cheap effects pedals, household objects, contact mics, cassettes and children’s musical instruments.