Dr Ox
Tanja Orning - cello
Natasha Barrett - laptop

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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