11th CYFEST – Live and Performance Program

Concert

Folk music of the 21st century. Arte Povera. Ersatz Exotica. The impossibility of rational in the already useless. The possibility of irrational in the still useful. The ethnos that emerges anew in hangars and abandoned concrete boxes. In their project, Grigory Avrorin, Yevgeniya Galkina, Sergey Dmitriev and Helga Lis use plumber pipes and all kinds of rubbish including broken musical instruments — everything easily accessible, preferably free of charge, outside of the conventional musical tradition. There are natural reverberations everywhere, where one cannot even imagine them.

Audio performance

Nikita Bugayev uses field recordings and creates his own applications. With their help, he gathers compositions that turn up in the gray area between music and sound art. As part of CYFEST, Nikita presents a new material based on the principles of reductionism and improvisation. The author disregards the visual component leaving the audience an opportunity to concentrate on the sound.

Photo Marcus Wrangö

Audio performance

In 1868, the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz vocalized an idea that largely determined the development of neurophysiology: “Nerve fibers are often compared to telegraph wires… In the telegraph network, we find the same copper or steel wires that carry just one type of movement — electric current — but they cause a wide variety of results at different stations in accordance with additional devices to which the wires are connected”. The issue of modular organization of central nervous system has been intensely studied during the last decades. Nevertheless, the process of uniting neurons into modules still arouses discussions. The performance by Kostyrko is an artistic illustration of the modular principle of organization of neural clusters with the use of various techniques of data sonification as well as modular forms of contemporary musical composition.

Concert

“Futuresong” is a concert piece for a voice and interactive electronics to a libretto Das Magazin des Glücks by the German playwright Dea Loher about seekers of happiness who suffer setbacks. Soloist: Sergey Polotovsky.

Audio performance

Ruslan Usipov will present at the festival the fifth version of the Compositor Software that includes over 80 new polyphonic rhythmic drawings. These loops are transformed into industrial-noise elements. Various emotions are imprinted in the loops, the ones that can be transmitted by means of the program Compositor 5. The carrier signal is the sequences that change the rhythm depending on the tunings. Digital musical segments are synchronized with carrying ones, and they are transmitted in parallel. The monitor reflects the resultant of color spiral and the location of virtual antenna. The set’s title — “Opening of the Spirit” — heralds the opening of a new dimension in sound.

Performance

Performance by Sam Conran is the synthesis of the Earth’s Magnetic Field, Jupiter Noise Storms and Cosmic Rays interfacing with an outboard modular synthesizer. The synth takes raw inputs and allows to adjust, play and filter the outputs. The contents of the performance will depend on what’s picked up (like tuning a radio) and by using the controls of the synthesizer.

Performance

“Digiphonia” is a musical improvisation on computer components. Physical artifacts of computer industry possess their own acoustic qualities, each different from the others. By bringing them to light, the author provides a new meaning to the notion of “digital sound”.

>Audio performance

In this sound performance, Monica Vlad uses old media devices, such as cassette players and radios, to create new soundscapes. The title “Lost, But Not Lost Forever” is a tribute to old media that doesn’t exist anymore, but we still remember their existence. It also poses the question “What’s the life expectancy of a media?” Of course, it depends from type to type, but at the end, somehow, they all die. “Is there a media that never dies?” “What’s the new media that is going to conquer the world?”

Concert

Performers: Dmitry Antropov, Vera Bezrukova, Filipp Guzeev, Mikhail Gunin, Anastasia Ivanova, Natalia Skulskaya

The key idea of laptop orchestra as their artistic practice is the refusal to view the notebook as a strictly application device. The search for its impressive possibilities as a full-fledged musical instrument calls for the traditional stage seating, presence of well-tuned sound sources and organization of the performance process by means of conducting. The laptop orchestra under the baton of Andrey Bundin was created in 2017 in the Lab of New Media. At the CYFEST Festival, the group will perform the musical composition “Mirrors” whose central theme is the digital world and the reality that is reflected in it.