Italian composer Valerio Tricoli, known for his dynamic reel-to-reel improvisations, returns to ISSUE Project Room with esteemed German electro-acoustic artist Werner Dafeldecker. Both artists perform solo, and together they present the NY premiere of their collaborative work Williams Mix Extended, a new interpretation of John Cage's Williams Mix, to be released by Quakebasket this fall.
Approaching Cage’s 1952 score from a contemporary perspective, Dafeldecker and Tricoli's Williams Mix Extended contains a close analysis of the relationship between early tape music and current digital production, allowing for original parameters of the score to be realized within the context of recent audio technological practices and live instrumental performance. Williams Mix Extended has a duration of 32 minutes, expanding the original 4’15” length— a difference generated by the transposition of the score‘s specifications from tape to digital audio software. To complete Williams Mix Extended, a library of approximately 2000 different sounds is used, all recorded by Dafeldecker and Tricoli.
Werner Dafeldecker was born in Vienna in 1964 and studied the double bass. As a musician and composer, he moves between improvised and composed music and takes advantage of the manifold possibilities offered by electro-acoustics. His works often follow principles of reductive music, based on concentrated material, subjecting it to subtle modifications. His musical projects are inspired by and deduced from outside influences such as architecture, physics, photography and film. Werner Dafeldecker also focuses intensively on field recording, or capturing natural and environmental sounds on recording equipment. He has built up an extensive sound archive and realized several works for radio, film and media.
Valerio Tricoli is an Italian composer and performer of electro-acoustic music, currently residing in Munich. His main instruments for live presentations are the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue / ergonomic device for live sampling and real-‐time transformation / editing / mixing of pre-recorded and made-on-the-spot sound sources. On a formal level his sets focus on the impromptu creation of narrative, taking into account the multiple relations intervening between reality, virtuality and memory during the acoustic event: sounds are always hovering between the "here and now" of the concert situation and the shady domain of memory— distant but at the same time present like in a deja-vu experience. Privileging fracture over continuity and by the use of a dynamic range that could jump suddenly from near-silence to extreme blasts of sounds, an almost tactile feeling of brooding tension is often attained. His electro-acoustic studio compositions, documented on few records, are aligned to the tradition of Musique Concrète and explore themes of the internal— represented both by the psychological and the physical— and of the occult, which together with the use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within. He is a founding member of the Italian avant-rock group 3/4HadBeenEliminated and has worked extensively with Thomas Ankersmit, Antoine Chessex, Werner Dafeldecker, Anthony Pateras, Robert Piotrowicz, Fabio Selvafiorita.
