This multimedia presentation includes an intercontinental collaboration between legendary composer Carl Stone and Tokyo-based singer, songwriter, and improviser Akaihirume; the streamed debut of All Tomorrow’s Oceans, an enveloping audio-visual performance by artist and musician Xuan Ye; an excursion through the vocal landscapes of Sarah Jo Kirsch; and a voluminous adaptation of Dimmer Switch by Colby Richardson.
Co-presented by GroundSwell.
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between Los Angeles and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan.
Akaihirume is a young Japanese singer whose ear is always tuned to the world’s sounds, which she keeps as materials in her shell.
As both an original songwriter and an improviser she has worked with a variety of artists, musicians, action-painters, photographers and more. Recent collaborators include Simon Fisher Turner, Joke Lanz, Akiko Nakayama and Carl Stone. First classically trained, then took a stint as a rock drummer in several Japanese garage bands. She began her career as a singer/songwriter in 2012. Her singing has been used in the soundtrack for the film Dies Irae by Eori Wakakuwa, and is also featured in Songs For A Thousand Duets, part of the, the sound installation by Duncan Speakman & Sarah Anderson as part of the Saitama Trienniale 2016.
Carl Stone and Akaihirume began their collaboration in 2015 in Tokyo, and have since performed around Japan, in Singapore and in New York. Reviewing the duo’s New York performance, critic Nick Zurko wrote: “What unfolded onstage was both sonically accessible and temporally exhaustive as Akaihirume and Stone entered into what could be described as an esoteric and aural courting dance that entranced the entire audience.”
Xuan Ye 叶轩 (CN/CA) is the prototype of many objects.
As a live performer, X is techne agnostic and genre eclectic, and has been lauded as “one of Canada’s most exciting voices in textural soma” by EVERYSEEKER. X’s debut LP xi xi 息息 is compiled from solo improvisations across a three year span, the recordings comprise a document of X’s foundational ideas: free improvisation, computational randomness, noise of the field, hybrid chaos of gestures and mediated bio-electrical currents.
X has performed at Music Gallery (CA), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (US), Suoni Per Il Popolo (CA), OBEY Convention (CA), Kazoo! Fest (CA), Electric Eclectics Festival (CA), Downtown Music Gallery (US), Zoomin’ Night (CN), Le Festival Croisements (CN), etc. X’s live performances and releases have also received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim!
X’s mixed media installations have been featured and exhibited internationally, including CONTACT Photography Festival, Varley Art Gallery of Markham (CA), Canadian Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario (CA), Vivid Projects (UK), Supermarket Art Fair (SE), InterAccess (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM (GE), Trinity Square Video (CA), among others. X is a finalist of EQ Bank Digital Artists Award and a recipient of SSHRC scholarship.
Colby Richardson is a media artist and experimental filmmaker currently based in Winnipeg MB, Canada. Driven by a fascination with out-of-date media technologies, and by the way we interact with and value the technology at our disposal, Richardson’s work examines the underused artistic capabilities of devices often unconsidered and dismissed. By utilizing and re-contextualising historic video equipment, everyday software, and ubiquitous electronics, Richardson creates dynamic and textural visual and auditory works, taking the form of; installations, performances, video-sculptures, expanded cinema, and single-channel film and video. His work embraces the potential meditative qualities of abrasive and jarring stimulus, and engages with unusual medium-specificity in a playful, structural, and exploratory manner.
Sarah Jo Kirsch (she/they) creates autocollaborative electroacoustic landscapes rooted in behavioural and biological attachments to non-verbal lyrical vocalization and the physical effects/affects of harmonic and timbral consonance/dissonance. Projecting a hyper-versatile vocal spectrum through the lens of digitally-assisted tactile impulse, they explore the relational nature of sound and the ability of the body to listen.
Sarah regularly sings with Winnipeg’s classical ensembles, series and festivals, and has performed across Canada, in Europe and West Asia. They have premiered dozens of new works for voice, largely by Canadian composers, and they continue to bring contemporary relevance to old (and new) art song through curating and presenting sociopolitically-focused recital programs. Sarah is also half of a/v duo the gritty.