IMA_experiments 7

Kassel Jaeger is the alter ego of French composer Francois Bonnet and is member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris. His music oscillates between concrete experimentalism, ambient noise and electro-acoustic improvisation. In addition to LPs and CDs released on the Senufo Editions and Unfahthonless labels, his most recent album »Toxic Cosmopolitanism«, the art work for which was designed by Stephen O'Malley von Sunn O))), appeared on Editions Mego. He is currently working on musical collaborations with Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu and Akira Rabelais. He operates a small antisolar label and publishes a series of infinite loop cassettes in small editions.

Floris Vanhoof presents his »Music for Moving Lamps«: brainwaves or minimal brain currents are measured, filtered and amplified on his head at five points, before being transferred, cable-free, to various parameters of the modular musical instrument. Daily exercise has meanwhile allowed Vanhoof to control his focus level, which alters both music and light, whereby external influences cannot be entirely edited out.

In his »Music for Moving Lamps«, Floris Vanhoof is less interested in the scientific aspect of an experimental arrangement than in seeking poetic meaning: Much like the experience at the theater when the lights go out while the stage is adapted, we awake each day to a new situation. Vanhoof seeks to accelerate this process by way of mobile, flickering lamps. Here, light becomes a metaphor for something new − a day, a beginning, a situation a place, a picture. Darkness is the night during which a day is processed in dreams; much like the after-image which remains once the original picture has already been extinguished − artistically accelerated by electronic processes of the modular music system which, in turn, is put into motion by processes in Vanhoof’s brain.

In »Brainwave music for Richard Maxfield«, Floris Vanhoof peers directly into the public’s eye. The sound color also alters here by way of the focus level. Metaphorically, the piece is based on a farfetched idea of North American composer Richard Maxfield which, similarly, has nothing to do with the scientific practice of detecting alpha waves.

Following the release of the LP »Cycles of Confusion« on the Belgian label Kraak, a Split LP was released with Keith Fullerton Whitman, in 2013. Vanhoof upgraded his Albatross Cybernetics Studio so as to process sounds for new recordings and performances. Floris Vanhoof lives in Antwerp, Belgium.