Wednesday 28.11.2012 20:30

Ircam Live with duo Hans Leeuw / Diemo Schwarz at Gaîté Lyrique, Paris

The duo of Hans Leeuw (Electrumpet) / Diemo Schwarz (CataRT) has been chosen as one of 4 winners of the Ircam Forum call for performances (out of 85 submissions) and will be presented in concert:

Ircam Live @ la Gaîté lyrique

also playing: Plaid (Warp), Lorenzo Bianchi, Benjamin Carey, Jean Lochard

Gaîté Lyrique, grande salle
3bis, rue Papin
75003 Paris

The duo between Hans Leeuw and Diemo Schwarz creates a dialectic between the age-old gesture of the musician and its digital transformation and critique, a pathway between the acoustic instrument and a recontextualising synthetic interaction at the heart of our times. The duo’s focus on expressive play with live sounds happens in two very different ways that happily blend together:

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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