To honor the music, innovation, and good humor of Rolnick’s 30+ years of activity as a composer and educator, EMPAC brings you an evening of his compositions. » Times Union article on Neil by Joseph Dalton Rolnick holds a unique place in the American musical landscape not only for the ingenuity of his work, but also for its showmanship and post-show “hummability”. In addition to his work as a composer, Rolnick founded and developed the Integrated Electronic Arts (iEAR) program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as the first interdisciplinary electronic arts program in the country.

EMPAC in conjunction with the Arts Department at Rensselaer and the the iEAR Presents! series present Custom Control, an evening of three performances where artists have built their own personal audio and video performance tools.

The artist duos hail from San Francisco, Mexico City, and New York and include Sue Costabile + Laetitia Sonami, Luke Dubois + Manrico Montero, and Benton Bainbridge + Bobby Previte. In the 1970’s, in tandem with pioneering organizations like the Experimental Television Center in New York, artists began developing electronics for their live and installation-based video art. In this tradition, the artists in Custom Controlall have personally crafted some aspect of their hardware or software for their performance tools.

The first performance, I.C.You, is a live film by Sue Costabile and Laetitia Sonami, Based on a script by poet Tom Sleigh, I.C.You follows the road-based travels of a truck driver delivering ice for the Universe Company. His job is to keep America cold. Sonami and Costabile open windows into his existence through a suitcase-sized foley stage, photographs, drawings, videos, shadow theater, and miniature lighting rigs.

By way of a specifically programmed Max/Jitter patch, guitarist Manrico Montero AKA Karras and video artist R. Luke Dubois create an improvised collaboration of sound and video entitled Night Breeze. Montero’s washes of layered guitar interact with DuBois’ live-camera-based imagery to create experience that translates the rich sonic language of Montero’s playing into a cinematic event.

The meeting of two mad scientists, composer Bobby Previte and video artist Benton-C Bainbridge, inspired the performance Dialed In. Dialed In is a true dialog between sight and sound — a live audiovisual performance and a collection of music movies. Previte’s music is an ambitious live solo electronic drum work — 14 movements will be performed in real time, with no loops, no laptops, and no overdubbing. Bainbridge responds by freely grabbing from personal archives of video obscura, altering them beyond recognition, then recomposing them in a real-time process much like Previte's kit-triggered music. Each using obsolete and forgotten technology scavenged from the tech dump, Bainbridge warps video into strange shapes while Previte elevates raw sound into listenable music.

Please note Custom Control is just one event in an initiative by the Electronic Arts Department titled TOOLS – Analogs and Intersections. This 2007 - 2008 series of events will include workshops, lectures, an exhibition and publications, focusing on artists who develop their own electronic and /or digital tools for video and audio in performance.

World-renowned saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton, with his 12-piece ensemble the 12(+1)tet, will perform and conduct from his most recent series called Ghost Trance Music.

The performers play and conduct, taking different roles, as they collage compositions from Braxton's Ghost Trance catalogue. As a collective, the group moves freely between the performance of compositions and improvisations, between solos and ensemble playing – and yet create a magical unity full of sparks. This is unusual music that carries away all those willing to let go into its mystery. Come experience this optimistic and surprising frontier of contemporary music, performed under the inspiration and direction of Anthony Braxton, one of America's most dynamic musical forces.

The first public presentation of an EMPAC commission!

Recorded and shot in and around Troy, New York, True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore is an eye-popping performance of epic proportions with projections on multiple over-sized screens that fuse documentary film making, live and electronic music, animation and motion graphics with innovative digital video performance tools.

Taking American folklore as a departure point, the UK-based Light Surgeons tackle the universal question of how our personal, political, and national myths evolve from subjective stories to widely held truths. The artists guide the audience through this terrain with a live collage of documentary footage, interviews and music recorded in Troy and across the rest of the state of NY—from Troy’s Uncle Sam’s Day Parade to a cramped music studio in Brooklyn to an upstate Native American reservation and more. 

Using an orchestra of over 20 individual loudspeakers, Natasha Barrett will perform works of her own and that of the “great old master-innovator” French composer Luc Ferrari.

Program:

Part I: 26 Minutes

• Music Promenade — Luc Ferrari
• Red Snow — Natasha Barrett
  • -PAUSE-

Part II: 19 Minutes

• Selections from FAR-WEST NEWS — Luc Ferrari
  • Episode 2 Part I
  • Episode 3 Part II
  • Episode 3 Part III
  • Episode 2 Part V
  • -PAUSE-

Part III: 55 Minutes

• Trade Winds — Natasha Barrett

For this concert, each composition exists as a recording, instead of a musical score. As a performer, she will interpret these works by projecting them through space live, through speakers in, around, and above the audience, creating unique realizations of each piece. On the program will be RED SNOW and TRADE WINDS, two of her recent works. Both pieces are intense and intricate — full of dramatic gesture, vivid sounds, and elusive narratives. She will also perform Ferrari’s MUSIC PROMENADE and selections from FAR WEST NEWS. MUSIC PROMENADE is a visually evocative collage of disparate sounds and the memories they trigger. In FAR WEST NEWS, Ferrari and his wife travel from France to the USA to take the iconic American road trip West to the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles. The resulting experiences and sounds are transformed into anecdotal narratives– expressed through quirky combinations of field recordings and Ferrari’s oddball psychoanalytic synth overlays.

Bedlam—originally the name for a medieval England insane asylum—has since become a synonym for tangled, chaotic states. This installation by Robert Darroll and Sean Reed draws us into the minds of five individuals planning their joint escape from Bedlam via multichannel sound and an amalgam of computer graphics, animation and video projected onto oversized screens. The word Bedlam refers to a medieval asylum for mad people in England. In the 18th Century, such asylums were a source of entertainment. Wealthy people paid a penny to enter and watch mad people behave crazily. Later the word came to mean, a chaotic, uncontrollable situation. A similar word is shambles, which Beckett uses symbolically to describe the very substance of existence.

On the 17th, FLUX will perform a new piece by Alvin Lucier called GROUP TAPPER that explores the Biotech Center's acoustics, Matthew Welch's bagpipe/gamelan inpired SIUBHAL TURNLAR, the architect/composer Iannis Xenakis's gritty TETORA, Anton von Webern's micro-masterpieces 6 BAGATELLEN and Giacinto Scelsi's QUATUOR n°2.

Two different approaches to contemporary music collide. Featuring SO PERCUSSION, a young percussion ensemble from Brooklyn fresh from tour with Matmos, and DIRTY PROJECTORS, rising stars of who knows what. So Percussion is a four member percussion ensemble in the tradition of the virtuousic Percussion Group Cincinnati and Les Percussions de Strasbourg. In the past few years, they have differentiated themselves by commissioning new works from young composers and extending their repetoire beyond traditional 20th century avant-garde percussion music through collaborations (most recently with Björk producers Matmos) and their own compositions. So Percussion / Dirty Projectors program:

• FOUR ORGANS, Steve Reich
• LITTLE EYE, David Lang, Florent Renard-Payen, Cello
• THE SO-CALLED LAWS OF NATURE, David Lang
• ... Intermission ...
• Dirty Projectors
• Total Running Time: 1:45

On the 19th, So Percussion will perform FOUR ORGANS by composer Steve Reich, and two works by David Lang: THE SO-CALLED LAWS OF NATURE, a work composed specifically for So Percussion that features homemade instruments such as teacups, flowerpots, metal tubing and LITTLE EYE, a gorgeous spatial piece for solo cello, piano, vibraphone, and brake drums. Just back from a national tour with Xiu Xiu, Dirty Projectors is the work of composer / performer Dave Longstreth -- who relentlessly assembles different groups of musicans to perform his diverse and rapidly expanding compositions. In this incarnation the group features Longstreth on guitar (played upside down, Hendrix-style) and vocals, back up singers Amber Coffman and Susanna Waiche, Charlie Looker (member of Zs and Extra Life) on twelve string electric guitar, Nat Baldwin on electric and upright bass, Brian McOmber on drum set, and live video projection by James Sumner, animator of Dirty Projectors' full-length animated opera THE GETTY ADDRESS.

Come and be immersed in clouds of dense fog and stroboscopic light in a digital landscape populated with virtual characters, intense sound and unearthly video projections. FEED is an artificial spectacle that will challenge your limits of perception like no other performance has done before. Seating is limited to 50 people per performance.

DRIFT is an immersive sonic/visual environment consisting of music, sounds and texts by Ranaldo in response to two 16mm analytical film projectors performed in real time by Singer. Much as a DJ scratches a vinyl record, Singer manipulates her films in a live improvisation with Ranaldo's guitar, poetry and soundscapes.