Electronic Frequencies

PABLO GARCÍA-VALENZUELA (Pablo Gav 1973) studied musical theory, piano and compo-sition at the CIEM (1992-96). In 1996 he moved to UK, where he completed an MA in mixed contemporary music composition at Hertfordshire University with Javier Álvarez. From 1998 to 2003 he completed his PHD in acousmatic electroacoustic music composition at the City University in London, with professors Simon Emmerson, Javier Álvarez and Denis Smalley. He has received international awards in composition like the Prix de la Region de Aquitaine at the Concours SCRIME 2000 in Bordeaux France, honorary mention in the Concours Metamorphoses 2000 Belgium, and the 3rd price of mixed electroacoustic music from the Luigi Russolo contest 2001, Italy. Pablo’s main interests are electroacoustic music com-position, in its acusmatic format as well as in combination with the acoustic instru-ments, the spatial multi-channel diffusion of sound, and finally the analysis and aesthetic debate of music. He has created experimental electronic music groups like the project mañas in London (for quadraphonic sound, two laptops, percussion and video) and forms part of the Mexican American progressive rock group Sonus Umbra. He is currently living in México where he is completing a post doctorate project on multi-channel creative sound at the Laboratorio de Acústica y Vibraciones of UNAM. Since august 2007 he is professor of experimental audio at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana where he is now head of the symposium La habitación del ruido.

GUILLERMO ACEVEDO studied music at the ENM of UNAM with Lucía Álvarez and Hugo Rosales, and computer music with Manuel Rocha Iturbide. In 1999 he made the music for the theater play Ayax y Tecmesa written by Antonio Ponce Rivas. The same year his piece La danza del sol, for 5 percussion players, piano and flute was chosen for the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva Manuel Enríquez. In 2000 He makes the music for the theater play Socrates redivivo written by Antonio Ponce Rivas. This year he was given a FONCA artistic residency grant at the The Banff Center for the arts in Canada. Later, the NYC contemporary music group The fourious Band performed his piece Rostros de mi tierra. From 2000 until now he decided to change from the “técnicos” to the “rudos” side, leaving the music for acoustic instruments behind and commit- ting himself in making “electronic noises”. He is presently a member of the collective Machintosco.

VICTOR H. ROMERO (1975) studied at the Instituto Cardenal Miranda and the UNAM’s ENM and electroacoustic music with Manuel Rocha Iturbide. In January 2002 he was selected by the International Institute of Electroacoustic music of Bourges, France (IMEB) for a resi-dence in composition. His works have been performed in multiple concert halls of México and abroad, among them we can mention the Carlos Chávez, Nezahualcoyotl, Miguel Covarrubias, Blas Galindo, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He has also played in festivals like Radar and the International Festival of Sound Art in Mexico city, and abroad in festivals like the International Festival of Electroacoustic music of Bourges (France), the 2nd Festival of noise times (Colombia 2002), The sound gallery of the University of North Texas (USA 2003), etc. Rude collaborator of the Machintosco collective from the beginning of the first round, a group of electroacoustic music composers that have collaborated in various projects, like the video-installation El Santo Cuántico, a work that won the first prize at the Electro-acoustic Trivium in Bourges in the category of multimedia in 2001.

ROGELIO SOSA (1977 Mexico City) is a composer and promoter of experimental electronic music and sound art. He studied electronic music at the Ateliers Upic and IRCAM in Paris between 1999 and 2001. In 2003 he obtained his MA in music and technology from the University of Paris VIII. Since 2004 he lives in México city. Currently he is a member of the improvisation with electronic media project .pig, the director of the Radar Festival, and was curator of the Electronic Arts Biennale Transitio_mx. He has curated projects for the Festival Decibel, La Habitación del Ruido, Instrumenta Oaxaca and Rawbits Festival in Chicago, among others. He was the sound art curator at Ex Teresa Arte Actual from 2005 to 2007 and professor at the Laboratorio de audio experimental of the Claustro de Sor Juana University from 2004 to 2007. His work has been performed in North America, Latin America and Europe. Sosa has been a FONCA recipient four times. The most important prices and achievements he has received are the Premio Nacional de la Juventud en artes (México 2000), the Electroacoustic Music Contest SCRIME (Bordeaux France, 2000), the Elec- troacoustic Music Contest from IMEB (Bourges France, 2001), the Premio Nuevas Resonancias (México, 2001), the Luigi Russolo Electroacoustic Music Contest (Varese Italia, 2002), the EAR Electroacoustic Music Contest (Budapest Hungary, 2003) and the grant for production and research of Art and Media from the Multimedia Center (México, 2006).

JUAN SEBASTIÁN LACH LAU (1970) began his musical career playing piano and keyboards in the experimental jazz band Psicotrópicos and later in the rock band Santa Sabina with whom he recorded six CD’s and made multiple tours. He studied Mathematics at UNAM in Mexico City. Later he obtained a bachelor in composition at CIEM, México City. He has a bachelor (2003) and master (2005) degree in composition from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, The Netherlands, with a specialization in Sonology. He is presently pursuing a PhD in Artistic Research from the Leiden University and Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. His music has been played by: Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Ensemble Royaal, Muse, Soil, Insomnio, The Barton Workshop, Modelo 62 and The Electronic Hammer among others. His composition teachers have been: Juan Trigos, Víctor Rasgado and Ignacio Baca-Lobera in Mexico; Gilius van Bergeijk, Clarence Barlow and Louis Andriessen in Holland. He teaches at the Electronic Studio of the composition department at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His pieces have been played in the American and European continents.

ALEJANDRO MONTES DE OCA TORRES (1980, Mexico City) studied classic guitar, electro- acoustic music and Musical analysis in Mexico City. He later studies computer music and electronic media in Vienna. In 2005, the UNESCO-ASCBERG grant program for artists offered him an artistic residency at the Electroacoustic Music Institute of Bourges, France. In 2007, Alejandro was selected to continue his studies through the program ECMCT (European Course for Musical Composition and Technologies), Track A Helsinki- Barcelona, sponsored by IRCAM in France, the Sibelius Academy in Finland and the ESMUC in Spain. The FONCA scholarship program currently supports him. His musical production comprises electroacoustic pieces for mixed media and tape. He has composed scores for dance, video, and cinema. His music has been performed in multiple festivals of México, Bolivia, Austria, France, Germany, Finland and Estonia. He is presently very interested in improvising with electronic media as well as in the creation of installations and sound sculptures.

SERGIO LUQUE (1976 Mexico DF) is a composer. He lives partly in Madrid and partly in Birmingham and currently is working towards a PhD in Composition at the University of Birmingham. He is an active member of the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST). In 2006 he received a Master’s Degree in Sonology (with distinction) from the Royal Conservatory at The Hague, studying with Paul Berg and Kees Tazelaar. In 2004 he received a Master’s Degree in Composition from the Conservatory of Rotterdam, studying with Klaas de Vries and René Uijlenhoet. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Composition from the Musical Studies and Research Center (CIEM, Mexico). Luque’s music has been performed in Europe, North America, South America and Oceania.

1/ Gutura,1999 – Pablo Gav
for tape.
The sound material is derived from improvisations of guttural gestures performed and recorded by the composer. Other sound sources are used for sound transformations, such as metallic and wooden impacts. Non-pulse-based rhythmic forces as well as timbre mostly structure the piece, but there are other aspects: an imaginary narrative describes a pre-linguistic human body whose ultimate [unconscious] goal is the externalization of his mind and the attempt to communicate by way of articulating a word for the first time in his existence. Although cartoon like and humoristic, the piece concentrates on the idea of how structured thought and instincts were (and are) translated into sound and therefore into spoken language. Gutura won the Prix de la Region de Aquitaine from the contest Concours SCRIME 2000 in Bordeaux France, and an honorific mention at the Concours Metamorphoses 2000 in Belgium.

2/ Punto de Partida (Departing point), 2002 – Guillermo Acevedo
for tape.
At least eighty percent of this work is realized with the only sound of a snare drum. The idea was to reveal the infinite possibilities of a timbre through the consistent and rude appli-cation of digital processes, and that the structure of the piece would emerge from this same experimentation. Although, regarding the piece’s structure, the best solution for me was to be guided by a kind of plot, because in this way intuition and imagination could be liberated within me. I also used the sounds of a computer keyboard in order to give the composition and infernal and percussive touch, as well as an Iranian chant to add ‘finesse’ and feminine sensuality. This piece is dedicated to all the gang that is searching for internal answers, and that is bringing this exploration until the last consequences.

3/ Voces (Canto1) Voices (Chant 1), 2000 – Víctor H. Romero
for tape.
Based in Gregorian modal singing, this work is the recreation and exploration of sound scapes and sound images suggested by these chants, as well as from the harmonic and timbre content of the voice.

4/ Maquinaria del ansia (Anxiety machine), 1999 – Rogelio Sosa
for tape.
This work procures to translate in the sound terrain the sensations experimented when we find ourselves in a state of anxiety. The emotional contention, unexpected explosion, obsessive repetition of an idea, and the sudden transition from one mood to the other, served as models to follow in the compositional processes. Here the challenge was to create a musical discourse starting from a minimal number of elements. I used only one sound impulse (the recording of a stroke in a wood body) in order to generate all the material of the work through the multiplication, transformation and manipulation of such a sound. Maquinaria del ansia uses beating and the repetition as metaphor of stasis and obsession, and the massification and deformation of these beatings as an allusion to an exasperated internal overflow.

5/ rzw for 4 channels (stereo version), 2002 – Juan Sebastián Lach
Percussion: Diego Espinosa.
The score of this piece was constructed by mapping permutations of five sounds against permutations of accent patterns in a five-meter. Their reading is made according to their symmetries; when coincidences happen the resulting clash generates a signaling ‘fill in’. The structure of the piece has this section as its middle and longest one, surrounded by contrasting sections built similarly but in a filtered fashion. The electronic soundtrack was generated in the analog studio from the multi track recording of the percussion and was done in several passes, processing the instrument’s sound in the outer sections and using synthetic sounds in the middle one. The computer was used at a later stage to synchronize the electronic parts and to do the quadraphonic movements. The live performance of this piece has the electronic sounds following the percussion and sometimes the percussion following the electronics, which resembles the process the composition went through. The work is dedicated to Diego Espinosa.

DIEGO ESPINOSA (1978) is a percussionist, actor, dancer, and a member of the Atlas Ensemble (directed by Ed Spanjaard), Ziggurat (Theo Loevendie), The Electronic Hammer, Slagwerk Groep Den Haag, Soil, PI, Ensemble Insomnio and the percussion ensemble Ear Massage with whom he won the International Percussion Competition of Luxemburg in 2005. He frequently plays for the Nieuwe Ensemble and the Ives Ensemble. He has played as a soloist in the Atlas Ensemble and the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam (Ed Spanjaard 2005), the Koninklijk Conservatorium Orkest (West Montgomery 2001 and Micha Hammel 2002), Orquesta de Pamplona (Josep Vicent), Orquest de las Arts (Josep Vicent 2005), the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra (Yan Hui- chang 2006) and the Nederlands Kamer Orkest (Jurgen Hempel 2007). Many pieces have been written specifically for him, including percussion solos in combination with orchestra, ensemble, percussion quartet, live electronics and with fixed media, as well as with dance and video.

6/ Imaginario 1 (Imaginary 1),2007 – Alejandro Montes de Oca
for tape.
Electroacoustic piece that has as its principal idea the study of microscopic sounds in relation with other bigger sounds, their acoustic characteristics and spatial potential. Within the work, we find sounds coming from two different recordings, a field and a studio recording. The first sounds work as a scenery and the second ones as actors. It is a metaphor of sound digitalization, a trip between the extremes; it’s about imagining with sounds. The composition was realized at the studios of the Composition Electroacoustic Institute of the Music University in Vienna, Austria. It was selected to represent this institute at the festival Next Generation ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.

7/ Frío (From lat. frigidus) for tape – Sergio Luque.

*1. adj. Applied to bodies whose temperature is much inferior to the ambience ordinary one.
*2. adj. Applied to the colors that produce sedative effects, like blue.
*3. adj. Indifferent to sexual pleasure.
*4. adj. That, with respect to one person or thing, shows indifference, coolness or lack of affection, or that doesn’t take interest in her.
*5. m. Excessive diminution of heat in bodies; drop of temperature that, in general rule, contracts them and arrives to liquidate the gases and freezes the liquids.
*6. m. Sensation that experiments an animal body towards a descent in temperature.
*7. m. Barrel. Frigorific, electro domestic apparatus that conserves nourishment.

Disc 3 (nrs: 1-7) from the album:
Electroacustico [1960 – 2007] IRD 002.
Many thanks to the artistic director of this unique document Manuel Rocha.