Metamorphoses – Grey Area – 3rd February 2015

metamorphoses

Assembly Roxy, 2 Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9SU

Concert: 7pm

There will be an interval
Admission: free
Tickets by reservation: Eventbrite – Metamorphoses

Martin Parker – “Vertebrae” for live electronics (2014)
Owen Green – New work for cardboard box and live electronics (2014)
Adam Linson – “Cryptogamic sporules I” for electronics (2014)
Armin Sturm – “Insects” for ensemble (2012)
Karlheinz Stockhausen – “Kontakte” for 4-channel tape (1960)

Performed by Martin Parker, Adam Linson and Grey Area.
Sound Projection: Sean Williams

New work for live electronics and acoustic instruments and things, combined with a larger group improvisation structured by way of Armin Sturm’s “Insects” piece, with a finale from the 1950s in the shape of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” for 4-channel tape. All of these pieces explore the boundaries between electronics and acoustic sound, with many of them merging one with the other, transforming between media, and displaying hybridised ontologies.

This concert features new compositions for solo live electronics by Martin Parker, Owen Green, and Adam Linson, a structured improvisation for ensemble by Armin Sturm, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s monumental four-channel electronic piece “Kontakte” from 1958. Sturm’s piece uses the life cycles of insects as the inspiration for each performer who must decide whether to express a metamorphic or a simple enlargement growth process over several notional years. Stockhausen drew on analyses of wood, skin, and metal percussion instruments, resynthesizing similar timbres, and combining these with entirely non-organic sounds to produce the 33 minute electronic music in four channels “Kontakte”. The piece can also be performed with piano and percussion, but this performance is the version for tape only.

Made possible by the University of Edinburgh and the Leverhulme Trust
(image coutresy of Sid Mosdell)