demo set - chamber music and electronic music

Clarinet: Daniel Pastene
Recorded at Orpheus inistitute by Juan Parra Cancino

Brachycalix

Phass is an electroacoustic piece. The source material consists of all sounds i could produce with a plastic bottle. These sounds where processed electronically, in a way that made them for the most part irrecognizable. The piece is a study of the effects that originate from the layering of several instances of one sound with slight and varying phase differences. With this technique, a whole range of sounds can be produced, ranging from piercing drones to pulsating rhythms.

Phass

for 9 guitars

I wrote this piece on demand by the instrument builder Manu Frederickx, for a replica of an italian baroque harpsichord he made and provided with four contact microphones. The harpsichord sounds are sent to a computer, from where they are transformed by an audiomulch patch we control in real time. Kristof Meers made an accompanying video installation.

The title is a reference to John Cages happening HPSCHD, the first piece ever where harpsichord sounds and live electronics were used together.

gbzkgd

This is kind of a radical remix of Sir John Longton, His Pavan, a consort piece by rennaissance composer John Dowland. It is based on a frequency analysis of a recording of this piece, from which i retained only the most striking changes in the spectrum. As a result, much of the original harmony of the piece disappears to the background in favour of more rare spectral components.
For a composition based on a rennaisance piece, historical instruments where an obvious choise, so it is written for theorbo, harpsichord and gamba, but the sounds of those instruments are also live processed by a Pure Data patch
This piece has been premiered by Dirk Moelants (gamba), Matthias Trofaes (harpsichord), Thomas Smetryns (theorbo) and myself (laptop).

Sir John Longton, revisited

This piece for two guitars is, both on macro- and microlevel, based on the repetition of a limited number of musical elements, that are gradually built up and modulated in different parameters. The nature of the modulations is fixed in the score, but the filling-in is largely up to the performers

This piece was written for the guitar duo Saffraan.

Doskordianistick

A piece for the <Hat> robot, that was ordered by Aphex Twin from theLogos Foundation, where i work.
http://logosfoundation.org/instrum_gwr/HAT.html

Study #11, for <Hat>

Thintroppoinmealways is a piece for two voices and interactive electronics. The voice sounds are continuously recorded, analysed and transformed by a computer program built on GMT and Pure Data. The transforamtions of the voice sounds are then used as an answer to new sounds made by the voices. Which transformations exactly happen is partly predetermined, but is also dependent on the pitch, the volume, the rythm, ... of the voice sounds.

This piece was written for Maja Jantar and Jelle Meander.

demo set - chamber music and electronic music

Kristof Lauwers