Asymmetry Music Magazine » Interviews

Madeleine Shapiro

michaelkarman — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:39:31 +0000

Asymmetry: You’ve been involved with new music since your college days. How did all that get started?

Shapiro: I was introduced to new music as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook by Paul Zukovsky, who was my mentor. I don’t know why he thought I would be interested, but he just said “You might want to play something new. I’ll choose and help you with it.” And he chose an amazing piece, which could have been a crazy choice but turned out, I guess, to be a brilliant choice for me. He chose the Davidovsky Synchronisms No. 3. (...)
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Barry Truax

michaelkarman — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:51:41 +0000

Truax: So here we are in the gardens of the Archevêché in Bourges, with its formal gardens and its walkways and roses.

Asymmetry: Maybe we should just talk about this, then, and forget about music for awhile….

Or perhaps this is just the place to talk about soundscape and how you got started in soundscape composition.
(...)
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Christian Clozier

michaelkarman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:08:33 +0000

Immediately after my interview with Françoise Barrière at the 2006 Synthèse Festival, Christian Clozier, the cofounder of IMEB, took over an hour out of his schedule to show me around the studios, including his workroom where he designed and built the Cybersongosse, a teaching synthesizer for kids, and the Cybernéphone, a machine for diffusion familiar to attendees of the festivals.(...)
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Françoise Barrière

michaelkarman — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:48:13 +0000

When I visited Bourges in 2006 for the annual international festival of electroacoustic music, both Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier, the festival’s founders, took time out of their busy schedules not only to give interviews to Asymmetry Music Magazine but to show me around the studios of IMEB. I’d like to thank both of them for their hospitality and generosity and to apologize for taking so long to publish the interviews and the reports on the 2006 and 2007 festivals.

Asymmetry: What did you listen to early in your life?

Barrière: Have you listened to Dessus la mer? That’s a long piece, 26 minutes, which I composed from ’95 to ‘97 or ’98. I began from a text by Rabelais, and the subject was exactly that: to expose in this piece the music that I preferred in my youth. Not all of it, of course. But some. And not always immediately recognizable, but as if the sound were ice, were frozen, and then becoming enlivened. The music developed after into something more. I thought classical music was in danger in this world where popular music is so much to the fore. And not only music, but nature, which I also love, and which I saw also as in danger. So I mixed nature in danger and music in danger.(...)
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Paul Rudy

michaelkarman — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:30:36 +0000

I first met Paul Rudy at the Bourges festival in the spring of 2007. When I attended the EMM festival that October, Paul kindly took some time out to sit down and chat with me about music and life and whether or not I had a plan for this interview.

Asymmetry: You can talk about whatever you want.

Rudy: Well, let me ask you, “What are you curious about?”

Asymmetry: I’m interested just to listen to you talk.

Rudy: Well that backfired, didn’t it! But that’s the teacher in me. I don’t want to just tell you something; I want to draw you out.

Asymmetry: Well, an interview is a complete fake, anyway. What will appear in the magazine will be something I’ve manufactured out of this raw material we’re producing.

(...)
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Francis Dhomont and Robert Normandeau

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:59:17 +0000

I met with Dhomont in Montréal the day after his 80th birthday, which was celebrated there with a five day festival of electroacoustic music by Calon, Brümmer, Martusciello and others. And by Francis Dhomont, whose concert took place on his birthday. A working birthday, too, as he presented his music himself. In the midst of all this activity, Dhomont was gracious enough to grant Asymmetry this interview, and not only that, but since he wanted to conduct it in French, his friend and colleague, Robert Normandeau very kindly agreed to act as translator for us and very naturally took part in the conversation.

Asymmetry: When you read biographies of composers, there’s often some mention of that person having studied with Nadia Boulanger, say, or Charles Koechlin or whomever. That’s the extent of it, usually. And I always find myself curious about the other people; who are the other people that a young composer, that a young Francis Dhomont—at 14, or 20, or 25—admired and perhaps tried to emulate, even? (...)
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Erik Hoffman

michaelkarman — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:21:53 +0000

“There’s a lot of great music out there that people don’t know about and should know about”

You may know Erik Hoffman as one half of Spastic Colon, whose latest album should be out soon, perhaps by the time you read this. You may know Erik Hoffman as the founder of Ground Fault Recordings, which has put out consistently high quality music covering a wide range of styles. You may have used the distinctive cover art of the Ground Fault albums to make your trollings for good music almost completely risk free. You may also enjoy gourmet coffee and tables being unexpectedly turned.

If any or all of these are true, here’s an interview you may want to read, an interview that took place at Polly’s Coffee in Long Beach, an excellent place, by the way, to satisfy your cravings for a perfect brew. (...)
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Beatriz Ferreyra

michaelkarman — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:20:16 +0000

“The only thing I could do, was music.”

Beatriz Ferreyra is best known as an electroacoustic composer, who studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Earle Brown, among others, and who worked for much of the 1960’s at Pierre Schaeffer’s GRM in Paris. But when I met her in Bourges at the 2006 IMEB festival, we talked before this interview about all sorts of other things, as people do, including her early desire to go to the U.S. and be a painter. Curious about yet another composer who has or has had close ties with painting, I started off the interview asking about that. We switched very quickly to musical topics—this is a music magazine, after all—but the exchange about painting gives such a good idea of Ferreyra’s personality, that I couldn’t resist leaving this bit in. (...)
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Jon Christopher Nelson

michaelkarman — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:16:03 +0000

“The technological advances that we have seen in our lifetimes create a wonderful atmosphere for sound exploration. For those of us who are easily intoxicated with sound, computer music provides fantastic possibilities.”

I first heard the music of Jon Christopher Nelson on an IMEB disc (Cultures Electroniques, vol. 9). I first met him at the 2006 Bourges festival, where his “Just after the rain” was played. Since we held this interview right after Jon had returned from some time in the studios at Bourges, where he had just finished a commission, we started things off talking about his decade-long association with IMEB, and about his latest piece.(...)
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Michèle Bokanowski

michaelkarman — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:27:43 +0000

“When I start making sounds, mixing sounds, I of course have some idea of what I’m searching for, but quite often result turns out rather different and much better than what I intended. And I have to be open-minded enough to hear it and humble enough to accept it.”

_______________________

In 2002, while idly flipping through the “Experimental” bin at Amoeba Music, I came across a three inch cd from Metamkine, L’Etoile Absinthe by Michèle Bokanowski, part of their Cinema pour l’oreille series. I had had only good luck with three inch cds from Amoeba so far, and particularly so with the ones from this series, so plunk it goes into my basket.(...)
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