Computer Musician, Programmer, Hardware Hacker

I’m about to head into my last concert at the SEAMUS conference, the morning concert on Saturday. Overall, the festival has been pretty rewarding, and I’ve heard a lot of good music. Many more instruments-with-electronics pieces than I was expecting, which made the concerts more entertaining from a visual standpoint. Many of the laptop pieces were lacking in visual component, so I’m grateful for the works with live performers. The sound was great, particularly in Ritsche auditorium.

Stellar performers on all the works, especially Christopher Biggs’ piece Bioluminescence – excellent handling of a complex score paired with equally challenging electronics. Larry Austin’s ReduxTwo was another treat, with live and taped pianos coming from all directions, and a great performance by Joseph Kubera. David Bithell’s Hithering for electronically-augmented trumpet was an enjoyable outlier, in that there weren’t too many “meta-instrument” performances. His performance was great, and the instrument seems very responsive and versatile. Hearing Curtis Roads diffuse his music in 8-channel was enjoyable – the spatial character of his gestures really comes through in that setting.

I enjoyed Schuyler Tsuda’s piece Viscera Voltaic Pile - probably the noisiest piece, and definitely a lot of improvisation. Contra-bass Clarinet paired with bowed/tapped amplified hunk of metal. Also liked Michael Boyd’s Reconstruction, a Fluxus-like piece where we listened to the processed sounds of him destroying an alarm clock with various hammers, saws, and electric drills, before attempting to rebuild the object with duct-tape. Totally chaotic, and he wore sunglasses, inside a bar, at night.