Monday 22.02.2016 19:30

Physical–Digital Diemo Schwarz & Hans Leeuw, Metanast, Texture, Manchester, UK

The duo of Diemo Schwarz and Hans Leeuw challenge each other on the extremities of sound through an improvised physical-digital battle play between modified trumpet and digital processing.

Concert featuring  Richard Scott & Jason Singh, Manoli Moriaty & Shona Roberts, and Rob Bentall, organised by the Metanast collective.
Texture, 67 Lever St, Manchester M1 1FL
19:30 – 23:00, £3
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In the duo of Diemo Schwarz and Hans Leeuw, both players will challenge each other on the extremities of sound through improvisation. Hans’ manipulated Electrumpet sounds are recorded in Diemo’s digital instrument CataRT where specific bits of sound are recombined and transformed, challenging Hans to come up with more extreme sounds surpassing his own originals. Thus we get a game-like improvisation battle between two players who control and master their respective instruments.

Hans Leeuw integrates his own live sound from the trumpet with the sensor controls that he manipulates at the same time. Not as a static effect but as a true integral part of performing. The resulting expressiveness is a blend between the virtuosity as a trumpet player and the expressive use of the controls. For that purpose the sensors are designed in a special way. Partly doubling the trumpet’s normal controls (mouthpiece, valves and playing the mute) but also exploiting fingers that a trumpet player normally doesn’t use by tactile sensors on the right spots.

Diemo Schwarz plays the sonic space captured live during the performance by navigating through it with the help of gestural controllers that lets the performer reconquer the expressivity that has been lost in many laptop-based performances.  Stroking an XY-pad, scratching contact-mic equipped surfaces, shaking a tablet are all possible gestural interactions that bring back the immediacy of physical action and sonic outcome.
Diemo thus re-combines Hans’ live-recorded sound events into new rhythmic and timbral structures, simultaneously proposing novel combinations and evolutions of the source material. The metaphor for composition is here an explorative navigation through the ever-changing sonic landscape of the sound corpus being built-up from the immediate history of the live performance.

The unpredictability of the sound produced during the improvisation is always part of the challenge.   Not to know what can happen is an integral part of the performance.

Hans Leeuw integrates his own live sound output from the trumpet with the sensor controls that he manipulates at the same time. Not as a static effect but as a true integral part of making the sound. The resulting expressiveness is a blend between the expressiveness as a player and the expressive use of the controls. For that purpose the sensor controls are designed in a special way. Partly doubling the trumpet’s normal controls (mouthpiece, valves and playing the mute) but also exploiting fingers that a trumpet player normally doesn’t use by tactile sensors on the right spots.

Diemo Schwarz‘s live corpus-based concatenative synthesis permits a new approach to improvisation, where sound from an instrument is recontextualised by the interactive, gesture-controlled software CataRT. The performer re-combines the sounds recorded live from the trumpet into new harmonic, melodic and timbral structures, simultaneously proposing novel combinations and evolutions of the source material.
The metaphor is here an explorative navigation through the ever-changing sonic landscape of the corpus being built-up solely from live recording, where expressivity is re-conquered by the software player using gestural controllers such as a pressure-sensitive xy-pad, accelerometers, and piezo pickups on various surfaces that allow to hit, scratch, and strum the corpus of sound, exploiting all its nuances.
In a poetic manner, the discourse of the instrument player can be resculptured in the instant by the software player, making the unpredictability of the musical material an integral part of the live performance.

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