Day One Lunchtime Concert

1:00PM - 2:30PM, Te Kōhure, Block 1, Massey University

  • Fuori è dentro (Giuseppe E. Rapisarda)

    • Notes: The piece was composed in 2020, during the lockdown caused by Covid19. Cities were empty. We have lived through unusual days, hearing a new soundscape. There was something new I listened to. Something I wanted to hear, but it wasn't there. It was an interior time, at home. It was a new surrounding space. I perceived a new map of the streets around me. The piece is like listening to a whole day in ten minutes. Was it real?

    • About the artist: Giuseppe E. Rapisarda graduated in Piano, Electroacoustic Music and Music Composition at Bellini Institute in Catania. He studied Electroacoustic Music under Alessandro Cipriani and obtained a master degree with first class honours at the Frosinone Conservatory. He took part in masterclasses with Barry Truax, Giacomo Manzoni, Trevor Wishart. His compositions have received honors and have been performed all over the world. He teaches Electroacoustic Music at the Palermo Conservatory.

  • Far Away (Serin Oh)

    • Notes: "Far Away" was composed for 2-channel fixed media in 2021. This piece describes the state of being away. Most sound materials were processed by RTcmix, a computer music programming language, and these were generated through instruments of digital audio synthesis, physical models, and filters.

    • About the artist: Serin Oh, a composer and pianist, broadens her music from such influences as literature, painting, nature and scientific phenomenon. Her pieces have been performed at many festivals and concerts, including Midwest Composers Symposium, Zodiac Trio Residency Concert, Unheard-of//Ensemble Residency Concert, Transient Canvas Residency Concert, USF Composition In Asia International Symposium & Festival, The Keyboard in the 21st Century Conference, Dot The Line New Music Festival, UNK New Music Festival, Cincinnati SongSLAM, Music by Women Festival, CMS Regional Conference, International Computer Music Conference, Seoul International computer Music Festival, and International Alliance for Women in Music. She participated in remusik.org Festival, Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium, SPLICE Institute & Festival, and CCRMA Summer Workshop. Oh holds her DMA in composition (cognate: computer music) at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. She holds her MM at the Eastman School of Music, MM and BM at Ewha Womans University. Oh is a member of New Music Society, Veritas Musicae, and The Korean Society of Women Composers.

  • Enter the Temple (Peter Liley and Jack Woodbury)

    • Notes: Enter the Temple is the penultimate track on Jack Woodbury and Peter Liley's debut collaborative album, Unfathomed Waters (Rattle, 2022). The album itself is a sonic interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Temple, a short story following a cursed submarine as it sinks to the ocean's depths and discovers the haunting beauty of Atlantis. Enter the Temple explores the story's climax, as its protagonist discovers and is driven mad by the temple at the heart of Atlantis. The piece itself is anchored in a frantic bass saxophone solo. Surrounding and obscuring this are complex layers of noise, percussion and distortion. Together, they aim to capture a sense of The Temple's madness and horror, and the cathartic release of surrendering oneself to the inevitable.

    • About the Artists: Jack is a Wellington-based composer and audio engineer. His compositional work focuses on juxtaposing noise and glitch textures against ambient materials. Largely working in the fixed media space, Jack has released the 2022 "Unfathomed Waters" and 2020 “inst.19-20” albums on Rattle Records. The former, collaboratively composed with Peter Liley, draws inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Temple". The latter is a fixed media collection of works originally composed for audio-visual installations. Jack has presented works in the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand.

  • Our Drifting Odyssey (Lauren Wong)

    • Notes: My hometown is a city which is small but complete. This piece is about my odyssey in this place. COVID-19 restrained all our activities. Although I was born and raised here, I feel like I have been drifting since 2019. I am here but I am so far away from my home. I am unable to determine the distance between the history and the story. I get lost between the fantasy and the reality.

      “THINGS DID HAPPEN.

      We are in the history.

      We are part of the game.

      We all know that our story was tampered.

      We were dragged into a vortex.

      We have never imagined that we would be so far away from each other.

      We have lost someone and something important.

      We are cursed.

      We are now here and we are in nowhere.

      How far are we from our home?

      What is the distance between the flower and the root?

      Our soul is drifting on a dandelion.

      Our odyssey will only come to the end,

      unless we keep on spreading our story to the soil.”

    • About the Artist: A sound engineer who lives in Hong Kong and likes experimental sound.

  • Nullius in Verba (Robert Scott Thompson)

    • Notes: Nullius in Verba translates from the Latin as “on the word of no one.” This acousmatic composition incorporates field and studio recordings and their transformation and elaboration. Sound sources include vocal, percussion, flute and ‘cello sources together with mechanical and environmental sounds. The music is conceived as a kind of “song without words,” and in working on it, I was reminded of Mendelssohn: “What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.” Techniques used for the work include ambisonic spatialization and spectral transformation methods. Tools used include Kyma, Csound, Metasynth, Cecelia, Trajectory and Spat Revolution.

    • About the Artist: Robert Scott Thompson is a composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music and is Professor Emeritus of Music Composition at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the recipient of several distinctions for his music including the First Prize in the 2003 Musica Nova Competition, the First Prize in the 2001 Pierre Schaeffer Competition, and awards in Musica Nova, The American Prize, Concorso Internazionale "Luigi Russolo", Irino Prize Foundation Competition for Chamber Music, and Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges - including the Commande Commission. His work has been presented in festivals such as the Koriyama Bienalle, Helsinki Bienalle, Sound, Présences, Synthèse, Sonorities, ICMC, SEAMUS and the Cabrillo Music Festival, and broadcast on Radio France, BBC, NHK, ABC, WDR, and NPR. His music is published American Composers Edition, New York.

  • Temple of No religion (Alessio Rossato)

    • Notes: Piece created with material recorded during a short residence at Villa Smilea ofMontale Pistoiese (Tuscany - Italy), where Andrea Dami's metal and sheet metal sculptures were sampled in various recording sessions including short improvisations. The sculptures were played in different ways, from the naked hands to wooden sticks, metal, rubber felt or cobblestones or with different thickness chains, different types of microphones were used with "active" recording mode, searching different sound and position in the sculptures.

      Material were treated with the following typical processes of early concrete music:

      Editing, simple editing and overlapping

      Stereophonic space distribution

      transpositions

      different file speed reading

      reverberation

      The piece consists of five sections, the composition process is based on the concept of musical sculpture: from section I, four repetitions/variations have been made in which each one is based on precise focused music, mainly in the elimination of material. The title Temple of No Religion is inspired by a building by Colombian architect Simón Vélez, and in particular at Iglesia sin Religion (a church without religion in Cartagena, Colombia) a cathedral- temple built only with bamboo canes, simple material and with Attention to eco-sustainability and that contradicts, at least in this work, the monumentality and functionality of the building itself...

  • from the void and until the unknown (Sylvain souklaye)

    • Notes: From the void and until the unknowns is a sonic experiment and visceral, intimate examination. The project is a four-part exploration of infinitesimal variations and frictions between the body and its environment.

      Our everyday actions are linked to a primal agenda. How to survive chaos and evolution?

      It seems that the foundation of our civilisation is only there as a reminder, a fear. There is an order in place despite chaos and evolution... An organised confusion.

      I recorded specific bodily and spatial daily markers and searched for the most arbitrary and fragile moments to sample. Those samples are photographs of movement and the spaces that encompass them. Then, I worked on and upon the granularity of those sonic and verbal photographs to visualise their seeds and finally modulate their behaviour. This disruption of the reality of the moment offers a possibility to expand from an intimate experience to a collective interrogation.

      from the void and until the unknown, you'll need ablutions and abhumanism, to write an ode to miasma and share ce que parler veut dire.

      I collected organised gestures and confused thoughts to synthesise our blind spots as an untold narrative.

    • About the Artist: Sylvain Souklaye is a Brooklyn based French multi-modal artist. He is obsessed with sampling intimacies about people who don't belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality.

      Sylvain Souklaye performances are a collage of individual memories which are relived for and via the audience.

      Self-taught, he began performing with vandalism in Lyon, and then intimate happenings, radio experimentation and action poetry. He later developed digital art installations using field recording techniques as a narrative layer while pursuing his writer’s path.

      Among his best known pieces are la blackline, a 5-year durational radio performance about socio-economic survival and urban absurdity, le déserteur a digital art installation dwelling on the notion of abandonment, TME a docudrama performance exploring self-inflicted amnesia and resilience and MIGRANT MARKET a remake of the slave market updated for the uber economy.

      Sylvain Souklaye methods characteristically involve intense physical acts as well as the use of unsettling intimacy.