focus: default #4 – 30.04.2023 with Eric Frye, Jung An Tagen, Jung/Frye (pt. 2)
Our next event is happening upcoming Sunday the 30th of April with performances by Jung An Tagen, Eric Frye, Jung/Frye, Nozomu Matsumoto, Marija Rasa (a.k.a. emer) and busf.
Our upcoming event is getting closer and therefore we would like to share with you a selection of works made by the artists set to perform. This focus newsletter, the second of the two centered around our fourth installment, highlights works by Eric Frye and Jung An Tagen, who are both playing a solo set as well as bringing a live adaption of their collaborative avant-acid project.
default#4 also includes a dinner session, carefully put together by Trang Hà & Jelle van den Brink, which requires a separate reservation (to be made here). The dinner will be accompanied by a listening dj set from Yunque.
Eric Frye
Eric Frye is an American composer and artist. He is known for his solo performance and installation work – an exploration of the dissociative and psychoactive functions of sound and image. In the last decade, he premiered audio-visual performances in LA, Vancouver, Tokyo, and New York City at ISSUE Project Room, alongside two central figures of experimental music, Curtis Roads and Beatriz Ferreyra (Ina GRM).
Intertwining surreal narratives with a multidisciplinary approach to sound, Frye assembles a shapeshifting auditory scene that explores the malfunction of perception and how it relates to identity, self-hood, and blurring the senses. His vast discography includes releases on labels such as Anòmia, ETAT, Salon, Cejero and Futura Resistenza.
His work has been shown at Hangar Art Centre, Barcelona; Audio Visual Arts, New York City; Rochester Art Center, Minnesota; Variform Gallery, Oregon among others. He has performed extensively in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia and is a 2022 Jerome Foundation Fellow.
His work at times refers to the rich history of electronic sound experimentations and is informed by (mis)using technological applications, both the ones intended for music making as the ones surveilling and interfering with our everyday lives. His audio works, however, are personal and playful and emerge as an artistic expression of novelty.
some of our favorite works by Eric include:
Gremlin Net 2005
(self-released, 2021)
Often working with obscured voices, Frye’s computer music oscillates between abstraction and beauty. This also shows on ‘Gremlin Net 2005’, a collection of various tracks from 2020-2021, originally produced for The Wire Magazine, Kraak Magazine & Hold Music. Closing track ‘Lips Rublev’ on the other hand was part of a multi-channel audio and video for a large-scale fixed installation.
Ambisonic audio, processed voice, 3-channel video.
Voice processed using Librosa Speech Toolkit in Python.
Dedicated to Anna Halprin July 13, 1920 – May 24, 2021.
The emptiness in these tracks- their minimal, or rather focussed qualities- makes this record, preceded by ten years of adventurous Bandcamp releases, a good example of how intriguing, unpredictable and eerie Frye’s work can be.
Grace
Lucy Liyou & Eric Frye (Futura Resistenza, 2022)
Over the years, Frye has gathered a collection of remarkable collaborative records and split releases with fellow contemporary sound-artists like Jeff Witscher, Jung An Tagen (see below) & most recently pent. On ‘Grace’, a collaboration with Lucy Liyou that was released last year via the Brussels-Rotterdam based record label Futura Resistenza, the combined and reinforced qualities of both artists’ solo practices turned into a moving interwoven result. Tristan Bath described their joint effort in the record’s liner notes as follows:
It takes time to heal properly. It takes reflection too. Sometimes it’s only by rearranging and reformulating the world—both inside and around—out of shape, so that everything can fall into place and drop into focus. Lucy Liyou and Eric Frye have both engaged closely with collage and philosophical methods on previous works, approaching music as both a practice and a playground. Coming together in a stream of emailed ideas, edits, and re-edits, Grace is a distillation of both artists’ work to tackle trauma, taking as much from Frye’s ‘heuristic junk’ and algorithmic composition as from Liyou’s stream-of-consciousness ambient diaries and digital missives. (…)
Grace is the beautiful result of a covalent bond forged between Frye and Liyou, with the boundary lines blurred and fingerprints overlapping throughout the piece’s duration. The duo swapped files and ideas throughout 2020 and 2021, continuously editing and resculpting a wide range of stem audio files and source sounds into the four-part piece. (…) This piece is a substantial realization of both artists’ worlds, and sees their approaches coming together to create something complementary and fresh, that neither could have made alone. Grace is a piece about tackling life’s messy and winding path, inspired by anits erratic mix of fear and love.
Satisfaction, Guilt Mode, Love Pilled
(3 self-released singles, 2022-2023)
Last year, Eric Frye released a handful of singles that shows his odd yet moving take on pop-single culture, while keeping high his music’s blurry, uncanny characteristics. Listen to Satisfaction, Guilt Mode and Love Pilled, below.
Other releases include Parpue / (2020), Diffusion Soliloquies (2020), Obfuscation Morphologies (2020), The Little Devil Built it With Cubes (Six Pieces for Stochastic Piano) (2018), On Small Differences in Sensation (2016), Automatic Junk Heuristic (2020), (Mesc. 1) (2019) and GlassTop Redux (2022).
Frye also organizes events in Minneapolis in order to bring international artists and musicians to the Midwest. The experimental event series includes performances, installations, conversations, readings, and screenings by important figures in the field of sound art.
Jung An Tagen
Viennese composer Jung An Tagen invites us to reflect on the diffuse but persistent term “experimental” not as a deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy, but as the design and implementation of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results; “electronic” as an annulment of the previous instrumental tradition, and as a simultaneous reversion towards aesthetic openness; as the fragmentation of a theoretical or mythical musical syntax by obsessive repetition, sequential motivic mutations, aleatoric arrays, pareidolic illusions and moiré effects; “electronic” as the ultimate split, dehumanization, mechanic strangeness.
Backed up by two decades of discographic activity under diverse pseudonyms and multiple collaborations on labels such as Editions Mego, Diagonal and Orange Milk Records, Stefan Juster tests strategies of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena that speak equally to the body and the mind. The grammar of this music is confounding, the language itself immediate, oscillating between modern composition and ritualistic techno, immersion and repulsion. It’s addictive music. Unpredictable music in constant explosion.
a selection of highlighted works includes:
Emergence Collapse (2021)
adapted from Emergent Properties (ETAT, 2020)
CAUTION: STROBE WARNING
Jung An Tagen is collaborating with filmmaker Rainer Kohlberger on audio-visual performances that conquer the observer’s perceptual apparatus. Their collaborative audiovisual chaos in ‘Emergence Collapse’ is an adaptation of their AV show, which was developed from Jung’s album ‘Emergent Properties’.
Functioning as an extended exploration of the neuroscientific effects of synthetic sounds, the album’s compositions are equal parts dizzying and ecstatic, oscillating between satisfying and frightening, concrete and abstract, as Shilla Strelka describes in the album’s liner notes, “an overstimulated exploration of perceptive processes.” It’s an effect that is stretched to breaking point with Rainer Kohlberger’s visual accompaniment (…) It’s a perfect visual representation of being confronted with Jung An Tagen’s productions: impossible to follow, completely overwhelming and resolutely uncanny.1
‘Emergent Properties’ marked the first release on Jung’s netlabel ETAT.xyz. Offering music in the form of free-download zip folders and setting aside any hint of expressionist gestures, one is left with form and abstract sound, emotional alienation: “dissociative, psychoacoustic, computer music”.
Presentism Cam Deas & Jung An Tagen
(Diagonal Records, 2021)
On the rhythmically complex and urgent ‘Presentism’, Cam Deas & Jung An Tagen worked with, around, and against extreme fixation of loops and the grid. ‘Presentism’ arose from their mutual interest in time theories.
Within the philosophies of time, three oppositional schools compete: Eternalism describes the phenomenon of time like a strip of film - the past and the future do exist, are real, but the present is merely a human concept. The growing block theory, maybe the most intuitive of the three, states that the present continually creates the past, but the future is unwritten. Presentism on the other hand argues that the only thing irrefutable is the present and that the past and the future are both unreal. By applying these three concepts to music, we may end up with a number of strategies to rethink what we consider as given.
It’s a hypnotic record that is based on one temporal randomized pulse, denying our ability to foresee the next kick and obscuring the possibility to form loops.
Handshake (y)
(PARKEN, 2020)
Handshake (x)
(Klangfestival, 2020)
Handshake (y) (2020) by Jung An Tagen an album in a series of 2 containing 13 tracks.
01) Common return (0.3:800)
02) Set ready (0.0:850)
03) Set to line (0.1:100)
04) Element timing (0.1:500)
05) T backward (0.1:050)
06) R backward (0.2:000)
07) Backward ready (0.2:850)
08) Calling indicator (0.3:700)
09) Received present (0.0:950)
10) Character timing (0.1:700)
11) Ground (0.1:650)
12) Loopback (0.1:000)
13) Local loopback (0.1:200)
Other releases include Das Fest Der Reichen (2016), Agent Im Objekt (2018), Proxy States (2019) and Aeussere (2020).
Jung is also active as a filmmaker. His most recent work, ‘FROM PAST TO FUTURE, PASSING US LIKE GHOSTS’ (2023), stands squarely in the tradition of abstract conceptual experimental film. The film features music by Eric Frye.
Jung / Frye
At default#4, Jung An Tangen and Eric Frye will bring a live adaptation of their conceptual avant-acid workouts, next to their solo performances. Both ‘Pulsar Acid’ (2020) as ‘Phantom Acid' (2022) were released via Superpang and followed up their earlier collaborative record, Variations for Computer Ashtray (2020).
Phantom Acid
(Superpang, 2022)
On ‘Phantom Acid’, they work with rigid parameters, every track of the twenty-four on this album is precisely ninety seconds in length, where they melt the pulsing aesthetics of acid music with what we by now could call a tradition of unwavering conceptual computer music of the 21st century.
The ideas and Machine-generated voices behind ‘Phantom Acid’ make reference to the repetitious auditory illusion of Diana Deutsch’s experiments, where she would play looped recordings of single words to study participants, offsetting the left and right speaker channels. Eventually, the subjects would hear “phantom words” in the din: new words and made-up words. ‘We therefore often mishear words and phrases, and are subject to compelling illusions’. The same effect is embedded in their latest effort, both the work and title.
Pulsar Acid
(Superpang, 2020)
‘Pulsar Acid’ preceded ‘Phantom Acid’, and created engaging, playful three-minute sketches around acid’s squelching sounds. Instead of predominant 303 loops, these hi-end digital synthesis wranglings are made with Marcin Pietruszewski’s ‘The New Pulsar Generator’. The end result is avant-garde and static, yet playful and by moments even strangely sensual.23
*Playback on stereo speakers is recommended, otherwise, single stems might not be audible*
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https://www.factmag.com/2021/07/14/rainer-kohlberger-jung-an-tagen-emergence-collapse/
https://boomkat.com/products/phantom-acid
https://boomkat.com/products/pulsar-acid