Electronic composition and improvisation are in some ways at odds. In a public improvisation performance we create sonic transformations, mixes
and temporal developments different to those we sculpt in a studio composition context. If for now we ignore aesthetical polarities, this difference is embedded in the limits of our
real-time creative abilities and the limits of our computer power - despite the exponential technological developments seen through the past decades.
How can we capture the immediacy of real-time improvisation performance
without losing the sonic and structural intensity of the compositional
process? This is what we try to do in Dr Ox. A hierarchy of compositional
control building blocks (rather than composed audio) - spanning micro and
macro temporal formulas, full range dynamics and spectromorphologies - are
pre-prepared by Barrett in a MaxMSP patch. The patch is designed to allow
any number of parameters to be accessed, controlled and fed into any other
layer in the hierarchy on the fly. Real-time acoustic sampling, logging,
recycling, layering and transforming of sound and control data allows
temporal-structural retrieval of that from the past, interaction with the
present, and anticipation of the future.
Tanja Orning, with her expertise as a performer and improviser coaxes her
instrument out of its stereotype. She injects the acoustic unknown - the
rational and irrational human factor - into the system. Orning lays
the seeds and tends to them as they grow through DrOx electroacoustic
sound garden.
In the interaction of DrOX improvisational and compositional structures
are welded into a single creation.
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