Club Concert 4C
Program Overview
Merzmania
Gintas Kraptavicius
Improvisation for Spheres
Calvin McCormack
Marsia 3
Jonathan Impett
oscheat
Moritz Wesp, Eric Haupt and Victor Gelling
The Skin of the Earth: Fragments
Paulo C. Chagas
The Long Now III
Cat Hope and Juan Parra Cancino
Tape Speed and Feedback
Andrew Loveless
About the pieces & artists
Gintas Kraptavicius: Merzmania
Electroacoustic live electronics performance made using my own created instrument made from computer, Plogue Bidule software & midi controller assigned to VST plugins. All software parameters controlled, altered live in a real time during performance using knobs & sliders of midi controller attached to VST plugins parameters. Performance made from synthesized sounds, no samples or before recorded sounds as fields’ recordings are used. Merzmania it is piece connecting classical music skills with today noise music (slight allusion to noise icon – Merzbow). Merzmania main playing method is real time interaction with computer which i am using on all my live compositions. I am using Computer as Music Instrument just like any other acoustic music instrument. Like a guitar. Onstage i get the same emotional feeling playing with computer as playing with any other acoustic/electric instrument. Main thing in a live performance it is energy and emotion to the pot like to rock’n’roll concerts. Merzmania featuring the motif of the Lithuanian folk song “Teka, teka šviesi saulė” (“The sun is rising, the bright sun is rising”).
About the artist
Gintas K (Gintas Kraptavičius) a Lithuanian sound artist, composer living and working in Lithuania.
Nowadays Gintas is working in the field of digital experimental and electroacoustic music, making music for films, sound installations. His compositions are based on granular synthesis, live electronic, hard digital computer music, small melodies. Collaborations with sound artists @c, Paulo Raposo, Kouhei Matsunaga, David Ellis and many others. He has released numerous of records on labels such as Cronica, Baskaru, Con-v, Copy for Your Records, Bolt, Creative Sources, Sub Rosa and others.
Since 2011 member of Lithuanian Composers Union. He has presented his works, performed at various international festivals, conferences, symposiums as Transmediale.05, Transmediale.07, ISEA2015, ISSTA2016, IRCAM forum workshop 2017 , xCoAx 2018, ICMC2018,ICMC2022 ICMC2025 ICMC-NYCEMF 2019, NYCEMF 2020 , NYCEMF 2021, NYCEMF 2022, NYCEMF 2023, NYCEMF 2024, NYCEMF 2025, Ars Electronica Festival 2020,. Ars Electronica Festival 2023 Ars Electronica Festival 2024 . IRCAM forum workshop 2025 Paris Ars Electronica Forum Wallis 2025, FARM 2025
Artist in residency at DAR 2016, DAR 2011 , MoKS 2016, KKKC 2023
Winner of the II International Sound-Art Contest Broadcasting Art 2010 , Spain.
Winner of The University of South Florida New-Music Consortium 2019 International Call for Scores in electronic composition category.
Calvin McCormack: Improvisation for Spheres
Improvisation for Spheres is a live electronic work for two custom spherical controllers with reactive visuals. Each sphere combines surface-embedded capacitive touch pads with an inertial measurement unit, wirelessly transmitting sphere orientation and touch sensing. Each sphere sits in a chalice cradle, with a ring of touch sensors embedded around the rim. The spherical form factor affords intuitive spatialization, the sphere’s rotation corresponds to the sound’s position in ambisonics, making spatial movement as immediate and embodied as pitch selection. Touch pads support expressive melodic and harmonic performance, and skin-touchpad contact area allowing dynamic and timbral expression. The work explores the sphere as both instrument and spatializer, where single gestures unite melodic, timbral, and spatial control. This audiovisual improvisation demonstrates how spatialization can be performed artistically rather than mixed, elevated from post-production to real-time expression.
About the artist
Calvin McCormack is an MST student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. His research focuses on accessible HCI and inclusive design for musical applications. He also conducts research in auditory neuroscience and plays jazz guitar.
Jonathan Impett: Marsia 3
This is the final piece of a series written for the installation Apollo e Marsia in 2024. This work expands the moment in time represented by Tintoretto in his painting La gara tra Apollo e Marsia (c.1545). Apollo, playing a bowed instrument with sympathetic strings, has been challenged by the satyr Marsia, playing a woodwind instrument, to see who is the greater musician. Ovid’s retelling of the story describes a terrible end for Marsia, but in the moment depicted by Tintoretto both musicians are waiting for the judgement of Midas, both trying to remember and assess what they and their competitor have just played.
The piece is therefore a play on the nonlinearity of memory under stress as both try to replay the performances in their mind. Moments are recalled, replayed or intrude, but are always changing in their reconstruction. Memories of themselves and of the other constantly modulate each other. New constructs emerge in memory through this process, and obsessive recall generates attractors and mirrors; we know from recent neuroscience that remembering and imagining are essentially the same reconstructive process.
At its root, the material all derives from two hymns to Apollo inscribed in stone at Delphi, arguably the earliest remaining instances of music notation, and likewise fragmented by erasures. Across time, musicians have attempted to reconstruct this partially-lost memory in different ways, creating new formations in the process.
Here, the Delphic material is subject to layers of nonlinear memory process, implemented in Open Music as forward- and backward-moving wave phenomena, sweeping up emergent patterns as they develop. This produces a score that often requires the performer to assimilate a polyphony of musical materials and physical behaviours as layers of memory. Analogous processes are used in the recorded and live sound processing, largely through physical modelling, cross-resynthesis and filtering – digital and analogue. This is in turn heard through a model of the stringed instrument of Marsia’s opponent, Apollo. An AI brings the live performance into relation with the behaviours, memory and projection of both competitors.
About the artists
Jonathan Impett (1956) is a composer, trumpet player and writer. His work is concerned with the discourses and practices of contemporary musical creativity, particularly the nature of the technologically-situated musical artefact. Activity in the space between composition and improvisation has led to continuous research in the areas of interactive systems, interfaces and modes of collaborative performance. Recent works combine installation, live electronics and computational models with notated and improvised performance, using fluid dynamics as a unifying behavioural model. A new project Anamnesis takes a radical approach to AI, identifying creative paths implied but unnoticed. He leads the research group “Music, Thought and Technology” at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent.
Richard Craig (alto flute) was born in Glasgow. He studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. He performs with groups such as Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien, ELISION and in Scandinavia with CAPUT, Kammarensemblen. He has released two solo discs of contemporary works, Vale and Inward, and recorded for Another Timbre, Wergo, FHR, Métier, as well as SWR, BBC and Finnish Radio. Not only a celebrated advocate of contemporary music, his recent album of the Telemann Fantasias and his improvisations was lauded as “bold, beautiful and clever” (Gramophone). He is also an improviser, composer and teacher, currently Director of Performance at the University of Edinburgh.
Moritz Wesp, Eric Haupt and Victor Gelling: oscheat
This contribution presents oscheat, a work-in-progress OSC-based interface, designed to extend ensemble communication beyond conventional musical gestures. By providing a modular and user-friendly environment, oscheat allows performers to directly control each other’s digital instruments, enabling novel forms of interaction, role-sharing, and emergent musical structures in real time.
Our instrumental system is structured into three functional sections reflecting core musical building blocks: synthesizers for melodic and harmonic material, sequencers for rhythmic organization, and samplers for vocal and sound-based material.
Additional functionality includes real-time MIDI recording and looping, pitch mapping with support for alternative tunings, spatialization, and global macro controls for large-scale structural manipulation. Each performer manages their instruments individually while making the controls accessible through oscheat.
Moritz Wesp, Eric Haupt and Victor Gelling are playing an eight-minute improvisation, demonstrating oscheat’s potential for rapid musical exchange, shared authorship, and collective decision-making. By exposing critical control parameters to all participants, the interface encourages social negotiation and flexible role allocation, making it relevant for both creative research and educational contexts.
About the artists
Moritz Wesp lives in Cologne (GER) and plays trombone, virtual trombone and other instruments that he designs, programs and builds. As an improviser he is working with different ensembles like Mariá Portugal Erosao, Matthias Muche’s Bonecrusher or the Simon Rummel Ensemble. Besides this he composes music and is part of the Audio-VR project SONA.
Eric Haupt is a guitarist and composer working in experimental music and punk. He completed his Bachelor of Music at the HfMT Cologne in 2018. He is a founding member of the ensembles Now My Life Is Sweet Like Cinnamon and Lawn Chair, as well as the initiator of the experimental game-show performance Sport1. His music has been presented at festivals throughout Europe and collaborations include internationally renowned producers Olaf O.P.A.L. and Chris Coady. His punk compositions have been broadcast on international radio stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music.
Victor Gelling is an improviser and composer who uses stringed instruments including but not limited to upright bass, tenor banjo, Pedalsteel- and Nonpedalsteel-Guitars in addition to pedals, synthesizers and barely working self-coded computer programs to create sounds. Their work spans genres from jazz to noise to electric cowboy songs to complex music, which culminates in their large ensemble works with Trash & Post-Chaotic Music, their alt-country/post-punk alias Slowklahoma, solo works or their playing in the Jorik Bergman Trio.
Paulo C. Chagas: The Skin of the Earth: Fragments
About the artists
Paulo C. Chagas is a Brazilian-American composer and Professor of Composition at the University of California, Riverside. With over 220 works across orchestral, chamber, electroacoustic, audiovisual, and multimedia formats, his work integrates advanced technology and expressive depth. He studied in Brazil, Belgium, and Germany, earning a Ph.D. from the Université de Liège, and was composer-in-residence at the WDR Electronic Studio. A Fulbright Scholar (Berlin, 2022–23) and ICMA board member, his work is widely performed and published.
https://solo.to/paulocchagas
Brazilian soprano Adriane Queiroz trained in Pará, Missouri, and Vienna. Since 2002/03 she has been a member of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, performing roles such as Pamina, Micaëla, Susanna, and Liù. She has appeared at major venues including the Hamburg State Opera, Semperoper Dresden, and Wiener Festwochen, and in concerts at the Musikverein and Konzerthaus Vienna. Her repertoire spans Mozart to contemporary works, including Schönberg’s Erwartung and Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata, with recent premieres under Sir Simon Rattle.
www.adrianequeiroz.com
Cat Hope and Juan Parra Cancino: The Long Now III
This a scored work for live modular synthesiser performance, with a backing track. It explores the potential of digital notation for modern electronic instruments, in this case, the contemporary modular synthesiser. It is named after the Long Now Foundation, that aims to provide counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture by encouraging long-term thinking, fostering responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Music provides complex answers to the question of “How Long is Now?”, and in this work, a slow descent into very low sound by the performer, where pitch is either uncontrollable or almost inaudible, reflects the limits of human action in and perception of sound as it passes through time, highlighting that there may be other ways to listen, and other ways to experience our passing through time.
The fixed media part of this piece was created at EMS in Sweden, using the Buchla 200’s 4 x 259 waveform generators and the score is read on the Decibel ScorePlayer, which also produces the fixed media part.
About the artists
Juan Parra Cancino studied Composition at the Catholic University of Chile and Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, earning a Master’s degree focused on electronic music composition and performance. In 2014, he completed his PhD at Leiden University with his thesis “Multiple Paths: Towards a
Performance Practice in Computer Music. Parra has been a research fellow at the Orpheus Institute since 2009.
Cat Hope is a award winning Australian composer who focuses on the extremes of sound – from extreme noise to barely audible delicacy. Her works have been performed world wide by ensembles such as Yarn Wire (US), the BBC Scottish Symphony (UK) and her works are published internationally on labels such as Hat (Hut) Art, with her monograph CD Ephemeral Rivers winning the German Critics Prize in 2017. Cat is a represented composer with the Australian Music Centre, and her music is published by Material Press. Her first opera, Speechless, won the Best New Dramatic work in the 2020 Art Music Awards.
Andrew Loveless: Tape Speed and Feedback
This performance presents a live realization of a dual-transport digital tape instrument designed for exploratory composition using playback speed manipulation and controlled feedback. It is performed using a custom-designed system which includes a live visualization that displays the spinning reels to indicate the playback speed of each transport. This provides an engaging visual element that helps the audience follow the sounds as they unfold.
The source of the sound material is the distinct, high-pitched whine of a CRT television’s flyback
transformer, which was chosen for its nearly inaudible high-frequency energy and analog character. One transport initially auditions the sound at normal speed before being dramatically slowed to reveal its hidden textures. The second transport is then introduced at a carefully tuned speed ratio, allowing the two sources to harmonize and phase against one another. These relationships produce beating patterns and periodic pulses that arise solely from speed interactions rather than from discrete sequencing or event-based control.
As the piece develops, the output of one transport is routed into the input of the other, introducing overdubbing and pitch-shifted layering. This process generates additional sound material while maintaining continuity with the original material. The performance is further extended by the routing configuration and playback speed chosen during the performance, rather than fixed delay parameters. Throughout the performance, changes are gradual and continuous, allowing structure to emerge organically from simple operational constraints.
The performance concludes with a slow attenuation of the feedback, allowing layers to dissipate organically. Instead of presenting a fixed composition, the work is shaped through live interaction with the instrument. In doing so, the performance situates historical tape music techniques within a contemporary digital context.
About the artist
Andrew Loveless is a graduate student in Music Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their work focuses on performance-centered instrument design and improvisation, with an emphasis on preserving tape music techniques and making them more accessible through hands-on, educational tools.