San Francisco
Tape Music Festival
Friday January 10, 2025
Voyage, Voyage (2006)
2’53” Stereo
To Francis Dhomont
A miniature, a music clip in honour of Francis Dhomont. Some of his pieces where the idea of travel is seminal made me want to cross spaces.
Cinema foley artist Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans’s passion for sound and listening pushed her to discover acousmatic music in 1984, at the 1st edition of the Festival acousmatique international L’Espace du son in Brussels (Belgium). After graduating in film editing from a cinema school (Institut supérieur des arts (INSAS)), she earned, under Annette Vande Gorne’s direction, a First Prize (1990) from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles and a graduate diploma in acousmatic composition (1993) from the Conservatoire royal de Mons.
While working her trade in the film world, Wyckmans applied sound creation to cinema, dance, television, video, and the theatre. However, her main focus has remained on electroacoustic and acousmatic composition, which she has taught in various Belgian arts colleges. Her works are a reflection of her interest in imaginary worlds, like the worlds transmitted by the radio, which she listens to daily, and she relays those worlds as imagined landscapes where iconic and transformed sounds act as land features orienting listeners’ mental representations. They also convey her ability — honed in her career as a foley artist — to make non-instrumental sounds speak, to make them expressive.
Vox Alia IV – vox populi (2023)
9’23” 16 Channels
Vox Dei? This short work mixes human choral voices when a ritual brings them together and unifies them: from children’s games and their screams, to those of demonstrators protesting in the public space, or even those of babies, to the litanic ritual of communal prayers. Close to the spirit of the Hörspiel, she affirms the necessity of sound recording as a basis for her work, and consequently plays with degrees of image recognition (iconic or their imprints), to communicate with the listener’s imagination. Its form is a succession of small, different tableaux, all linked to the other works of the Vox Alia cycle.
Vox Alia IV — Vox populi was realized in 2023 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium) and was premiered on November 29, 2023 during the inaugural concert of the Fondation Annette Vande Gorne at Espace Senghor in Brussels (Belgium). The work was realized with support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (Service de la musique classique et contemporaine du Service de la Création artistique).
Annette Vande Gorne studied at the Royal Conservatories of Mons and of Brussels, and “... chanced upon acousmatics when on a training position in France.” She was instantly convinced by the works of François Bayle and Pierre Henry of the revolutionary nature of this art form, she took a few training positions to grab its basics, then studied musicology (ULB, Brussels) and electroacoustic composition with Guy Reibel and Pierre Schaeffer at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris.
She founded and manages Musiques & Recherches and the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio (Ohain, 1982). She also launched a series of concerts and an acousmatics festival called L’Espace du son (Brussels, 1984; annual since 1994), after assembling a 60-loudspeaker system, an acousmonium, derived from the sound projection system designed by François Bayle.
In 1995 she was awarded the Prix SABAM Nouvelles formes d’expression musicale [SABAM Prize for New Forms of Musical Expression].
Her current work focuses on various energetic and kinesthetic archetypes. Nature and the physical world are models for an abstract and expressive musical language. She is passionate about two other fields of research: the various relationships to word, sound, and meaning provided by electroacoustic technology, and the composition of space seen as the fifth musical parameter and its relationship to the other four parameters and the archetypes being used. Her work falls essentially in the acousmatic category, including the Tao cycle and Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Est, which renews electroacoustic music’s ties with the past, with a few incursions in other art forms, including theatre, dance, sculpture, etc.
[English translation: François Couture, ii-18]
Visage V (1958)
10’35” Stereo
Profiles for 10 instruments (2 flutes, 2 trombones, trumpet, double bass, piano, 3 percussions)
The author composed this work, Visage V, in 1957 and 1958 before his arrival at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the R.T.F. (French Radio and Television). It represents an attempt at conquest of a certain number of degrees of an imaginary and already concrete range.
Prize of the Biennial of Paris in 1961.
Luc Ferrari studies piano at the conservatory, and other schools he starts composing in 1946. From 1952 on he goes to Darmstadt where his works are performed as well as in Paris and Köln « Musik der Zeit ». In 1958 he enters the Groupe de Musique Concrète where he remains until 1966. Creates with Pierre Schaeffer the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (1958-59); teaching activities, series of broadcasts on Musique Concrète, artistic and research direction of a small ensemble whose conductor is Konstantin Simonovich.
Jump to 1995, a Ferrari season « Parcours Confus » is organized throughout Holland. In 1996 he builds his own home studio, which he calls Atelier post-billig. In 1997 conference and concert tour in California before, in 1998, he visits the American southwest as an itinerant sound hunter and composes a radio series « Far-West News » for the Dutch Radio NPS.
Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s Ferrari wins numerous international prizes and award for his compositions and radio art, including the 1990 the Koussevitzky Foundation Award for his symphonic piece Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation.
In 2004 the ensemble Ars Nova organizes a Ferrari-retrospective during a week of his electro acoustic, solo and orchestra works with the city of Poitiers and “one week with works by Luc Ferrari, an out of line composer who cannot be categorized, ” within the Lille 2004-festival « AUDIOFRAMES, paysages sonores ». One more week with Ferrari’s compositions for ensembles, electro acoustic works, as well as his audio-visual installation “Cycle des souvenirs” in November 2004, organized by the NOVELUM festival of Toulouse.
Luc’s life ended in Arezzo, Italy, on 22nd of August 2005.
Surface Tension (2010)
9’50” Stereo
Beneath the water’s edge in the wetlands, a lively sonic world far beyond human’s limited hearing range flourishes.
Maggi Payne is a composer primarily of electronic and electro-acoustic music, and a video artist. Her works are presented world-wide. She received the SEAMUS Award in 2022 and is a recipient of several awards from the National endowment for the Arts and other organizations. Her works appear on Aguirre, Air Texture, The Lab, Lovely Music, Innova, Starkland, Music and Arts, New World Records (CRI), Root Strata, Ubuibi, Asphodel, and several other labels.
Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1) (2021)
9’02” Stereo
To MH and Lili...
The very nature of honey is for me an inspiring natural model, in life and especially in the realization of this work. Honey is the result of a long transformation. Honey, instead of being secreted spontaneously, results from a long process of metamorphoses which begins with quasi-volatile materials (pollen, nectar) that evolve in a continuous densification process to produce a rich, dense texture, up to crystallization. Bees collect, unify, transfigure and transfuse: they make possible the passage from pollen to honey, that is to say they take a powder—dispersion without order — and turn it into a structured and unified liquid. The symbolism of honey is associated with transformation and synthesis. Honey also represents a time of harvest and abundance. Therefore, Honey (Architectures From Silence No.1) offers a sonic architecture that has the following background:
•the transformation and metamorphosis of materials towards densification and transfiguration;
• material richness and abundance associated with a harvest period;
• the depth of retrospection and its temporal and musical possibilities, which summarize the path taken up to the harvest period, and;
• architectural and formal evolution of the work through a more structural approach to editing, particularly emphasizing a certain level of non-linearity and fragmentation between the large units and sub-units of the work while seeking local cohesion (gestures, phrasing, binding techniques and processes) and holistic cohesion (the work as a whole).
Martin Bédard’s current work focuses mainly on deepening and exploring the discursive possibilities of digital audio music. In a time where sound creation is marked by a fascination with new media, research on the notions of discourse seems to me essential. My “sound architectures” question the grammar of sonic organization and the elements constituting the possible discourse of the audible. They seek to further explore new rhetoric through conceptual media and interdisciplinary interactions between audiovisuals (cinema), literature (Nouveau roman, Oulipo, rhetorics), art (visual arts, architecture), and science (morphogenesis, natural models, theories of self-organization, systemics, human and communication sciences, cognitive sciences and perception, artificial intelligence). To this end, in 2012 I submitted a doctoral thesis — Du langage cinématographique à la musique acousmatique: écritures et structures (From cinematic language to acousmatic music: writing and structures) — on the possible relationships between cinematic grammar and digital audio music.
Over the years, I have been the winner or finalist of 12 international competitions, and my works have been presented at more than 75 international events. I also teach electroacoustic composition, and sound typology and morphology at Université de Montréal and auditory perception, composition, and analysis of electroacoustic music at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.
S. C. Sharma
After the War (1969)
4’12” Stereo
In 1969 David Tudor arrived in Ahmedabad, India, in the state of Gurajat, for a three-month residency at the National Institute of Design (NID). According to a 2023 Pitchfork review of the compilation, “The NID Tapes: Electronic Music From India 1969-1972”, written by Joshua Minsoo Kim, during his residency Tudor had shipped from New York, “a Dual Ring Modulator, a Bode Frequency Shifter, and tape machines, and led workshops on the instrument.” During this Festival we will be playing selections from this compilation.
The Pitchfork review continues,
The tracks unearthed on The NID Tapes are often sparse, and all the more striking for it. S.C. Sharma’s After the War, consists of synths wavering at various temp to create textural and rhythmic complexity. Expertly mixed to take advantage of stereo imaging, its layered blips and clangs echo the full-body immersion associated with raga.
Inflection Point (2024)
10’58” Stereo
Inflection Point represents a person's lifelong struggle with anxiety and insecurity in their quest for peace and tranquility. This dichotomy is depicted in the work through two extremes: the intense noise of the urban landscape and the tranquility of the natural landscape. The idea for the work came from a visit I made to the Athens subway last year. As someone who has lived away from urban centers for years, the scenes I encountered inside the trains and various stations were unfamiliar to me. People were in constant tension to catch the next train, walking briskly -almost hurriedly- continuous movement, fast-paced rhythms, and a general sense of anxiety and melancholy. The same conditions were present in the soundscape: constant announcements from loudspeakers, footsteps and voices echoing in the large station halls, and the characteristic noise -capable of instilling awe due to its magnitude and intensity- emerging from the tunnel as the train approached the station. All these stimuli, which can cause turmoil, a sense of claustrophobia, and anxiety, are captured in this work as psychological obstacles that our character must overcome to secure the tranquility they so desperately seek. To achieve this, it is inevitable for the character to reach a peak and climax of intensity -a reflection of their psychological state- which will lead them to a critical point, or in other words, an inflection point.
Nikos Kanelakis comes from Thessaloniki. He studied Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Department of Music Studies of the Ionian University and is currently a postgraduate student in the program " Sonic Arts and Audio Technologies" of the same department. His main subject is the acousmatic music composition. His interests extend to sound design, soundscape music and interactive sound media. In 2016 he became a member of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association and since then his works are presented at the annual concerts of the association.
Image Storm (2024)
4’29” Quadraphonic
The second track on the album SKYMYTH, “Image Storm” cuts a sharp shift in tone. Broken rhythms and aggressive incursions abruptly replace the prior track’s atmosphere of reverence and incense. I imagine an actual storm of supernatural images swirling atop the mountain, like in the movie Poltergeist. I created the music to be the destruction of religious icons—shards of glass, picture frames cracking, statuary toppled and crushed. A confusion of recognizable elements in a heap. A heap that was once a world, and a heap of pissed off gods.
Sam Genovese is a sound artist, composer and filmmaker who works across recordings, film, opera & installations. Blurring boundaries between song, sound sculpture and phantom score, his work incorporates electronic, computer music & contemporary composition. While his “epic” (Wire Magazine) 2021 album SKYMYTH was ritualistic in scope, his latest release STUBBORNDEATHSTUBBORNSTEEL uses voice and piano on a more intimate scale. 2024 saw his video work screen at Athen International Film & Video Festival, Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, and many others. 2025 holds the promise of a book/album/film project and a new opera.
Eremozoic (2021)
14’35” Quadraphonic
Ocean waves resonating in antique glass bottles in San Francisco, California. Field recordings of ocean surf in Svalbard, Norway, Australia, and California; and birds at Marin Headlands, California.
In 2019, I was invited to participate in Ineligible, an art/archeology project spearheaded by Dr. Doug Bailey of San Francisco State University. Bailey sent artifacts from the excavations that preceded the construction of the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco to artists, archaeologists, and creators around the world. We were then asked to repurpose the artifacts by using them as raw materials in works that engaged with contemporary political and social issues.
Among the objects I was given were an assortment of antique glass bottles, likely from the late 1800s. I took these bottles out to the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Sutro Baths, put tiny lavalier mics inside them, and recorded the glass-filtered washes and swells of ocean surf that became the primary sound sources for Eremozoic. Listening for some time, ear to conch as it were, I pondered geologic time, evolution, and the myriad lifeforms that have emerged from the sea over the Earth's history. Amidst subtle irregularities in the drones, I imagined I heard shadows of extinct creatures: scurrying, wing flaps, chirps and chatters, whimpers and bellows. So many species now gone, and more vanish each year.
The term “eremozoic” was coined by biologist E.O. Wilson, as an alternative to “anthropocene.” Wilson has suggested that we are entering the Earth’s Eremozoic period, which he characterizes as an age of loneliness following mass extinctions caused by human activity. Layering together glass-filtered and open-air recordings to form this composition became a kind of offering in remembrance of our lost creature-relatives.
Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer, field recordist, and instrument builder. Her works investigate natural sites and ecosystems, and human relationships with them. She uses microphones and amplification to explore sonic intricacies, highlighting unique voices and soundscapes while addressing environmental issues. Her projects often feature sculptural natural-object instruments and field recordings from remote locales. Leonard’s artistic research has taken her to a wide range of wilderness areas, including Antarctica and the Arctic. Her works have been presented in concerts and art exhibitions in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. Grants awarded include the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, American Music Center, American Composers Forum, and ASCAP. Commissions include works for SFMOMA, Kronos Quartet, Small Press Traffic, and Funsch Dance. Leonard's recordings are available on Other Minds, mappa, Gilgongo, and numerous other labels.
[neo]Lalia (2025 revision)
10’00” Ambisonic
Neolalia: Speech, especially of a psychotic nature that includes words that are new and meaningless to the hearer.
[neo]Lalia is a meditation on the intersection of organic and artificial representations of the human voice, the extreme juxtaposition of stasis and hyperactivity, and the relationship between artist and technology.
Created with bespoke machine-learning and synthesis tools, the sonic fabric of [neo]Lalia is formed using the voice as raw material and activator – a model used to resynthesize sound from a vast corpus of audio materials and drive synthesis parameters. While the sonic materials are sometimes recognizable as human in origin, the moment-to-moment sounds are often wildly transformed from their source into a ballistic, cold, and artificial world of grinding metals, feedback tones, and synthesis.
An earlier version of [neo]Lalia was completed in 2020, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a fixed-media work for video and third-order ambisonics audio. This initial version was a companion work to a collaborative project named Autoimmune that I worked on with Brazilian filmmaker Marcos Serafim. Both projects explored the (then) relatively nascent audio and video machine-learning tools, and the relationship between organic and inorganic materials – often with a focus on the uncanny liminal space that lay between.
In only five years, the landscape of AI and machine-learning in the arts has changed dramatically. Formerly niche and arcane creative tools have since been commercialized, packaged, and turned into easy-to-use products. This rapid development has led to an interesting, complex, and sometimes uncomfortable relationship between artist and tool – between human and technology.
This new version of [neo]Lalia has been heavily reworked and expanded; a reflection of that changed relationship. Where there was once simple fascination in the blurry and fragmented nature of machine-learning, there is now a more nuanced dialogue – one that more deeply explores this inflection point, and the simultaneously exciting and sinister possibilities found beyond that further horizon.
Douglas McCausland is a composer / performer, sound designer, and digital artist whose visceral and often chaotic works explore the extremes of sound, technology, and the digital medium. Described as “Tremendously powerful, dark, and sometimes terrifying...” (SEAMUS) and “Ruthlessly visceral...” (The Wire), he leverages the intersections of numerous technologies and creative practices, such as gestural performance interfaces, spatial audio, interactive systems, intermedia art, and machine-learning. Douglas is currently the Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) Studio Manager at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and is also a lecturer at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
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