On tour from Brooklyn, NY, Matthew Ryals is a modular synthesist known for his work merging generative/algorithmic techniques with free improvisation. He is currently touring in support of his newest album, impromptus in isolation, “a bold, joyous tear through visceral free jazz, bucolic ambience, head-scratching sound design, and more.” - Mike Nigro, Oxtail Recordings.
For the tour, Matthew has developed a set of “Performance Patches” centered around various generative processes. In lieu of a lead sheet, each patch serves as a jumping off point for deep, improvisational exploration resulting in an unique and entirely unpredictable performance each night.
His third album, impromptus in isolation releases June 17th on Sound As Language on cassette and digital. It was recorded live at home without overdubs. Matthew Ryals is a musician, sound designer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Primarily working with a modular synthesizer, his music explores aleatoricism, cybernetics, and unfixed forms. Currently, his research investigates human-machine collaboration and the co-authorship of the resultant material. Tiny Mix Tapes has described his music as “filter[ing] the emotion of the human experience through the cold circuitry of electronics”.
His third album, impromptus in isolation, will release June 17, 2022 on Sound As Language. Elaborating on methods developed for his 2021 release Voltage Scores, the entire album was recorded live without overdubs and merges free improvisation, generative processes, and the multi-sectional forms of classical composition. His solo output is spread across Sound As Language (Carolinas, US), Oxtail Recordings (Sydney, AU), Post Season Franchise Records (NYC, US), Low Hanging Fruit (Cologne, DE) and his own imprint, Behind Glass Records (NYC, US).
As a 2022-23 New Music USA Creator Development Fund Awardee, Matthew is collaborating with composer Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie on a new project under the working title, Experiments in Collaboration and Generating Musical Forms. In 2021, he was awarded an IEA Electronic Media Residency at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, where he experimented with the possibilities of quadraphonic generative systems.
A frequent collaborator of choreographers, Ryals has received commissions and performed with companies such as The Movement Project, 7Midnights Physical Research, and Cleveland State University’s dance department. As the recipient of the Kulas Theatre Composer Fellowship at Cleveland Public Theatre for two consecutive years, he created original electronic music scores for the plays ‘Feefer Rising’ and ‘Red Ash Mosaic’ along with several miniature works. He has written for short films including his contributions to ‘The Fixers’, a collaborative art-meets-protest film series that put Cleveland’s underrepresented residents in the forefront to tell their city’s story during the 2016 RNC. The series exhibited at SPACES gallery in Cleveland and Smack Mellon in New York City.
Recent sound design projects include his work for Prada, Kinema, Riot Games, and Global Health Reporting Center, an independent newsroom and nonprofit that reports on the most pressing health issues of our time. Ryals is also a dedicated educator with a holistic method that combines rigorous training with creative mentorship. He co-designed an after-school program for the Brooklyn based studio, Keylab, where he is also the lead instructor. The program, for kids 4-12 years old, is centered on nurturing self-expression through sonic exploration, songwriting, music production, band collaboration, music theory fundamentals, and beginner piano skills.
Ryals was raised in rural Arkansas and holds an MM in classical guitar from Cleveland Institute of Music and a BM in instrumental performance from Arkansas State University.
Amma Ateria is an electroacoustic composer and sound artist, born in Hong Kong, working in San Francisco and New York City. Her work explores the coexistence of polarity, psychoacoustics in binaural beats, and equal-loudness contour. With the immediacy of tension and release, she navigates between oppositions, transforming deafening noise into meditative stance. Her compositions, developed during recovery from a concussion, utilize brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as their materials and focal point. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates towards frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and distorted speech as lost speech.
She Studied with Maggi Payne and Fred Frith. Performed with Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Tarek Atoui, Paul Clipson, Zeena Parkins, Erik Friedlander, Brian Chase, Nava Dunkelman, Matmos, Pauchi Sasaki, John Zorn, Julie Tolentino, Stephanie Mei Huang, Kim Ip, and others.
Since her studies at Mills College in music composition with specialization in electronic music, audio engineering, and media technology, her work has been presented in installation, performances, and artist-in-residence at SoART, Austria (2013), Titanik Gallery, Finland (2014), The Stone, New York City (2016), San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, San Francisco (2016), BAMPFA, Berkeley (2017), Exploratorium, San Francisco (2018), Marfa Sounding, Marfa, Texas (2018), CCRMA, Stanford University (2018), YBCA, SF (2019), Minnesota Street Project (2019), Other Minds: Latitudes 11 (2019), Recombinant 'Clouds of Confoundment’ (2020), Cone Shape Top: Cicada Series (2021), MAK Center/ Schindler House, LA (2021), Fort Mason Arts & Culture, SF (2021), Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2022), The Lab, San Francisco (2022)
Kevin Corcoran works with percussion, field recordings and electronics with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of music, art, communication and place.
As a percussionist he is focused on techniques which extend the sonic possibilities of the instrument by emphasizing textural sound, friction, sympathetic vibration, sustained tones and the use of found objects with an interest in freely arranging events in duration rather than marking time by rhythm. Whether working in sparse sound with a single drum and cymbal or frenetic contexts on the drum kit, improvisation is crucial to his practice as generative method and non-hierarchical exchange of ideas.
Through field recordings he observes and interacts with sites and objects with specific interests in abandoned architecture, urban excess, and intersections of infrastructure and open space. Electronic sound features in his work through the use of cassette tapes, computer software, feedback systems and various means of amplification.
Based in San Francisco, California, he collaborates across disciplines and borders having performed in the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan with musicians, dancers, filmmakers, writers and visual artists. In addition to making live and recorded sound and music, he has exhibited sound installations and experimental video works.
Cost: $10-20