Friday 18.11.2011 22:30

Performance of Le lieu d’un autre centre, with Frédéric Blondy at The Warehouse, London

Second performance of the piece “le lieu d’un autre centre”, with Diemo Schwarz (live corpus-based concatenative synthesis) and Frédéric Blondy (bowed and prepared piano) at The Warehouse, London, within the Spectrum Festival organised by Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram. Other pieces in this festival are by Stephen O’Malley, Eran Sachs, Gol, Tim Hodgkinson, Steve Noble, Florian Hecker, Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Samon Takahashi, Iannis Xenakis.

See this post for more info and this page for an audio excerpt. The pieces composed by Frédéric Blondy and Diemo Schwarz follow a trajectory, a predetermined evolution, within which musical expression thrives freely, based on listening to the sound world they create, and to its resonance with the performance space. For each composition, the aim is to explore in depth a given material, a principle of play, a type of interaction, and to extract from it its essence, its expressive force. The piano, driving force of the performance setup, is seen here in a very extended way, where the entire body of the instrument, as well as the materials it is made of, are engaged in sound production. Be it by using preparations, playing inside of the instrument, or extended playing techniques, the acoustic material is extremely rich and diverse, and serves as source for the electro-acoustic setup. The piano’s acoustic body is electronically doubled with the help of corpus-based synthesis, producing at times a sonic shadow, at times a parallel space that crosses and interlaces with the sounds of the piano. Corpus-based concatenative synthesis allows here to recontextualise the sounds captured and analysed in real-time, and to precisely navigate in the timbral space spanned up by the sounds of the piano, nourishing the corpus all along the performance.

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