Ben Neill will perform music from his ambient music project Trove and the recently released Prana Cantos album on his self-designed Mutantrumpet, with interactive video by Ralph Abraham. Opening set from Headboggle will make use of live grand piano and a prepared electronic backing.
Trove
The meditative, atmospheric music emanates entirely from the notes and timbres of Neill’s self-designed Mutantrumpet - no other sound sources are used. The timbral improvisations of Neill's multi-belled instrument are captured in real time and transformed into richly textured electronic music using a Fibonacci series-based processing matrix.
Trove combines improvisation and composition based on numerical structures through a network of software applications, and reflects Neill's long history of performing with minimalist pioneer La Monte Young. The Fibonacci series sequences on which Trove is based are used to model the forces of growth and reproduction in the natural dynamical systems of plants and animals. Trove uses this fundamental structure of lifeforms to create a uniquely dynamic form of live ambient music.
Abraham's imagery and animations are based on historical chaotic attractors and their bifurcations for flows (continuous dynamical systems). The visual materials are set in motion and processed by Neill's Mutantrumpet using the instruments notes, dynamics, sensors, and other onboard controllers.
Ben Neill
Composer/performer and inventor Ben Neill is widely recognized for his innovative and experimental work with the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument. Through his use of interactive technologies, Neill blurs the lines between acoustic and electronic to create “art music for the people.” (Wired Magazine) His music blends elements of ambient, minimalist, and improvised music to create otherworldly sonic experiences.
Ralph Abraham
Ralph H. Abraham has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1968. He received the Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1960, and taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton before moving to Santa Cruz. He has held visiting positions in Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, and Florence, and is the author of more than 20 texts, including eight books currently in print.
He has been active on the research frontier of dynamics -- in mathematics since 1960, and in applications and experiments since 1973. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields (medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, psychotherapy, etc.) and is an active editor for the technical journals World Futures, and the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos. In 1975, he founded the Visual Mathematics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which became the Visual Math Institute in 1990, with its popular World Wide Web site since early 1994. He has performed works of visual and aural mathematics and music (with Ami Radunskaya and Peter Broadwell) since 1992.
Headboggle
Headboggle, the long-running experimental electronic project by Derek Gedalecia has been making waves in and out of the Bay Area for some timheade now. WIRE readers and synth-heads the world over know about the project already: psychedelic electronic synth jams meet absurdist musique concrete conceptual performance. Derek’s decades long experience with keyboard and guitar-based instruments is often underscored by standup comedy and performative antics in the live setting.