Matt Welch performs Bhima Swarga (Balinese Journey of the Soul 2006) with Ikue Mori* and 6-piece gamelan ensemble. This collaboration is a modern spin on the Balinese Wayang Kulit, or shadow puppet theatre. Ikue Mori has added image processing to her unique sound manipulations to create a brilliant audio/visual performance animating characters from traditional Balinese paintings. Welch’s accompanying compositions for Balinese gamelan are based on bagpipe laments. Utilizing a revolutionary new gamelan species called Semara Dana, Welch is able to take his starting material of excerpts and arrangements of pibroch, the classical music of the bagpipe and completely map it onto the pitch spectrum and idiomatic rhythmic, formal and textural practices of the Balinese gamelan.

In this, the very first installment of What the Dormouse Said, Ray Sweeten and Zach Layton perform new and old takes on sound/image generation. Using the OpenGL protocol, Layton produces dimensional wire-frame geometrics and extracts lush sound abstractions from the visual field. Approaching at 180 degrees head-on, Sweeten digitally synthesizes two sets of waveforms which are graphed to XY coordinates on a pre-pc era analog oscilloscope. Joining us this evening, the live circuit building stylings of Loud Objects.