As part of the June PAN_ACT festival, ISSUE Project Room and Goethe-Institut New York present solo sets by electronic music visionaries Rashad Becker and Valerio Tricoli, preceded by “Music Of The Eternal Now: Post-Husserlian Temporality, Pattern Cyclic Time-Consciousness And Computer Music” the world premiere of a short silent film by British artist Mark Fell. Here Fell (not in attendance) sets out the theory behind his claim “music is a technology for constructing an experience of time”. Shot entirely on the remote Finnish island Hailuoto, the film’s formal structure interweaves theoretical argument and the frozen landscape.
Rashad Becker creates precise, phantasmic computer sound designs encouraging audiences to focus their hearing. His carefully constructed, sparse improvisations, have unexpected qualities, and have been called conversational not only for his sampling of dissected human voices, but for the way these samples integrate with the timbre of his electronics. “It sounded like a long stream-of-consciousness sentence made up short syllables, electronic oohs and wahs, sections of muttering, and occasionally bickering. Whatever he does, it seems Becker has the knack of giving sound its voice.” (Scott McMillan in the Liminal)
Valerio Tricoli works as an acousmatic music composer, improviser, sound installation artist, producer and sound engineer, and curator. His compositions bridge concrete music and conceptual forms of sound, investigating a radical interest in how reality, virtuality, and memory relate to each other during the acoustic event. Tricoli explores music, as a recorded or as a synthetically-modeled sound, in its ability to hover between the "here and now" of the event and the shady domain of memory– evoking a distant but at the same time present, dèjà–vu experience. Tricoli plays live music with electronic, largely analog instruments with the structure of the devices ever-changing, seeking multiple relations between the performers, the device and the performance space. He is one of the founders of the group 3/4HadBeenEliminated, a daring synthesis between improvisation, electro-acoustic composition and avant-rock sensitivity.
