Radio News, July 1931

March 13, 2011, 1:29pm

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Nicolas Collins: “Little Spiders”

From the album Ron Kuvila & Nicolas Collins (1982)

A lovely little piece of early digital noise sculpture, “Little Spiders” is the result of a simple performative scenario based on the computer-monitored interactions of two instrumentalists: “A microcomputer examines the gestural styles of two keyboard players whose instruments are equipped with small lights that indicate the finger activity of the other performer. The sound and structure of the piece are generated by coincidences between the players.”

Since the late 1970s, Nicolas Collins has specialized in music combining hacked electronics and improvisatory performance situations.  His work is a continuation of the tradition of “live electronics” pioneered in the 50s and 60s by John Cage, David Tudor, and other American experimental composers, who sought to integrate electronic sound generation with principles of compositional indeterminacy.

Collins has published a book entitled Handmade Electronic Music, which provides recipes for a number of do-it-yourself projects using hacked electronics to create unexpected sounds.  For Collins, this manner of working corresponds to an aesthetics of evanescence symbolized by the fleeting phenomena of dreams:

It’s about creating an experience of the moment of discovery rather than constructing a masterpiece that you would remember when you leave the concert hall. It must be some sort of weird, self-destructive urge that I have, but in a sense my goal is to create a work that you won’t remember afterwards, that will only be an experience while one is immersed in it but that, while you’re immersed in it, will be all-encompassing. It will be like that sort of pseudo virtual reality that comes in a dream. When you have a dream, it’s all-encompassing. You only once or twice get a crack in the dream where you say, oh, it’s only a dream. Until then, for all its lack of reality, it is a completely enveloping experience even though it might be wholly impractical. And when the dream is over, it vanishes. Well, to use a dream as an analogy for a piece of music is hopelessly romantic and tacky and clichéd, but there is that aspect that you can’t deny the power of a dream simply because when you wake up, it vanishes. 

This long out-of-print album, also featuring works by composer Ron Kuivila, is available for download at Continuo’s Weblog.

September 29, 2010, 10:36am

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Erkki Kurenniemi: “Improvisaatio”

From the album Recordings 1963-1974 (2002)

For various cultural and economic reasons, the standard version of the history of electronic music tends to be dominated by western Europe and the United States. The hot spots are always the same: the Italian Futurists, Varèse, then a thirty-year lacuna; suddenly Schaeffer in Paris and Stockhausen in Cologne, maybe Berio in Milan, Cage in New York, then Moog and Milton Babbitt, the birth of the synthesizer and computer music, MIDI, etc., and onward into the no longer narratable mess of the postmodern present.

One of the more remarkable characters inhabiting the margins of this story is the Finnish composer/inventor/futurist Erkki Kurenniemi, whose pioneering work in the 1960s made crucial contributions to music, technology, and the then-fledgling discipline of electronic art.  Kurenniemi has finally gotten some attention in recent years, including the 2002 album Recordings 1963-1973, from which the above track is taken, and the 2003 release of the documentary The Future is Not What It Used to Be, which charts Kurenniemi’s brilliant career and his bizarre ongoing existence.

More on Kurenniemi can be found at the Philadelphia Sound Forum Blog.

November 02, 2009, 6:56pm