Josep, Orm and Glen talk during rehearsal, prior to Barcelona Laptop Orchestra’s performance at Festival Mixtur 2013.
Last Friday (April 26), the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra performed at the Mixtur Festival, an event featuring musical and sonic art, research and experimentation. The venue was beautiful – inside the renewed industrial space of Fabra i Coats. The space was previously a textile factory, created following the 1903 fusion of Catalan textile producer Fabra y Portabella with the ancient J & P Coats company, with roots in Paisley, Scotland.
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Show announcement.
Last week was a busy one! After Tuesday’s Moritz/Insectotròpics event, on Thursday I had another concert with the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra – this time at l'Auditori, in Sala 2 (Oriol Martorell). There wasn’t enough advance publicity, and we ended up very (very!) far from filling the 600-seat venue, but it was a great experience nonetheless. It was fun to be behind the scenes at such a large and professionally-run venue.
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A nice new video of our January Phonos concert is available now on Youtube (thanks, Sònia!).
Since then, we had a more intimate and playful performance (February 8) at a small art space called Niu – it went down really well (maybe drinks helped – audience and/or performers ;-)). We performed three pieces, including extended and more improvisatorial versions of CliX ReduX and Six Pianos (which didn’t use pianos at all this time, instead Hammond organs, electric guitar/bass and a few other funky things).
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Barcelona Laptop Orchestra performing Cage’s ‘Variations II’, with remote contributions (and Skype presence, on an iPad on the pedestal) by developer William Brent. (Photo: Álvaro Sarasúa)
We had our Phonos concert last Thursday (January 31), and in spite of not being 100% prepared – in spite of a big final-week push – I think it was a success. Probably 30-40 people attended in the “sala polivalent” at the UPF, and they were treated to a very complex setup and six very different pieces.
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Have been working slavishly on several pieces for the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra. Among them, an optical-recognition piece that took Steve Reich’s Six Pianos as its starting point (or – more accurately – it’s ultimate goal, and we’re not quite there yet!), and a piece we call CliX ReduX, inspired by Ge Wang and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra’s original CliX.
We have our Phonos concert coming up next Thursday (January 31, 2013), at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
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This fall I joined the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra, a technically-saavy musical ensemble founded by folks from the Sonology Group at ESMUC (l’Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya) and the Music Technology Group at UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). They also allow a few of us non-affiliated “outsiders” to join, thankfully…
If you’re up for a bit of Catalan practice, you can read this great blog post/interview about us (essentially, trying to answer the question: “what is a laptop orchestra?
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