Bienale Koper
Introduction to Biennale Koper - concert of trio line upon line
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Event Date: Oct 16, 2022

Event Time: 7:00 pm

Location: Koper Music School Hall

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Program
Michelle Lou - Molt (2019)
Jessie Marino - Piece for Middle Airplane Seat (2017)
Sam Pluta - Matrices (2009)

Kelley Sheehan - Sentience (2020)
Bryan Jacobs - Blocks and Birds (2018)
Olly Sellwood - Mikrophonie III (2019)


Michelle Lou composes mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music, both in hardware and in computer based forms. She has also created large scale sound installations which are often performative and collaborative. She performs and improvises on acoustic and electric bass, electric guitar, and on laptop and various electronics. Her work has been presented at Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, The Festival of New American Music (Sacramento), the MATA Festival (New York City), The 66th American Music Festival at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., The Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Ultima Festival (Oslo), Chance and Circumstance (Brooklyn), Klub Katarakt (Hamburg), Klangwerkstatt and MaerzMusik (both in Berlin), amongst others. She received degrees in double bass performance and music composition from UC San Diego with additional studies at The Conservatorio G. Nicolini in Piacenza, Italy (double bass) and The UDK in Graz, Austria (composition), the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship. Graduate studies culminated in a doctorate in composition from Stanford University. Michelle was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has been granted commissions from institutions like the Fromm Music Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, and the Norwegian Arts Council. Michelle has taught at short term courses such as the WasteLAnd Summer Composition Course, Line Upon Line Festival Academy, and the Yarn/Wire Institute at Stony Brook.  She has also taught as visiting faculty at Dartmouth College, the Akademie für Neue Musik in Boswil, Switzerland, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Written for Line Upon Line, Molt forgoes traditional percussion instruments in favor of metal hand tools, threaded rods, objects, and consumer and DIY hardware electronics. Two players on either side of the stage share similar setups while the center player not only adds differently to the sound world, but also acts as a control center as the two flanking musicians are networked together to be manipulated at his station. The noisy electronic world explores granularities in metallic textures in off kilter proportions, eventually shedding its outer layer for beats to emerge and merge amongst an even noiser world.


Jessie Marino is a composer, performer, and media artist. Her work explores the repetition inside common activities, ritualistic absurdities, and uncovering nostalgic technologies. Jessie’s pieces score out sound, video, physical movements, lighting, and staging, which are then placed within organized temporal structures, fractured narratives and musical frameworks. Much of Marino’s interdisciplinary compositional work eschews conventional instrumentation, with scores that ask performers to use their bodies—using precisely articulated gestures, facial expressions, and quotidian physical movements—both as an alternative and a complement to musical sounds. Her work maps out the way humans communicate with their bodies on a performative timeframe, revealing the musicality hidden within everyday gesticulations, signs, and demonstrations, transmitted both consciously and unconsciously. Marino finds humor and profundity in personal interactions and the way humans navigate physical space—an improvisational act that can invoke a ballet, a dinner party or a demolition derby.
(No program note.)

Sam Pluta is a composer and electronics performer whose work explores the intersections between instrumental forces, reactive computerized sound worlds, traditionally notated scores, and improvisation. Since 2009, Sam has served as Technical Director, electronics performer, and composing member of Wet Ink Ensemble. Laptop improvisation is a core part of Pluta’s artistic practice. Performing on his custom software instrument, he has toured internationally with groups like Wet Ink, Rocket Science, and the Peter Evans Ensemble. Sam appears as a composer and performer on over thirty albums of new music and jazz, many of which are released on the label he co-runs, Carrier Records.
 
Matrices approaches the percussion trio as an electro-acoustic ensemble, amplifying and manipulating sounds in a digital sonic environment. The battery involved is simple, yet far from austere, consisting of a single bowed flexatone, 2 powered fans, a balloon, a plastic bag, 2 woodblocks, and a snare drum over a speaker. The work was born out of the software I use for improvisation, a large-scale modular live-processing environment built in SuperCollider. While the score is rigorously notated, the software responds to the performer's actions differently every time, resulting in a new version with each performance. Matrices was commissioned by TimeTable Percussion for the Austrian Cultural Forum's Moving Sounds Festival in 2009.

Kelley Sheehan (1989, she/her) is a composer and computer musician moving between acoustic, electronic, electro-acoustic, and performance art works. In any medium, her work centers on noise, performance, and interaction. Her work has been described as "Full of discovery, collaboration, and unpredictability" (Iannotta, Kyriakides, & Stäbler) with "Woozy Electronics" (LA-Weekly).

For many years, ethical questions around whether crustaceans, such as lobsters, can experience pain, has been a topic of much debate. Recently, the question of whether or not Artificial Intelligence has achieved consciousness has been of public concern. What does it mean to be conscious, to be self-aware? Using fixed media, snare drums, and interpretation by Line Upon Line, this piece explores noise, awareness, and the process of re-animation.

Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-built electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoustic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.
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Blocks and Birds inverts the role of the human performer- instead of starting sounds, they are tasked with stopping them. The piece progresses through eight different arrangements for human-computer interaction in which small electromagnetic beaters excite cymbals and drums. The performers act to deaden the sound of the resonating bodies, often as soon as they start. Blocks and Birds was written for Line Upon Line in 2018.

Olly Sellwood is a composer of music for live performance that combines musical instruments with electronic technology. His works create specific set-ups that offer new and unfamiliar listening perspectives of acoustic instruments, the subject of his recently completed PhD. Olly’s music has been performed by ensembles in the UK, Europe, and the USA, including the London Chamber Orchestra, GBSR Duo, and Ensemble Fractales. Recent commissions include the Horniman Museum, as part of the Hear It Live! Programme, performed by Jane Chapman.

Mikrophonie III uses Stockhausen’s 1964 work Mikrophonie I as a kind of model for composition. Whereas Mikrophonie I asks performers to explore the sounds producible by an adapted tam-tam, my work substitutes the tam-tam for Stockhausen’s composition itself. Performer actions, acoustic and electronic sounds, and film from previous performances are all appropriated in order to explore Stockhausen’s initial claim that anything (not just a tam-tam) can be examined in the realisation of Mikrophonie I.

Formed in 2009 at The University of Texas at Austin, line upon line exists to champion living composers and pursue the musically unfamiliar. 
The Austin-based trio has premiered nearly 100 new works for percussion and has worked with composers in residencies at Stanford University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, University of Huddersfield, University of Liverpool, City University of London and Monash University (Melbourne).
Internationally, the group has performed at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia), Open Circuit Festival (Liverpool), in Basel (Hochschule für Musik), Berlin (Unerhörte Musik), Cologne (Loft Köln), Freiburg (Hochschule für Musik) and London (City, University of London) and has taught at the Conservatoriums in Melbourne and Sydney, London (Guildhall School of Music & Drama), Manchester (Royal Northern College of Music) and Tours (Le pôle Aliénor).
Nationally, line upon line has performed and taught in twenty-two different states, at two Percussive Arts Society International Conventions, the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento) and The Myrna Loy Center (Helena, MT). 
In Texas, the group has performed at two Fusebox Festivals, the Menil Collection (Houston), Victoria Bach Festival, and the International Festival-Institute at Round Top.
line upon line consists of its three original members: Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk and Matthew Teodori.