Composer/performers Ryan Lott, a.k.a. Son Lux, and Toby Driver jointly curate an October 26th performance as part of MATA's INTERVAL concert series, joining such esteemed former curators as SO Percussion, the Calder Quartet, and The Knights Chamber Orchestra. The concert features new works by composer/performer/sound designer Terran Olson, and a new collection of synaesthetic audiovisual environments by Thicket, the audiovisual software authored by Joshue Ott and Morgan Packard.
Terran Olson premieres a new composition for clarinet and piano that explores various ways in which meter, and rhythmic relationships between instruments, can be bent. Particular inspirations include Bulgarian music via Béla Bartók and Persian music via Trey Spruance (Mr. Bungle/Secret Chiefs 3). The piece will be performed by Daniel Means on clarinet and Olson on piano.
Thicket simultaneously generates sound and picture using a combination of custom algorithms, its own inscrutable whim, and the guiding hand—literally—of artist/programmer Joshue Ott. The performance moves through roughly ten distinct pieces, each using the densely tangled visual lines and subtly varying musical patterns that Ott and Packard have embraced, but are clearly distinct. Because the systems controlling the audio and the visuals are so tightly connected, audience members can expect a uniquely unified sensory experience— abstract sound and image moving, dancing as one. Ott also performs with composer/producer and co-curator Son Lux using a visual instrument of his design called superDraw. The pair performs unique, integrated audiovisual arrangements of selections from Son Lux's latest record We Are Rising, a 2011 release sparked by the RPM Challenge, an international open call to create an album in 28 days, from NPR's All Songs Considered.
The featured composers also participate in a collaborative piece, with Olson electronically manipulating audio input from Means and cocurator Toby Driver via a custom SuperCollider patch of Olson’s own design, which is processed visually by Ott and SuperDraw.
