• About the project:
 This solo live electronics project merges vocabularies and approaches from different, often seemingly clashing, realms of electronic music: noise and no-input music with electroacoustic composition with vibrant underground tekno. The sets are very hands-on, using a custom-built live-electronics instrument programmed in SuperCollider. Playing it is very involved, and as real-time as playing an acoustic instrument.
Bookings/contact: stm@modularbrains.net

• About this piece:
Megas Diakosmos ('Μέγας Διάκοσμος', i.e. ‘The Great Order of the Universe) takes its name from a lost cosmological treatise written by Leukippos, an ancient Greek natural philosopher of the 5th century BCE. In this treatise, Leukippos introduced for the first time an Atomic Theory of cosmology, surprisingly comparable to contemporary cosmological theories. Very little is known about the work, but according to remarks of other ancient writers, Leukippos postulated that the universe consists of tiny, invisible, indestructible, unchangeable and indivisible 'Atoms' (the 'Being') differing only in size and shape, and of 'Void' (the 'Non-being'), that exists in-between atoms and has also material properties, although different (anti-matter?). This infinitely expanding and contracting void allows atoms to move and collide eternally, creating and destroying matter, new bodies, and our world, but also a vast number of other worlds in the universe, some inhabited some not.
Leukippos' atomic theory and turbulent cosmogonic vision form the conceptual and experiential starting points for the composition, its sonorities and their development throughout the piece, as well as for the system and sound synthesis methods used. The system is a cybernetic model based on digital feedback and implemented as a sonic complex dynamical system – mathematically similar to a cosmological entity or universe in motion. This sonic universe is defined by the sample-by-sample interactions of a single binary digit (One, or ‘Being’) moving incessantly within a world of Void (Zeros, or ‘Non-being’). This digit floats and collides, is fused and split from delayed copies of itself, thus creating countless sonic bodies in states of equilibrium, oscillation, chaotic behavior, noise and silence.
Although Megas Diakosmos is a fixed medium piece, all the different ‘worlds’ (layers and sections) were performed in real-time using a hands-on, live electronics version of the system to maintain an aspect of ‘in-time’ timelessness, and to accentuate the primal and visceral character of the composition.


• More info and a schematic of the live electronics instrument can be found here:
http://modularbrains.net/megasdiakosmos.html

This piece appears together with an artist interview at Gonzo(circus) [issue 103], a Belgian/Dutch magazine for contemporary music and culture.
http://www.gonzocircus.com/gc103


Stelios Manousakis - Megas Diakosmos [2011]

About the project: 
 Stelios Manousakis' solo live electronics project merges vocabularies and approaches from different, often seemingly clashing, realms of electronic music: noise and no-input music with electroacoustic composition with vibrant underground tekno. The sets are very hands-on, using a custom-built live-electronics instrument programmed in SuperCollider. Playing it is very involved, and as real-time as playing an acoustic instrument.  Bookings/contact: stm@modularbrains.net


About the piece:
L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif Sonore (‘The Primeval Sonic Atom Hypothesis’) is named after a cosmological theory, 'L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif', presented in 1931 by Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian physicist, astronomer and priest. The theory was later mockingly dubbed by its opponents as the 'Big Bang' theory, a name with which it has become widely known ever since. Lemaître, based on Albert Einstein's general relativity theory and on Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman's equations, proposed a model of the initial conditions and subsequent development of the Universe, in which the Universe expanded and continues to expand from a single point containing extreme amounts of energy. This expansion happens in forward time and is coupled by a contraction in backward time that brings the mass of the entire Universe back into a single point (‘l'atome primitif)’, where and when the fabric of time and space comes into existence.

Lemaître’s theory is the inspiration for the structure of the piece and for the sonorities found in it. The piece begins with the bursting of a highly condensed core of sonic energy, which after a period of turbulence and constant transformation creates a plethora of sonic worlds to be observed: some slow and calm, others very fast, others oscillating, and others in chaotic states - but all constantly breeding change and transformation, even when they momentarily appear to be static. The piece zooms in and out of these worlds, looking, or rather listening, at these sonic galaxies from the cosmic to the quantum levels and in-between.

To realize the above, the piece also treats Lemaître’s theory as the conceptual starting point for the sound synthesis and control methods used, with the metaphor of a single point generating the Universe being the core of the design of the live electronics system: The system is a cybernetic model based on digital feedback, which is set in motion by one single binary digit: the primeval atom of digital technology. No other sound sources are used but real-time manipulation of that digit’s path within a synthetic sonic phase space of possibilities, thus revealing its multi-faceted potential and the emergent beauty of the constantly shifting digital universe it creates.

The piece is an Open Composition, meant to take its final shape through live performance, creating an immersive sonic experience that fluctuates between varying degrees of tension and release.


More info and a schematic of the live electronics instrument can be found here: http://modularbrains.net/lhypothesedelatomeprimitifsonore.html


Stelios Manousakis: L' Hypothèse de l' atome primitif sonore (live) [2010]

About the project: 
 This solo live electronics project merges vocabularies and approaches from different, often seemingly clashing, realms of electronic music: noise and no-input music with electroacoustic composition with vibrant underground tekno. The sets are very hands-on, using a custom-built live-electronics instrument programmed in SuperCollider. Playing it is very involved, and as real-time as playing an acoustic instrument.  
Bookings/contact: stm@modularbrains.net


About this piece:  
Fantasia On A Single Number (pronounced: /fantazía/) is an open composition that takes its final form through live performance. ‘Fantasia’ is the most open to improvisation classical music form. Described by Renaissance composer Luis de Milán in the 16th century as an instrumental composition whose form and invention spring ‘solely from the fantasy and skill of the author who created it’, the form developed considerably in the following centuries, varying widely from free, improvisatory types to much stricter contrapuntal forms, while always remaining highly virtuosic.

Fantasia On a Single Number grows from and expands on the tradition of virtuosic, 'composed improvisation', and is an exploration of the continuum between these two poles (composition / improvisation). It is an Open Composition whose structural backbone and overall dramatic arc are pre-defined, but in a manner that allows - and at specific points requires - the inclusion of spontaneous ideas and their development according to the compositional and aesthetical framework of the piece. This ensures that particular qualities and micro-moods will freely emerge and develop within each performance, while assuring that the piece always remains recognizable, retaining its formal outline, together with key sonic, gestural and motivic characteristics.

Fantasia On A Single Number is composed for a live-electronics instrument; the instrument is designed as a complex dynamical sonic system whose raw power the performer guides into states of equilibrium, oscillation, chaotic behavior, noise and silence to create an immersive sonic experience that fluctuates between varying degrees of tension and release. The piece and the instrument are based on digital feedback, set in motion by one single number which draws from the guts of the machine an intense visceral stream of bursts, rhythms, turbulence, drones and resonances. No other sound sources are used but real-time manipulation of the number's path within a synthetic space, revealing its emergent beauty as it populates a constantly shifting digital universe.

More info and a schematic of the live electronics instrument can be found here: http://modularbrains.net/fantasiaonasinglenumber.html


Stelios Manousakis: Fantasia On A Single Number (live) [2009]

Stelios Manousakis is a composer, performer, sound artist and researcher. In these capacities he strives to develop a new musical and artistic language that is both visceral and cerebral, communicating in a purely cognitive and experiential level while being complex and multilayered.

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