Adam Vidiksis presents part<->link<->bond
Music for percussion and electronics with friends
Featuring music performed live and remotely by Vidiksis and special guests:
Stephanie Lamprea, soprano; Taylor Brook, electronics; Scott L. Miller, electronics; Sam Wells, trumpet; Joo Won Park, electronics; and Rajeev Maddela (a.k.a Currency), electronic drum kit
Program:
Excerpt from The Altering Shores
Video and percussion with real-time processing
Music by Adam Vidiksis
Video & Direction by Rod Coover
Poetry by Nick Montfort
Interweaving sound, language and image, The Altering Shores is a video performance with live music. Set in the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local Delaware River watershed and others worldwide, the experience presents a kaleidoscope of climate futures through fragmented language and multi-layered sounds and images.
Improvisation with Stephanie Lamprea, soprano
AI-Generated Electronics (“Scuffed Computer Improviser”) by Taylor Brook
Long – Short
By Scott L. Miller
Performed by
Sam Wells, trumpet
Adam Vidiksis, drum set
Scott L. Miller, electronics
Improvisation with Joo Won Park, electronics
Circadia & Currency
Improvisation with Raj Maddela (a.k.a Currency), electronic drum kit
Adam Vidiksis (a.k.a Circadia), electronics
Bios:
Adam Vidiksis is a composer, conductor, percussionist, improviser, and technologist based in Philadelphia whose music often explores social structures, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. Critics have called his music “mesmerizing”, “dramatic”, “striking” (Philadelphia Weekly), “notable”, “catchy” (WQHS), “magical” (Local Arts Live), and “special” (Percussive Notes), and have noted that Vidiksis provides “an electronically produced frame giving each sound such a deep-colored radiance you could miss the piece's shape for being caught up in each moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer). His work is frequently commissioned and performed throughout North America, Europe, and Asia in recitals, festivals, and major academic conferences. Vidiksis’s music has won numerous awards and grants, including recognition from the Society of Composers, Incorporated, the American Composers Forum, New Music USA, National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, and ASCAP. His works are available through HoneyRock Publishing, EMPiRE, New Focus, PARMA, and SEAMUS Records. Vidiksis recently served as composer in residence for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and was selected by the NEA and Japan-US Friendship Commission to serve as Director of Arts Technology for a performance of a new work by Gene Coleman during the 2020 Olympics in Japan. Vidiksis is Assistant Professor of music technology at Temple University, President and founding member of SPLICE Music, which includes the annual Institute, Academy, and Festival, a Resident Artist at the Renegade Theater company, and a founding member of the Impermanent Society of Philadelphia, a group dedicated to promoting improvisation in the performing arts. He performs in SPLICE Ensemble and the Transonic Orchestra, conducts Ensemble N_JP, and directs the Temple Composers Orchestra and the Boyer College Electroacoustic Ensemble Project (BEEP). He produces real-time generative improvised electronic music (Circadia) alongside his longtime friend and collaborator Rajeev Maddela (Currency). [www.vidiksis.com]
Roderick Coover is an internationally-recognized artist, whose practice spans documentary film and ethnographic visual research, interactive and emergent cinema, virtual reality and digital narrative and poetry. Coover's most recent work investigates both imagined and actual implications of climate change, and explores how places are perceived, encountered and consumed.
Coover is a professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University, where he is also a founding Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Documentary Arts and Ethnographic Practice. His work is internationally exhibited in art venues and public spaces such as the Venice Biennale, The Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and Documenta Madrid and he has received Fulbright, Mellon, Whiting, Spire and LEF awards, as well as recognition from the Electronic Literature Organization and the SEA(s) Arts International Art Exhibition, among others.
Nick Montfort‘s computer-generated books of poetry include #!, Autopia, The Truelist, and Hard West Turn. He has collaborated on digital projects The Deletionist, Sea and Spar Between, and Renderings. He performs and exhibits his work internationally, in contexts ranging from the demoscene and livecoding concerts to art galleries and poetry readings. Six of his books, collaborative and individual, have been published by the MIT Press, most recently The Future. He is professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs The Trope Tank. He is also Professor II at the University of Bergen and a teacher at the School for Poetic Computation. Montfort lives in New York City.
Photo credit: Luke Marantz
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, Stephanie uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (composer Jason Eckardt). Her work has been described as “mercurial” by I Care If You Listen, and she “sings so expressively and slowly with ever louder and higher-pitched voice, that the inclined listener [has] shivers down their back and tension flows into the last row." (Halberstadt.de) She has received awards from St. Botolph Club Foundation, John Cage Orgel Stiftung and Puffin Foundation. Stephanie was a featured TEDx Speaker in TEDxWaltham: Going Places.
Stephanie devours mammoth works of virtuosity and extended techniques with ease and creative insight, singing with an entire spectrum of vocal colors (including operatic style, straight tone, sputters and throat noises). She has performed as a soloist at Roulette, National Sawdust, Shapeshifter Lab, Miller Theater at Columbia University, the Slipper Room, Park Avenue Armory, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Re:Sound Festival. She has worked with Wavefield Ensemble, Ekmeles, Guerrilla Opera, Boston Art Song Society, Verdant Vibes and the Original Gravity Concert Series. In 2020-21, Stephanie will collaborate with the New Gallery Concert Series (Boston), perform as Artist-In-Residence at University of California - Davis, perform in residency at Mana Contemporary, and present a solo recital at Roulette.
Photo credit: David Bird
Taylor Brook is a Canadian composer who has been based in New York since 2011. Brook writes music for the concert stage, electronic music, music for robotic instruments, as well as music for video, theatre, and dance.
Described as “gripping” and “engrossing” by the New York Times, Brook’s compositions have been performed around the world by ensembles and soloists such as the Ensemble Ascolta, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Quatuor Bozzini, Talea Ensemble, and others. He has won numerous SOCAN Young Composers awards, including two first-place prizes and the grand prize in 2016 for Song, for solo cello.
Brook studied composition with Brian Cherney in Montreal, with Luc Brewaeys in Brussels, and with George Lewis and Georg Haas in New York. In 2008, he studied Hindustani music and performance with Debashish Bhattacharya in Kolkata. His music is often concerned with finely tuned microtonal sonorities, combining his interest in exploring the perceptual qualities of sound with a unique sense of beauty and form. Current projects include a new work for bassoon and electronics for Dana Jesson and a concert-length new work for TAK Ensemble.
In 2018 Brook completed a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in music composition at Columbia University with Fred Lerdahl. He holds a master’s degree in music composition from McGill University. Currently Brook is a Core Lecturer at Columbia University. He is also the technical director of TAK Ensemble.
Scott L. Miller is an American composer described as ‘a true force on the avant-ambient scene’ of ‘high adventure avant garde music of the best sort’ (Classical-Modern Music Review). Best known for his electroacoustic chamber music and ecosystemic performance pieces, his music is characterized by collaborative approaches to composition and the use of electronics, exploring performer/computer improvisation and re-imagining ancient compositional processes through the lens of 21st century technology. Inspired by the inner-workings of sound and the microscopic in the natural and mechanical worlds, his music is the product of hands-on experimentation and collaboration with musicians and performers from across the spectrum of styles. His recent work experiments with VR applications in live concerts, first realized in his composition Raba, created for Tallinn-based Ensemble U:.
Three time McKnight Composer Fellow, his work is frequently performed by soloists, ensembles, and at festivals throughout North America and Europe. Recordings of his music are available on New Focus Recordings, Innova, and other labels, many featuring his long-time collaborators, the new music ensemble Zeitgeist (and whose albums he produces). His music is published by the American Composers Alliance, Tetractys, and Jeanné. Raba (NFR198) is his most recent album, a collection of audio-visual music drawn from collaborations with six film and video artists. Miller is a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music and theory. He is Past-President (2014—18) of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. (SEAMUS) and presently Director of SEAMUS Records.
Photo credit: Jane Kozhevnikova
Sam Wells is a trumpeter, composer, improvisor, and technologist based in Los Angeles. As an advocate for new and exciting music, he actively commissions and performs contemporary works.
Sam has performed throughout North America and Europe, as well as in China. He is a recipient of a 2016 Jerome Fund for New Music award, and his work, stringstrung, is the winner of the 2016 Miami International Guitar Festival Composition Competition. He has performed electroacoustic works for trumpet and presented his own music at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Chosen Vale International Trumpet Seminar, Electronic Music Midwest, Electroacoustic Barn Dance, NYCEMF, N_SEME, and SEAMUS festivals. Sam and his music have also been featured by the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) and Fulcrum Point Discoveries. He has also been a guest artist/composer at universities throughout North America.
Sam is a member of Arcus Collective, Kludge, and SPLICE Ensemble. Sam has performed with Contemporaneous, Metropolis Ensemble, TILT Brass, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, and the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra. Sam has recorded on the SEAMUS and Ravello Recordings labels.
Sam is currently enrolled in the Performer-Composer DMA program at the California Institute of the Arts. He has degrees in both performance and composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and graduate degrees in Trumpet Performance and Computer Music Composition at Indiana University. He is on faculty at SPLICE Institute, Molloy College, and the California Institute of the Arts.
Joo Won Park (b.1980) wants to make everyday sound beautiful and strange so that everyday becomes beautiful and strange. He performs live with toys, consumer electronics, kitchenware, vegetables, and other non-musical objects by digitally processing their sounds. He also makes pieces with field recordings, sine waves, and any other sources that he can record or synthesize. Joo Won draws inspirations from Florida swamps, Philadelphia skyscrapers, his two sons, and other soundscapes surrounding him. He has studied at Berklee College of Music and the University of Florida and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Wayne State University. Joo Won’s music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, PARMA, Visceral Media, MCSD, SEAMUS CD Series, and No Remixes labels.
Rajeev Maddela is a drum set artist, electronic music composer, computer programmer, and rudimental percussion instructor based in Brooklyn, NY. Maddela specializes in applying the unique rhythmic phrasing found in bass-forward electronic music (e.g. golden era jungle, drum and bass, UK garage, dubstep, and house). He has performed with Karsh Kale, Anoushka Shankar, Tim Lefebvre, Jonathan Maron, Max ZT, Chris Buono, and many others from the world and live electronic music scenes.
Under the name Maddela, he has released a host of singles and albums on labels such as Noisy Meditation (BM), High Chai Recordings (NY), and Reminiscence Audio (Serbia). His production work spans the genres of experimental drum and bass, future bass, and UK garage, with a focus on live performance elements and wide sonic palettes.
Maddela holds a degree in computer science from New York University. His career as a computer programmer spans nearly two decades, with expertise in enterprise level billing solutions, performance optimization, and generic design patterns. He is a dedicated music pedagogue, serving as an instructor at Msgr. Farrell High School’s award winning Marching Percussion program since 1998. He continues in this role, specializing in developing students’ technique, expression, and clarity.
IG: @currencyaudio