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Morton Subotnick “Silver Apples of the Moon Revisited” Live At Recombinant Festival

Recombinant Festival 2019 resurfaces the seminal Silver Apples of the Moon Revisited by Morton Subotnick with a live A/V show.

Saturday November 16, 2019
Doors 6:30pm, Show 7:30pm

$20 Advance Tickets
All Ages

Morton Subotnick and visual artist Lillevan…offered a mesmerizing reminder of the distances that both electronic music and video art have traveled over the last half-century.
Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times

At Recombinant Festival 2019, the legendary composer's analogue performance will be augmented by visual conjurings from Lillevan, presenting the work through a new multifaceted lens.

Following "Silver Apples of the Moon Revisited," Recombinant Festival will culminate with live A/V performances by the cross-disciplinary visual and sound artist Crank Sturgeon and the multi-instrumentalist CYRNAI.

Silver Apples of the Moon is the debut album by Subotnick and a showcase for the Buchla 100 synthesizer, an early analogue synthesizer that the composer helped develop. Released by Nonesuch Records in July 1967, it was the first piece of electronic music commissioned by a higher profile american record company. Subotnick would spend up to ten hours a day working on the composition, seeking sounds that other musicians would find hard to recreate.

Upon release, Silver Apples of the Moon was an instant success and received critical acclaim. The record has since gone on to be considered a milestone in electronic music. It was the first album to feature a voltage-based synthesizer, and the album's sequenced rhythms are credited with anticipating electronic dance music. The composition is experimental in style, with Part I featuring slow, calm passages and experimentation in tone and Part II featuring pulse and sequenced rhythms, the latter an innovation for the time. Today the record is considered to be Subotnick's signature work. In a 1992 list, The Wire considered the album to be among the 100 most important albums ever, and in 2009, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Artists

Morton Subotnick Bio

Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and multi-media performance and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre. His work Silver Apples of the Moon has become a modern classic and was recently entered into the National Registry of Recorded works at the Library of Congress. In the early 60s, Subotnick taught at Mills College and with Ramon Sender, and co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center. It was also during this period that Subotnick worked with Don Buchla on what may have been the first analog synthesizer.

Lillevan

Lillevan

Lillevan is an animation, video and media artist. He is perhaps best known as founding member of the visual / music group Rechenzentrum (1997-2008). Lillevan has performed and collaborated with many artists from a wide array of genres, from opera to installation, from minimal electronic experimentalism to dance and classical music. Lillevan recontextualizes, combines and politicizes existing film images and fragments. Since the mid-nineties he has mainly investigated non-narrative facets of film which has lead to completely abstract works, but also to collage explorations of film history, to interactive works for dance groups and much more. The focus is often on the musicality of the imagery, thus defining the moving imagery as an instrument in its own right as opposed to accompanying music.

Crank Sturgeon

Crank Sturgeon

Crank Sturgeon is the multi-disciplinary visual and sound artist Matt Anderson, who currently resides in Western Massachusetts. His discography is among the most prolific of American sound artists, his performances incorporating elements of improvisational comedy, homemade electronics, and jarring junk noise. Positioned in a unique space within the American underground, his artistic practice encompasses elements of dadaist sound poetry, Viennese Actionist confrontation of art/non-art boundaries, and good old fashioned screaming noise dysfunction.

CYRNAI

Spanning over four decades of work, Bay Area musician Carolyn Fok (CYRNAI) specializes in electronic experimental music, composing and producing with synthesizers, piano, guitar, and percussion. Her adventures in sound began at the tender age of 9, recording stories into a tape recorder and experimenting with her father’s musical instruments and effects units. By the age of 16, Fok had become inspired by pioneering industrial electronic artists like Cabaret Voltaire, as well as anarcho-punk acts such as Crass. She is perhaps best known for pioneering a form of experimental music intertwining her ‘handcrafted’ sound designs, real life, and popular rhythm constructs. She composes, produces, engineers, remixes and masters all her designs with synthesizers and percussion, and uses any instrument and sounds from piano, guitar, to gongs, as tools to an art canvas. She has recently embarked on an ambitious project that involves releasing her vast archive of music via her website Memoir Of Sound.

Creative Producer

Recombinant Media Labs

The Recombinant Media Labs organization was founded to research the qualities and artistic potential of Spatial Cinema. It does so by means of Experiential Engineering; exploring processes that propagate the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic AV exhibition. RML acts as producer and presenter of hybrid artworks and performance archiving based on spatial media synthesis; intermodal works using image, light, sound and other disseminated media in three-dimensional space. The CineChamber is RML's curated, nomadic platform under the artistic trajectory of founder & Director Naut Humon plus a superhuman crew.

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