Browsing articles in "Performances"
Jan 23, 2015

Solo drums+electronics – Hotspur House – Manchester – 23/01/15

Who
Solo drums+electronics
When
Friday, January 23, 2015
8:00pm - All Ages
Where
Hotspur House (map)
2 Gloucester Street
Manchester, England M1 5QR
Dec 11, 2014

bird rat centipede – Fuel Cafe – Manchester – 11/12/14

Who
bird rat centipede
When
Thursday, December 11, 2014
8:00pm - All Ages
Where
448 Wilmslow Road
Manchester, England M20 3BW
Oct 30, 2014

me & you – Long White Cloud – London – 30/10/14

Who
me & you
When
Thursday, October 30, 2014
8:00pm - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
151 Hackney Road

London, England E2 8JL
Oct 4, 2014

Distractfold ensemble – Anthony Burgess Foundation – Manchester – 04/10/14

Who
Distractfold ensemble
When
Saturday, October 4, 2014
8:00pm - All Ages
Where
Engine House, Chorlton Mill, 3 Cambridge Street
Manchester, England M1 5BY
Sep 26, 2014

Solo drums + electronics – MediaCity – Salford – 26/09/14

Who
Solo drums + electronics
When
Friday, September 26, 2014
6:00pm - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
The Greenhouse, MediaCityUK
Salford, England M50 2EQ
Other Info
As part of this:
http://metanast.wordpress.com
Sep 18, 2014

dfscore premiere – Fuel Cafe – Manchester – 18/09/14

Who
dfscore premiere
When
Thursday, September 18, 2014
8:00pm - All Ages
Where
448 Wilmslow Road
Manchester, England M20 3BW
Sep 2, 2014

Distractfold Ensemble – Cafe Otto – London – 02/09/14

Who
Distractfold Ensemble
When
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
8:00pm - All Ages
Where
18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston
London, England E8 3DL
Other Info
http://www.kammerklang.co.uk/2-September
Aug 24, 2014

Distractfold Ensemble – Le Bruit de la Musique Festival – Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux – 24/08/14

Who
Distractfold Ensemble
When
Sunday, August 24, 2014
6:00pm - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Mairie
Le Bourg
23140 Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux
Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux, France 23140
Other Info
Programme (sous réserve)
Iannis Xenakis, violon solo
Stephan Prins (BE), violoncelle solo
Iannis Xenakis, alto solo
Dominik Karski (PL), flûte solo


Avec : Richard Craig (flûte), Linda Jankowska (violon), Emma Richards (alto) et Alice Purton (violoncelle)
Aug 23, 2014

ialreadyforgotyourpussy.com / solo improv – Le Bruit de la Musique Festival – Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux – 23/08/14

Who
ialreadyforgotyourpussy.com / solo improv
When
Saturday, August 23, 2014
5:30pm - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Mairie
Le Bourg
23140 Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux
Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux, France 23140
Other Info
Programme (sous réserve) :
Richard Craig (UK) flûte amplifiée
Mauricio Pauly (Costa Rica), violon et pédales d’effets
Richard Craig/Rodrigo Constanzo (UK, USA), flûte amplifiée, caisse claire et électroniques
Rodrigo Constanzo, improvisation
Mauricio Pauly (Costa Rica), ensemble amplifié (flûte basse, violon, violoncelle, percussion, guitare) et électroniques

Avec : Richard Craig (flûte), Linda Jankowska (violon), Alice Purton (violoncelle), Mauricio Pauly (guitare), Rodrigo Constanzo (percussion, électroniques).
Aug 22, 2014

Distractfold Ensemble – Le Bruit de la Musique Festival – Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux – 22/08/14

Who
Distractfold Ensemble
When
Friday, August 22, 2014
8:30pm - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Mairie
Le Bourg
23140 Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux
Saint-Silvain-sous-Toux, France 23140
Other Info
Programme (sous réserve) :
Martin Iddon (UK), trio à cordes
Pedro Álvarez (Chile), trio à cordes
Jonathan Harvey (UK), flûte et trio à cordes
John Croft (UK), flûte basse, alto et violoncelle
Santiago Díez-Fischer (Argentina), trio à cordes

Avec Richard Craig (flûte), Linda Jankowska (violon), Emma Richards (alto) et Alice Purton (violoncelle)
Aug 12, 2014

Distractfold Ensemble – Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt – Darmstadt – 12/08/14

Who
Distractfold Ensemble
When
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
8:00pm - All Ages
Where
Nieder-Ramstädter Str. 190
Darmstadt, Germany D-64285
May 24, 2014

Distractfold Ensemble – Video Jam – Islington Mill – Salford – 24/05/14

Who
Distractfold Ensemble - Video Jam
When
Saturday, May 24, 2014
5:00pm - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
1 James St
Salford, England M3 5HW
May 10, 2014

Distractfold Ensemble – University of Leeds – Leeds – 10/05/14

Who
Distractfold Ensemble
When
Saturday, May 10, 2014
TBD - All Ages
Where
Leeds
Leeds, England LS2 9JT
Apr 26, 2014

Silence Blossoms – John Rylands University Library – Manchester – 26/04/14

Who
Silence Blossoms
When
Saturday, April 26, 2014
2:00pm - All Ages
Where
150 Deansgate
Manchester, England M3 3EH
Apr 8, 2014

In progress

The last few months have been both slow and busy at the same time. In that time I’ve been slowly working on multiple pieces/projects simultaneously. I figured it might be interesting to make a blog post about things in progress.

After finishing a piece for good friend Linda Jankowska and the end of last year I started working on two other pieces. The first one being a piece for skipping CD player and drumset. The working title is “Rhythm Wish”, but I’m not fully settled in on that. It looks/sounds something like this:

The piece, compositionally, will fall somewhere between two approaches I’ve been working on recently. First the kind of open/memory/improv structure of pieces like the .com pieces, and to a lesser extent ‘an amplifier‘, and the game/challenge/etude modes of interaction found in the ‘Battle Pieces‘ from a duo (strikethrough me & you) with another good friend Sam Andreae.

The piece will be constructed in a way that before the performance the performer (either myself or David Meier) has to improvised some material, given certain prompts. Those materials will then be burned onto a CD player (with the un-muted modification ala Nic Collins CD Hacking). The CD player will sit on the snare drum (as in the demo video I made above), which will cause the CD to skip around and act unpredictably. That glitchiness (along with the order of the tracks on the CD) will form the structure of the piece at a larger level. The more local interactions will be defined by challenge/interactions that the performer will have to engage with, along with the recorded version of themselves.

There will also be some real-time ‘nudging’ of the CD player via a footswitch that I hacked together from an old remote control for the CD player.

cd player

As evident in the video, the sound of the CD player blurs with the sound of the acoustic drumset, which is very much intentional. Some of the seedling ideas for the piece were of a sort of temporal duality. With a protagonist/antagonist fighting it out musically, one being live and one being recorded. I like the poetics of it being the same person/instrument with the conflict coming only via the displacement in time (then vs now, past vs present). I took these ideas and played around with a ‘3-act play’ structure, which is still somewhat present in the larger structural framework, but is less important than it originally was.

I will also play with illusion in terms of what is real and what is recorded. This kind of interaction was a mainstay in the performances of the performance art duo I have with Angela Guyton, Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern. During the era that relied on live painting + live sampling, the idea of hearing the sound of the lines being put down, then not hearing them (or hearing a different recording) when seeing it happen again proved to be very powerful. This was very much inspired by the ‘Club Silencio‘ scene from Mulholland Drive. (more on Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern below)

In addition to the ‘Rhythm Wish’ I am also working on a piece for tuning forks and computer hard drive. It looks/sounds something like this:

The piece will be for four performers all sitting around a table, with the computer hard drive in the middle. The piece is written for a new ensemble I’m performing in called bird rat centipede and will be called ‘the keys to everything that has ever existed’.

The main compositional material of the piece will be ‘privacy’. In the sense of ‘hitting the tuning fork on the table and pressing it to the table’ being a ‘public’ sound, and ‘hitting the tuning fork on your knee and holding it near your ear’ being a ‘private’ sound. I very much like the idea of multiple perspectives on the same piece, particularly since there is no ‘real’ perspective. Each performer hears a, literally, different version of the piece, and same goes for the audience and/or recording.

The computer hard drive is modified with an ‘analog HD’ by Gijs, which is essentially 3 oscillators and an amplifier driving the voice coil in the hard drive (so it acts like a speaker).

I’ve also started working on my dfscore system, which is a networked laptop score displaying software system I’ve been working on for a while (which has taken a bit of a back burner position for a bit). I used a very stripped down version of it in ialreadyforgotyourpussy.com with Richard Craig, which looks/sounds like this:

I had pitched the idea to the Manchester Jazz Festival last year, and although it was not accepted, I did continue talks with them. The project is now moving forward again and is, quite unusually for me, being financially supported by Jazz North. I’ll have more details on this soon, but it is very exciting to be working on the system again.

It will eventually be a software system that you can quickly install on any number of laptops which are connected up via ethernet cables (for minimal latency). This will allow for a more dynamic/adaptive type of composition which would work very well with the kind of music I’ve been writing as of late. I will also be openly sharing all of the code and try to make it as user friendly as possible.

I’ve also finished putting the finishing touches on this MIDI to relay system built for me by Circitfied (Dan Wilson). I commissioned Dan to build a box that would take MIDI messages and turn on/off relays which I would connect to a bunch of ciat-lonbarde instruments. The box on it’s own is pretty cool/exciting (not to mention great looking!) but it will be much more so once I pair it with some crafty programming.

I plan on building several modules to drive it, including an attack detection to random re-patching, and a much more challenging/exciting analysis-based system where I can analyze the audio descriptors (using Alex Harker‘s externals for Max) of each combination made by the box, then by analyzing incoming audio, create a resynthesis of that audio using repatching/reconfiguration! Very similar to the synthesis used in my CCCombine Max patch, but instead of using a bank of samples, it would use hardware synthesis/sounds.

grassibox

Lastly (but not leastly) is a continued development with the next phase of Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern. We’ve moved away from an amplified canvas and towards a DMX lights based setup. That looks something like this (though not directly focused on Angie):

The trajectory of the work has been moving further and further away from an ‘art object’ in the last few years, so this is the final ‘jump’ away from physical stuff. Most of it is still based around an image, but now it’s smeared in time/space by using flashing lights as the only visual component. The sonic component is still being worked on, though it’s mainly been sampled voice/breathing.

ABOUT

Rodrigo Constanzo
-makes music and art
-lives in Porto/Manchester
-is a crazy person

Read my PhD Thesis!

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Composition, Performance,
and Making Things,
sitting in a tree :
Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me

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