Name: Dos piezas para un tiempo errante by mvlenv
Duration: 4 min 24 s
Description: Obra estrenada por el Ensamble de Música Contemporanea Damus (UNA) en Septiembre de 2022, Río Negro.

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 for computer-generated sound

More automatic adaptive texture layers were added in this excerpt, specifically rich low-frequency sounds that sometimes saturate, feedback loops that develop harmonic materials from the input, and reverberated textures processed with a tremolo-like amp modulation effect. Overlapping of more differentiated automatic textures seem to yield richer, more organic results, but the logic by which they are activated is still primitive. Some moments in the recording suggest that particular pairings between these textures give better results than others, and that a mechanism could be implemented to prevent the same combinations from recurring.

K4mi

Gwoope tree

Sensen - Entorno Inseguro

Spoil

Q Energy

This is an Extract from the Premiere of my new solo performance "Interdimensional Generated Space", premiered in October 2022 at Panke Culture in Belin, as a part of the series (Von Antennenwäldern und Wellenozeanen) . 

A research-intensive piece focusing on the transcendental phenomenon of the Northern Lights. 
The planned performance uses the implement of self-made recordings from the Northern Lights, in combination with self-made crystal radio, plus light, detectors, and motors, to simulate a technological audio-visual version of Northern Lights in the performance space. “Interdimensional” specifically refers to the movement of energy between modes of perception. One part of this energy come from the composed mixture of “natural cosmic voices”; and another part is coming from the electromagnetic forces generated and captured in real time during the performance. The piece make full use of the contrasts of the invisible processes, to create a new experience of space, time, and human scale. 
This is an attempt to achieve a unique sonic dialogue 
between “Natural” and “Technological” world, a reflection on Nature that is imitated by technology in an anthropogenic age.

This project was kindly supported by Musikfonds & Neu Start Kulture
Photo credit : Alex Conu
Live recordings by : Roy Carroll

Interdimensional Generated Space_ Extract Live Premiere@Panke Culture, Berlin 2022

Obra estrenada por el Ensamble de Música Contemporanea Damus (UNA) en Septiembre de 2022, Río Negro.

Dos piezas para un tiempo errante

Sunik Kim’s Raid on the White Tiger Regiment arrives three years after 2019’s Zero Chime on First Terrace Records. Raid has strong political undertones and is named after one of the eight core revolutionary operas produced during the Cultural Revolution. This particular opera focuses on the joint struggle of Chinese and Korean communists during the Korean War, during which there were devastating US attacks on the northern part of the peninsula. Raid is an insanely wild ride made with software Sunik custom-built in Max MSP and SuperCollider using free orchestral soundfonts at hyper-speed tempos. Despite the presumed chaos of this album, there is a strong and present voice that permeates the barrage of noises, almost as if the teeming and swirling sounds coalesce to create a slowly shifting mass that is somehow soothing. There is a constant regeneration of textures and sensations here: simultaneously shedding and accumulating, receding and emerging. A multidirectional presence, both solidly grounded but also unpredictable in its motion. Side B presents a unique live document of Sunik’s performances of the Raid material: a lengthy 30 minute piece created from multiple field recordings of the performances at Cafe OTO in London and Counterflows in Glasgow. “Raid Live” stands as an interesting counter to the meticulously crafted studio-created material. Its weight is held by roomtone, pockmarked with the audience’s yelling and mingling; a cathartic experience felt by many.

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Artist's statement:
This is possibly the second album named after one of the eight core revolutionary operas produced during the Cultural Revolution; to my knowledge, the first is Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, the opera, focuses on the joint struggle of Chinese and Korean communists during the Korean War—a truly “forgotten war” in much of the world, in which the US dropped 635,000 tons of explosives and 32,557 tons of napalm on the northern part of the peninsula, killing 20 percent of the population, and massacred tens of thousands of Korean communists and suspected sympathizers from Nogeun-ri to Daejeon.

Raid, the album, pulls its titles from the opera’s program and thereby positions the music as a soundtrack: an inherently limited and dependent form that requires a broader historical and political context—a connection with the world—to reach its fullest state of development. In substituting my wordless, “abstract” music for that of the original opera, I hope to establish a living nexus of contradictions between: (1) the original opera, as direct an example of “political art” as there can be; (2) the extended historical and political processes that birthed it; (3) our current conjuncture; (4) the immediate listening experience. In this clashing and intertwining of timelines, histories, and sense-perceptions, I hope to facilitate a visceral act of comparison, a tracking of excess and deficiency: what aligns, what collides, what falls horribly or comically flat, what brings tears of joy or sadness? And why?

The music is constructed with custom software I built with Max/MSP and SuperCollider that controls banks of free orchestral soundfonts at chaotic tempos. I hope the overt “cheapness” of the materials, and their constantly coalescing, collapsing, disintegrating, reassembling movement, establishes a dramatic—operatic!—tension internal to the logic of the music itself: one that, above all, argues that possibilities—aesthetic, yes, but also historical and political—have nowhere near been exhausted, and that the present order will one day be rightfully relegated to “the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.”

Sunik Kim, 2022

Dos piezas para un tiempo errante

mvlenv

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