Stochastic synthesis is a microsound synthesis technique invented by Iannis Xenakis that uses stochastic processes to create and vary waveforms. I composed all the sounds in this piece using my own extensions to Xenakis's stochastic synthesis algorithms that I have been developing for the last 20 years in the programming languages SuperCollider and C. No samples were used.

It Is Happening Again (Stochastic Synthesis)

Mujō, is a Japanese term that means change and impermanence. It originates from Buddhism and is one of three main characters of Wabi-sabi, which are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. This composition is inspired by the Wabi-sabi, a Japanese philosophy and aesthetic idea that describes nature's raw and imperceptive beauty. Through the electronic manipulations on acoustic recordings of a traditional eastern instrument, Guqin, this piece is perusing a kind of unbalanced beauty between acoustic and electronic, musical and noise. The sound materials in this composition keep varying, and all the features alternate between stable and unstable.

Mujō

like knotted strings (2022) for string quartet
Commissioned by JACK Studio

World premiere
Performed by the JACK Quartet
28 January 2023. JACK Studio Festival, Ernst C. Stiefel Hall, Mannes School of Music, New York City, USA

JACK Quartet
Violin 1: Austin Wulliman
Violin 2: Christopher Otto
Viola: John Pickford Richards
Cello: Jay Campbell

Recording and editing: Matt Craig

Programme note:
In "like knotted strings", I looked to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose literature often tackles themes relating to infinity, labyrinths, and intertextuality. Having established a basic ‘library’ of sound gestures and microtonal chords, I wrote a piece in which I flesh out these materials and explore a handful of their possibilities, with quasi-quotations which provide a glimpse of a musical composition which may or may not exist in a different timeline. In keeping with the Borgesian themes that inspired the work, the piece presents multiple versions of certain passages. Each version leads to a different outcome, which may or may not lead (back) to another version of that same idea. Gestures and harmonies are recontextualised and presented as half-remembered recollections. As far as a reading of the form of the work is concerned, one may approach the work from different angles, all of which are equally legitimate. In the grand scheme of the strucure, each of the four members (or narratives) of the quartet follows their own paths as the music progresses. Sometimes these parts converge in a rhythmically, harmonically, or gesturally homogenius fashion, only to diverge later on. This aspect of the work presented the greatest challenge for me, as I sought to establish the meta-narrative of the music whilst also keeping ensuring the work stands as a cohesive whole.
— Njabulo Phungula

“Some genres describe time as the ramification of alternatives, others as the inevitable enactment of a timeless pattern. In some, alternatives are only possible at a few critical moments; time is like a knotted string with deterministic interstices leading to rare and dense moments of choice.”
— Gary Saul Morson, "Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time"

“Almost immediately, I understood: “the garden of forking paths” was the chaotic novel; the phrase “the various futures (not to all) suggested to me the forking in time, not in space.”
— from Jorge Luis Borges’ "The Garden of Forking Paths"

https://www.njabulophungula.com/like-knotted-strings

like knotted strings (2022 version) for string quartet

For the last four years I have been grappling with a concept I encountered in the writing of Donna Haraway, the Speaker for the Dead. This sci-fi notion imagines possibilities of holding memories and “collecting up the stories for those left behind.” For me, engagement with Haraway led to a practice of using obsolete sound technologies and exploring how performers and listeners act as Speakers for the Dead. In this piece written for Hypercube, the phrase takes on a secondary meaning. A low-fidelity Casio SK-1 sampler featured in the work acts itself as Speaker for the Dead, collecting individual sounds of the ensemble until it is left behind.

Written for and performed by Hypercube- Erin Rogers, Jay Sorce, Andrea Lodge, and Chris Graham.

Speaker for the Dead [2023]

Underscoring this year’s curatorial focus, Curating in the Digital Age, we are thrilled to welcome longstanding exhibitor, Steven Sacks, owner and director of the New York-based gallery, bitforms, in conversation with exhibiting artist, Manfred Mohr. Mohr utilizes algorithms to engage rational aesthetics, inviting logic to produce visual outcomes. Not only exhibiting within the booth, the artist and bitforms will present the Special Project of his Early Plotter Drawings, highlighting a selection of Mohr’s earliest computer-generated plotter drawings.

Episode 77: Curating in the Digital Age - Steven Sacks in conversation with Manfred Mohr

AI-generated noise processed through
cassette tape and timbre transfer models (2024)

Generation Loss for AI-generated noise processed through cassette tape and timbre transfer models.

Simon Kanzler - "STEREO" (2024)

Composed for Ensemble Recheche
Commissioned by Koussevitzky Music Foundation
Premiered: December 5, 2024, Freiburg, Germany

Program note: 
The title of this piece, "Journal of an Ordinary Grief," is inspired by a poignant collection of autobiographical essays by the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. His work profoundly captures the complexities of loss, identity, and resilience through the act of writing poetry in the face of unimaginable violence and suffering.
My composition responds to the ongoing catastrophe unfolding in Palestine, a crisis that compels us to confront the stark reality of this still ongoing barbaric violence and its profound impact on our shared humanity. Structured in five movements and interspersed with three fixed-media electronic pieces featuring recitations by Darwish of three of his poems, the work seeks to narrate the intricate dilemmas and pain we face in witnessing such devastation and aims to create a space for collective mourning.

The poems and translations of the fixed-media pieces:

1)
early evening
over a neglected village
and two eyes dreaming
I go back thirty years
and five wars
I see that time holds for me
a grain of hope
the singer sings about
the fire and strangers
and the evening was evening
and the singer was singing
and they interrogated him
“Why do you sing?”
He replies
“Because I sing”
They searched within him
but found only his heart
they search his heart
but found only his people
they searched his voice
but found only his sadness
they searched his sadness
but found only his prison
they searched his prison
but found only themselves in chains
and the evening was evening
and the singer was singing

2)
Excerpt from Counterpoint
(for Edward W. Said)
Translated by Mona Anis

On wind he walks, and in wind
he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind,
no home for the wind. Wind is the compass
of the stranger’s North.
He says: I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part…
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams.
I have an English language, for writing,
with yielding phrases,
and a language in which Heaven and
Jerusalem converse, with a silver cadence,
but it does not yield to my imagination.

He says: The poem could host
loss, a thread of light shining
at the heart of a guitar; or a Christ
on a horse pierced through with beautiful metaphors. For
the aesthetic is but the presence of the real
in form/
In a world without a sky, the earth
becomes an abyss. The poem,
a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.
Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you’re still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth.. 


3)
Nothing pleases me
the traveler on the bus says-Not the radio 
or the morning newspaper, nor the citadels on the hills. 
I want to cry/
The driver says: Wait until you get to the station, 
then cry alone all you want/ 
A woman says: Me too. Nothing
pleases me. I guided my son to my grave, 
he liked it and slept there, without saying goodbye/ 
A college student says: Nor does anything
pleases me. I studied archeology but didn’t 
find identity in stone. Am I 
really me?/ 
And a soldier says: Me too. Nothing
pleases me. I always besiege a ghost 
besieging me/ 
The edgy driver says: Here we are
almost near our last stop, get ready 
to get off…/ 
Then they scream: We want what’s beyond the station, 
keep going!
As for myself I say: Let me off here. I am 
like them, nothing pleases me, but I’m worn out
From travel. 

(Translation by Fadi Joudah)


Journal of an Ordinary Grief (2024)-Ashkan Behzadi

Virginie Bove- Flute
Sinem Sadrazam-Viola
Vasilios Avraam- Guitar

Three Pieces for Flute, Viola and Guitar

This original composition for electronic sounds and electric guitar is centered around the deep ambient resonance of the TON 618 black hole. Each time its haunting presence emerges, it warps the surrounding elements—human speech and electric guitar textures—twisting them through extreme time-stretching and distortion. In the rare moments when the black hole recedes, the listener is met with the eerie echoes of a medieval choir, offering a brief, uncanny contrast.

Electric Guitar - Deniz Özkibar

no sense of self

Tobias Fandel

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