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Stelios Manousakis' solo live electronics project merges vocabularies and approaches from different, often seemingly clashing, realms of electronic music: noise and no-input music with electroacoustic composition with vibrant underground tekno. The sets are very hands-on, using a custom-built live-electronics instrument programmed in SuperCollider. Playing it is very involved, and as real-time as playing an acoustic instrument.
The instrument is an open cybernetic system specifically designed - and meticulously fine-tuned - for the creation of music in real-time. The system is based on digital feedback, set in motion by the primeval atom of digital technology: a single bit, that draws from the guts of the machine an intense, visceral stream of bursts, rhythms, turbulences, drones and resonances. The role of the performer is to manipulate the number's path as well as the system's structure and configuration, guiding it into states of equilibrium, oscillation, chaotic behavior, noise and silence, with the sonic output being the ultimate guide. No external or pre-recorded sound sources are used but real-time manipulation of the number's path within a synthetic sonic phase space, revealing its emergent beauty as it populates a constantly shifting digital universe.
This project grows from and expand on the tradition of virtuosic, 'composed improvisation', exploring the continuum between these two poles (composition/improvisation). The pieces written for this project are Open Compositions, whose structural backbone and overall dramatic arc are pre-defined but in manners that allow - and at specific points require - the inclusion of spontaneous ideas and their development according to the compositional and aesthetical framework of that piece. This ensures that particular qualities and micro-moods freely emerge and develop within each performance, while assuring that each piece always remains recognizable as the particular composition, retaining its formal outline, and key sonic, gestural and motivic characteristics.
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