The programming for the two Sonic Lab Immersive concerts reflects recent upgrades to the Lab’s spatial system. Nine pieces are programmed across two concerts, including multichannel fixed media, live electronics and mixed instrumental and electronic works.
All works are adapted to the Sonic Lab’s spatial system to enable three contrasting and complementary approaches to immersive sound: surround (48 loudspeakers surrounding the audience at four vertical levels, a Wavefield Synthesis frontal array and the IKO loudspeaker. The design of the three systems aims to explore the unique spatial affordances of each, including diffuse immersive image with surround ambisonics, the highly precise frontal localization and distance with Wavefield Synthesis and the object-like ‘inside out’ characteristic sound of the IKO.
This concert will feature three pieces:
Nick Feldman – The Permanence of Decay
Eric Lyon, ft. Kyle Hutchins and Kendra Wheeler – BLUE
Cristiana Palandri – Commiato
Programme Notes
Nick Feldman – The Permanence of Decay
Force Majeure is the latest musical project from Nick Feldman, a Cardiff-based audio/visual artist with an eclectic and visceral set of production and performance works over more than 25 years.
This project is a new stepping stone in the artistic career of someone who was born from a rave-orientated British underground DIY scene. The lack of a dancefloor focus here provides a good opportunity for him to explore the more experimental and abstracted side of his musical tastebuds.
This project has taken his work into more of a hardware-based workflow and each of his two albums have separately explored the outer limits of sampling (the self-titled Force Majeure, on French label Concrete Collage) and synthesis (in the follow up, The Permanence of Decay). His new album contains a unique hardware instrument and performative workflow for each piece that was created with ambisonic spatialisation for immersive playback and live reworkings.
Performances under this alias have taken place at the Chaos Theory and Crux festivals in London, as well as special immersive audio performances at the Sound/Image Festival in London (at University of Greenwich) and CEM in Cambridge.
Eric Lyon – BLUE
Featuring Kyle Hutchins and Kendra Wheeler on saxophones
BLUE is for two tenor trombones with live computer processing. Two key concepts for the piece are spatialization and elongation. Short events are articulated with multi-channel impulse responses of lengths up to 70 seconds. Many different impulse responses were generated for the piece. The distended nature of the interaction between saxophones and computer processing allows for an introspective performance, and one in which timbral decisions made in very short performance time spans have long term consequences.
Cristiana Palandri – Commiato
Commiato is a piece for the Ambisonics system.
The sound material was created through analogue instruments such as the electric guitar, modular synthesisers, recorded vocal samples and an extensive use of soundscapes combined through convolution with digital synthesis.
Commiato addresses the issue of global warming not only by using recorded soundscape sounds that reveal intense climatic variations and melting ice, but above all as a farewell, a piece that becomes an elegy:
Information on climate change has been available for decades, but society seems to observe this phenomenon like a respectful audience listening to an opera. Artistic works, regardless of their explicit social purpose, are political acts insofar as they can highlight issues and prompt new readings and openings. Given the apparent indifference of the social reception of this phenomenon, Commiato takes the form of an Elegy, a farewell song to our natural environments.
Media
