Festival of Live Electronic Music—Idiopreneurial Entrephonics II: Performances by Bonnie Jones and John Bischoff

Friday, February 17, 2023 at 8:00pm
World Music Hall

FREE!

The first evening of the Idiopreneurial Entrephonics II festival of live electronic music begins with performances by Bonnie Jones and John Bischoff.

Bonnie Jones presents samesame, a multichannel electronic music, sonic counter-narrative. Using field recordings, circuit-bent electronics, samples, and historical recordings, samesame considers how the specificities of our individual experience and perception of the world are reflected and refracted within geopolitical and historical narratives.

John Bischoff presents Bitplicity and Visibility Study. Both works employ pulse-wave analog circuits sounding in audio and sub-audio realms that are animated by performer actions—primarily the momentary shorting of conductive points in each circuit. He rounds off the concert with Calliope, a take-off on Leon Theremin’s realization of Henry Cowell’s Rhythmicon, an instrument which automatically reiterates its tones at rates corresponding to the ratios of the sounding pitch combinations. But in Calliope the instrument is designed to have internal drift in all dimensions so the tones migrate out of tune and disassemble in time as each phrase develops.

PROFILES

Bonnie Jones (b.1977) is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. She was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the ICA in London and Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the U.S., Mexico, Europe and Asia. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, Jones was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore and Providence, on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narrangansett.

John Bischoff (b. 1949, San Francisco) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as the development of computer network music. His recent performances combine hands-on analog circuitry and digital synthesis in open dialog. Sonic attributes in one domain inform music unfolding in the other. The ebb and flow of discontinuity in these systems spontaneously generates form. Bischoff was a founding member of The League of Automatic Music Composers in 1978 and The Hub in 1986. As a member of the Hub he was awarded a ZKM Giga-Hertz Prize for life-time achievement in 2018 by ZKM. He was also a recipient of an Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 1999. Recordings of his work are available on Artifact Recordings, Lovely Music, Tzadik, 23Five, Centaur, and New World Records. He was on faculty for many years in the legendary Music Department at Mills College.

For other Idiopreneurial Entrephonics II festival performances, visit the festival events page.

Images (from left): John Bischoff and Bonnie Jones (photo courtesy of Fridman Gallery)