Early 21st century experimental music
(selection)

Standard Indeterminacy (1997)(*)
(*)I know, it's '97, but it is definitely a transition work.
free instrumentation
commissioned by Jens Brand (Mex) & the Open Systems Festival

Crossroads/Invocation (2001)
for live microphone feedback and real time DSP
"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your computer and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there be sure to get there just a little ' fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your computer and be playing a piece there by yourself. A big black man will walk up there and take your computer and he'll install new drivers on it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."

Mining the Fabric (2002)
for tone decoder, microcontroller and synthesizer
Mining the Fabric is an ongoing series of installations/performances whereby the sonorous fabric of a specific location is being mined for G (196Hz). The mining is done, in real time, with microphones and simple tone decoders. The gathered data is interpreted by a microcontroller connected to a synthesizer and effects processor. The microcontroller uses this data to steer the synthesizer through a half diminished G7 chord and has the effects processor slightly bending pitches.
Mining the Fabric I was commissioned by Champ d'Action and presented during the 'Music and Architecture' project in the Toyo Ito Pavilion in Bruges, Belgium, in September 2000, Mining the Fabric II was presented in De Singel in Antwerp, Belgium, during the presentation of the December 2002 issue of the Janus magazine. Mining the Fabric III (not the bridge) will be presented on June 6 2003 in the Brueckemusik program in Cologne, Germany.

Bending the Tonic (2004)
for voice, flute, trombone, bass, percussion, guitar and computer processing
Bending the Tonic is a blues in 144 bars, or what happens when you read Schoenberg while listening to Bukka White. In analogy to the movie 'Fantastic Voyage', the musicians are miniaturised on a temporal and on a vertical harmonic scale and injected into 12 standard blues bars. The work was commissioned by the November Music Festival.



Very Slow Disco Suite (2006)
for 3 instruments, microcontroller and computer processing
The Very Slow Disco Suite is, as the title states, a musical exploration of extremely slowed down disco music. I found that slowing down (preferably simple) musical events causes otherwise very discrete properties to emerge. The essence of disco music is a very rigorous binary beat, running at a speed of approximately 120 BPM. But that quality vanishes when you slow the tempo down to 20 BPM or less and other harmonic and melodic aspects take over instead. Three musicians and a microcontroller are the explorers of the material that runs as a backing track. The microcontroller is hereby the central arranger. It is in charge of a number of things: it tells the musicians which segment of the score to play, it decides when and how or not to process the sound of a particular instrument and it decides which of the 4 accompanying voices will be heard or not. To make these decisions it gathers information from the music being played. The microcontroller appears to be very talented, but also very unreliable, sometimes shy and stubborn, at times very stimulating or frustrating. Very human in a sense, thus that I came to consider it as the 4th albeit slightly autistic member of a quartet.


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