Network Music Festival

Alongside our performance and installation programme the festival will also include a chance to explore the inner-workings of network music with a variety of general interest and specialist talks and workshops – open to all levels of experience.

Our 3 talks sessions include:

Technical Talks from tech experts and artists explaining some of the newest technological developments and projects related to Network Music.

General Interest Talks on accessible topics from network artists, including new development in music notation systems in the networked world and the challenges of performing over a network in co-located and geographically dispersed ensembles.

Pre-Concert talk with The Hub. The seminal network band The Hub will talk about their work in conversation with Dr. Nick Collins. There’ll also be an opportunity for audience questions.

We will be running 2 workshops over the saturday and sunday of the festival:

Sebastien Piquemal will run a 2 part workshop introducing the WebPD programming language for web ‘jamming’ projects. The workshop is free to NMF ticket holders and open to all levels of experience. Beginners will learn the basics of webPD and javascript and advanced users will focus on building projects.

Roger Thomas will present CIRCE: collective and interactive recording with collaborative electronics. A chance to get your hands on the controllers and tools that network artists are using to make music with in an interactive session and to record your own contribution to an album of improvised electronic music. No technical or musical knowledge required!

The Network Music Festival will present 2 installations exhibitions this year:  ‘m a c h i n i c d r i f t’, curated by Samuel Rodgers, and an exhibition curated by the NMF team made up of submissions to the OPEN CALL.

The NMF OPEN CALL installation exhibition will be presented at Space II at The Edge, and will present 4 works by Ian Baxter, SATSYMPH, Scot Gresham-Lancaster & Steve Bull and Rob Canning.

The exhibition will open at 6pm, Friday 22nd February ahead of our opening concert at 8pm and will be open for the duration the festival weekend.

Ian Baxter will present his work ‘Playing the Weather System’ which takes live weather data from the BBC to algorithmically determine the musical parametres of the output sound such as pitch, scale, filtering and reverb.

SATSYMPH’s ‘On a Theme of Hermes’ is a mobile phone app which participants can download to their smartphone. The participant can then go to any outdoor location and follow instructions to create an individual GPS-triggered virtual sound environment to explore.

‘Cellphonia’ by Scot Gresham-Lancaster & Steve Bull is an interactive installation where pariticpants can record a short clip of sound which is automatically added to a dynamically shifting score made up of all the participants recordings.

Rob Canning will present ‘Radio Kulturo’, an installations that rebroadcasts and remixes the national classical radio station of every country in the European Union – thus exploring notions of consensus, time and simultaneity.

More details of the ‘m a c h i n i c d r i f t’ exhibition can be found here.

Our full performance programme is now online here!

New to the bill are JesterN, John Wild & Thibault Autheman, Henrique Portovedo and BEER.

Artist and scientist JesterN will perform his piece Fragmentation which uses EEC technology to track the performer’s brain wave. The perform acts as an avatar within a computer-generated maze, with sound and visuals generated from the brain signals disturbing him on his quest!

Performance artist John Wild and algorthmic composer Thibault Autheman perform a piece that explores and interacts with the abundance of wireless internet networks, 3G and 4G smarphone networks, blue tooth and GPS systems and other high-speed lines which create an invisible geography of wireless communication channels.

“Spaces”, performed by saxophonist Henrique Portovedo, tackles the concept of Augmented Music Performance, including the effect on communication when interaction  between performer, sound and visuals is mediated  via networking processes.

University of Birmingham’s laptop ensemble BEER (Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research) is a live electroacoustic performance group who research network music performance and live coding. The group will perform an improvised piece where they write and hack each other’s sound generating code live in the performance space!

Watch out in the next couple of days for our installations, talks and workshops line-ups!

On Saturday 23rd February 3pm Melatab, Play the Moment, CLOrk (Concorida Laptop Ensemble), Hammami & Urošević and The Soundlings Collective will perform in our telematic concert.

Each exploring various aspects of the effects of using networks to communicate in multi-location performances, the telematic concert will involve more than 40 performers in over 10 locations across 7 countries!

CLOrk will perform their piece “Small-world Network” alongside acoustic ensembles Mustek and The Transcenders in multiple locations in the USA and UK. The piece explores the elements of synchronicity and multiplicity inherent in performing in multi-locations.

Hammami & Urošević will perform their audio visual piece “Abyss vs. Hyperspace”. Communicating via the internet Hammami and Uršević will combine image and video created by Katarina DJ Urošević in Serbia with Amin Hammami’s sound and music played live in Tunisia. The piece explores the mystery and horror of the abyss in Hyperspace.

Melatab‘s performance references Handel’s Water Music with musical events traversing fibre optic cables, necessary for network music, becoming a metaphor for Handel’s barge on the river Thames. Merging improvised acoustic music, with dance and electronic processes in a collective multi-location performance where synchronicity may occaisionally occur.

Play the Moment will perform the piece Excavating Desire, by Victoria Gibson. In 4 movements Excavating Desire explores desire as the core of individual identity. Play the Moment is an all female improvising multi-disciplinary ensemble based in the USA and Canada.

International sound ensemble The Soundlings Collective will perform _waveFronts, where several performers or ensembles connect via internet streaming to interact with each other. The performance investigates differences in close and distant states of embodiment and the direct and digitally mediated transmission of musical thought.

Joining Slub to perform in our Saturday Late Night Concert/Algorave will be Mico Rex, xname and Judy Dunaway.

Curated by Wrongheaded, the concert will build from provocative network disturbances to full kilter networked beat music.

Judy Dunaway will perform a live set streamed from Boston, USA to the festival venue in Birmingham. Performing alongside vocalist Jill Burton, Judy is investigating the affects on sound quality of streaming audio across a network and actively seeking out the addition of  audio glitches by routing the audio through multiple live streams before the sound reaches Birmingham.

xname will present her piece Tempus Fugit which investigates the effect of time lag and delay when the sounds from the room in Birmingham are sent via the internet through several servers before being replayed at the venue.

Kicking off our late night Algorave will be Mico Rex, streaming their performance direct from a venue in Mexico. Mico Rex are an experimental electro-pop duo who are pioneers of live-coding in Mexico! They combine genres such as glitch, punk, electro, bolero and future-80s, in an improvised performance with vocals, tortured home-made controllers and most importantly – dancing!

The inventors of the ‘Algorave’ – Slub – will finish the night with a set of live coded, generative, electronic dance music. Slub coined the term algorave to describe music which is ‘made for  both heads and feet, generated live from software, but made by humans for humans.’

Great music and great dancing guaranteed!

As part of the NMF 2013 programme we commissioned local curator Samuel Rodgers to curate an exhibition of sound installations relating to the theme of networking.

Open 12-6pm during Network Music Festival and 12-5pm the following Thursday to Saturday, the exhibition will take place at The Lombard Method, just round the corner from the main festival venue and will run from 22 February – 2 March 2013.

Samuel Rodgers will present an exhibition of video and installation work by Dominick Allen, Steven Dickie and Pete McPartlan. Taking the notion of networking as a point of departure, the artists have made new works that variously explore the nature of the singular within a mass, the transmission and exchange of abstract thought, distraction/interruption, and the clumsy reality of electronic devices.

Join us for the exhibition preview on Thursday 21 February 6-8pm!

You can find more information on the exhibition and artists here.

The exhibition is FREE to attend so just drop in and enjoy!

Time to let you know about our first round of OPEN CALL performers:

Radikal Audio Lab, Ewa Justka, TAPERS, Informal, Juxtavoices and Delbrots and the Man will all perform at NMF2013.

Radikal Audio Lab. play electroacoustic music, computer-generated sounds and noise-based compositions. Frank Niehusmann and Clemens von Reusner connect their electronic instruments as an interactive computer network. Thereby they create unique concert versions of their compositions using live-sampling, looping- and live-overdubbing techniques based on their own software network.

Ewa Justka is a polish electronic artist based in London. Her work is focused on performative and philosophical aspects of ‘noise’. Her performance at NMF2013 explores possibilities of distance communication and ways of data exchange. What are these day to day signals around us? How do they influence our activities? What is communication? Is it possible that in the nearest future the communication between human species will become pure signals exchange?

TAPERS describe themselves as unconventionally crafted contemporary classical music: the lo-fi aesthetics and magnetics of Gustav Rye and Simon Kinch. (Lost and) found objects, Schoenbergian wax grunge, and deconstructed cassette concrète, all created through hand-sculpted set-ups of rewired walkmans and jumble sale electronics.

Contemporary composer John Eacott will present his piece ‘Floodtide’ with Informal. The piece is based on the natural movements of the river Thames. It will see Eacott collect real-time data on the river’s tidal movement, which is automatically translated into musical notation, and transmitted via the internet to be performed by a chamber group of classical musicians in Birmingham.

Juxtavoices comprises both trained and untrained voices. The group uses fixed texts and structures for its compositions, but no specific pitches are ever written and through use of improvised elements no two performances of a given piece are ever the same. For this performance of Guardian Weekend Remix, choir members will direct the performance among themselves using text messages as the piece progresses.

Delbrots and the Man is a project by members of Benoît and the Mandelbrots, including The Man (Drums). The whole performance is mainly based on improvisation wherein the performers try to reach the limits of their network-based system. This project is focused on drone music, noise and distorted sounds.

There’s still more to come, so stay tuned for the next announcements!

It’s time to announce some more acts who will be performing at Network Music Festival 2013! 

We’re happy to have invited 4 bands from the UK, Europe and USA to perform at the festival.

UK and Netherlands based audio-visual artists Alo Allik and Yota Morimoto will perform in our opening concert on Friday 22nd February.

In their performance the direct revelation of binary dynamics and rhythms of electronic circuits through custom-built sonic and visual models is expanded and contrasted with complex behavioral patterns of 3-dimensional artificial life and genetic programming algorithms. The audience can expect a challenging perceptual experience, simultaneously challenging, disorienting and yet familiar.

Live coding trio Slub will be performing in the late night concert on Saturday 23rd February.

With roots in UK electronica and tech culture, slub build their own software environments for creating music in realtime. Only custom composition and DSP software is used. Everything you hear is formed by human minds.

Slub project their screens so that the audience are able to appreciate their live software development process, which does not adhere to industry quality control standards. They communicate using OSC over UDP and eyebrow gestures. The output ranges from extra slow gabba, through intelligent ambient gabber to acid blues glitch.

On Sunday 24th February german laptop band PB_UP (powerbooks unplugged) will perform.

If the laptop is the modern equivalent of the folk guitar, then PB_UP is the first acoustic computer folk band. 6 networked laptops: that is, sound synthesis and real-time sound processing. The sound is played only via the computer speaker. The idea of the laptop as an autonomous musical instrument is consistently realised by PB_UP into a reality. The six musicians sit in the audience writing and modifying algorithms using only self-written software.

Finally distributed laptop quartet – based in the UK and USA – Glitch Lich will also perform on Sunday 24th February. 

Glitch Lich is a group of like-minded musicians specializing in creating and performing real-time network music with its members spread across three different time zones. The quartet met at Mills College focusing on the practices of improvisation with electronics, just-intonation, and game theory. Since then, members of Glitch Lich have relocated to other parts of globe in pursuit of further studies in composition, DEMONOLOGY, and brewing. To maintain their performance practice, Glitch Lich have devised innovative methods to continue to collaborate despite trans-national/ Atlantic distances, developing new technologies to facilitate this mode of music making.

To buy tickets for NMF2013 go to http://networkmusicfestival.brownpapertickets.com/

We will be announcing the results of this years OPEN CALL next week!!

We are very excited to announce that seminal network music band The Hub will be giving a special performance at NMF 2013 on Saturday 23rd February 2013, 7pm.

Computer network music, as practiced by The Hub over the last two decades, is characterized by the sharing of digital information via a network, which is used to algorithmically influence the music played by each player in the group. This form of interaction provides the opportunity for composer/performers using computers to use the unique attributes of this instantaneous sharing to create new ensemble relations. The musical behavior that results when each performer individually creates their own realization of a data-sharing specification in a variety of computer music languages affords a rich and unpredictable environment. Emergent behaviors and inexplicable synchronicities abound, and are used to enhance a collaborative, and improvisational performance practice.

Their festival performance will include recent group configurations featuring spectral analysis of acoustic objects, room resonance as a data source, as well as hyper-improvisational mapping of shared values among other schemes.

We are releasing a limited number of tickets for The Hub concert only. They can be purchased, along with festival weekend passes and day tickets from: http://networkmusicfestival.brownpapertickets.com

Tickets for Network Music Festival 2013 are now on sale and are available from http://networkmusicfestival.brownpapertickets.com

We have discounts available for early ticket buyers with Super Early Bird tickets available in limited numbers until the 14th January and Early Bird tickets available in limited numbers until 4th February. Get them quick before they sell out!

We’re also please to announce that we are selling Donor tickets this year so if you want to help support the festival and receive a thanks and an exclusive invitation to a drinks reception where you can meet the Network Music Festival artists alongside access to all the Network Music Festival events, then check our Donor Weekend Pass and Gold Donor Weekend Pass.

More details of ticket prices is available on our tickets page, or if you’ve already got enough info go to http://networkmusicfestival.brownpapertickets.com and get yourself a ticket!