JBRH 024

Performed by Ensemble Pamplemousse with Laura Cocks, Charlotte Mundy, and Marina Kifferstein, Aug 2021. Commissioned by Darmstadt Ferienkürse 2020 (2021).

This is a bridge.
This bridge is not your typical "cable" bridge.
This one does not go to nowhere.
It is much stronger, and it is made with little pieces of metal in it.
It is sturdy, but it takes time and it does not always hold.
Like anything else, it can break.
Sometimes people will drive onto the bridge, and jump over the side.
Some people will jump right into water.
Some people will jump right onto the train tracks on the other side of the river.
The bridge has no train tracks.
It is the train tracks that make the bridge.

The bridge has no train tracks (Universal™ Love)

for string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou June 7th 2017
Quatuor Diotima

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As a kid we had a television set with an antenna that rotated (you could rotate it from inside of your house). When the major channels would go off-air you could rotate it and pick up strange other channels from smaller cities around - from across the border, Buffalo and so on - and you would see strange things, that were kind of hard to see (there was a lot of static) and it was very intriguing to watch that kind of things. That was really the core, the crystal at the centre of this movie: my experience with that thinking “what if the images that you pulled up were really quite extreme, disturbing, possibly illegal, and what would you think then, would you keep seeking out those channels or would you call the police or what would you do, how would you respond to them?”

David Cronenberg on his movie Videodrome (commentary track of the Criterion Collection BlueRay)

The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking (probably the most famous and certainly the longest signal hijacking ever) that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, United States on the evening of November 22, 1987. The signal pirates, whose identities were never found, succeeded in getting their broadcast intruded onto WTTW (a local Public Broadcasting Service television station).
The pirate broadcast, which lasted 90 endless seconds, featured an individual disguised as Max Headroom (a sci-fi computer-generated television character quite popular in the 80s, coming from dystopian near-future dominated by television and large corporations).
Around 11:15 p.m. an episode of the British TV-Series Doctor Who was suddenly interrupted by television static, after which an unidentified man wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses appeared. The man started to moan, scream and laugh, uttering various random phrases (the audio was distorted and crackling), including New Coke's advertising slogan "Catch the Wave" while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time). He then tossed the can out of sight, presented his middle finger wearing a rubber extension, sang an excerpt of “I’m losing you” (a 1966 Motown hit recorded by the Temptations), hummed the theme song of Clutch Cargo (a clumsily-animated television series of the 60s), moaned painfully complaining about his piles, farted, put on and off a giant glove (similar to the one worn by Michael Jackson at the time). He then partially exposed his buttocks, howling: "They're coming to get me!”, while an unidentified female accomplice wearing a French maid outfit started to spank him with a flyswatter. The transmission then blacked out for a few seconds before resuming the Doctor Who episode in progress.

“The 1987 Max Headroom Broadcast Incident” features a string quartet “enhanced” with transducers and preparations. 
The digital processing of the instruments is largely inspired by the same modulation techniques that were - and still are - commonly used for radio and television transmission. 
The piece, an hommage to obsolete or soon-to-be deprecated technologies and to the media-dominated, dark future that the “cyberpunk” sci-fi of 80s foretold, is dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli.

Mauro Lanza - "The 1987 Max Headroom broadcast incident" (2017)

Diego Castro, electric guitar / Nicolás Kliwadenko, electronics
Relincha Festival, Valdivia, Chile, November 24, 2017

http://aaroncassidy.com/product/the-pleats-of-matter/

The Pleats Of Matter - Diego Castro & Nicolás Kliwadenko - Relincha Festival, Chile, Nov 2017

Mustard Sweatshirts Are Forever (Perf. by Roomful of Teeth)

For bass flute, bass clarinet, bass oboe and live-electronics, performed by Ensemble Mosaik (Bettina Junge, bass fl; Simon Strasser, bass oboe; Christian Vogel, bass clar)

!!---please listen on good speakers/headphones, there's a lot happening in the <100Hz and >10kHz freq bands---!!

Commissioned by and dedicated to Ensemble Mosaik.
Premiered on 1.8.2020 at AckerStadt Palast, Berlin. 
Recording on 28.7.2020 at Vivaldi Saal, Berlin.
Recording engineer: Arne Vierck, editing and mastering: Stefan Prins

Inhibition Space #1 (2020)- for bass flute, bass clarinet, bass oboe & live-electronics

Contemplation on Little Big Muff (2000)
for amplified - cello and percussion
Odd Appetite duo: Nathan Davis, perc., Ha-Yang Kim, amplified cello.

...can you tell me about the title?  i was thinking about the quality of sound of the amplified cello.  distorted.  distorted through a Russian guitar pedal (it’s called a “Big Muff”).  what’s cool is that amplification works to make more apparent the inherent qualities in the physicality of sound which, without amplification, we are less aware:  it brings out the internal beatings (and therefore the tempos) within certain intervals; it allows for the possibility of bringing out different overtones from changing only the bowing position; it brings out the artifacts of production noise.  these qualities I find beautiful and in contrast to the hierarchical dominance of pitch/harmony in western Classical music.  and there is a temporality necessary to make these elements cognitively focused, therefore the “contemplation.”

This pieces was written for the ‘cello + percussion duo, Odd Appetite (Ha-Yang Kim + Nathan Davis).

Mustard Sweatshirts Are Forever (Perf. by Roomful of Teeth)

Mary Kouyoumdjian