- Cory Brodack
Karst
(10 mins) (17) - Kerry Hagan
tibone
(10 mins) (8) - Varun Kishore
Fracture
(10 mins) (2) - Wilfrido Terrazas
My Shadow Leads the Way
(10 mins) (2) - Adam James Wilson
The Fourth Man
(7 mins) (2)
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Cory Brodack
Karst
guided improvisation for horn and live electronics
Karst is a type of landscape that forms from the erosion of rocks like limestone. This forms features like sinkholes, caves, springs, and streams that go nowhere. Some of Missouri’s most beautiful landscapes and fascinating ecological areas are due to these formations. In this work, live processing is used on the horn to represent the extremely slow and deliberate formation of these features. This starts with the Mississippian Sea, a warm, shallow sea that covered much of the midwestern and western United States during the Paleozoic Era. The shells and skeletons of the marine organisms were then compacted down into limestone, which was eventually dissolved by acidic waters, forming these beautiful landscapes.
Cory Brodack (b.1997) is a composer and sound engineer from Saint Louis, Missouri. He has been awarded the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize as well as honored by East Carolina University’s New Music Initiative, the National Federation of Music Clubs, the Society of Composers, and Lowell Chamber Orchestra. Dr. Brodack has worked with performers and ensembles including JACK Quartet, Hub New Music, Unheard-of//Ensemble, icarus Quartet, Hypercube, and Rhythm Method String Quartet. He has also received commissions from artists and groups such as Andrew Pelletier, Bowling Green State University, Saint Louis Wind Symphony, the Metropolitan Orchestra of St. Louis, and the Steven Gerber Trust.
His music has been featured at concerts and festivals including the SCI National Conference, Hot Air Music Festival, Bowling Green New Music Festival, UNG’s Research on Contemporary Composition Conference, and New Music on the Bayou. He received his PhD in Composition from the Eastman School of Music, his MM in Composition from Bowling Green State University, and his Bachelor of Music from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Missouri.
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Kerry Hagan
tibone
Learning from a project by student Owen Cushing, I’ve been exploring 1-bit synthesis for sound
design. This new piece commits to the restrictions of 1-bit synthesis to make a true 1-bit piece –
actually, one bit per speaker – with no post-processing or amplitude control.
Kerry is a composer and researcher working in both acoustic and computer media. She develops real-time methods for spatialization and stochastic algorithms for musical practice. Her work endeavours to achieve aesthetic and philosophical aims while taking inspiration from mathematical and natural processes. In this way, each work combines art with science and technology from various domains. Her works have been performed in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. In 2010, Kerry led a group of practitioners to form the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association, where she served as President until 2015. Kerry was a Lecturer at the University of Limerick in the Digital Media and Arts Research Centre (2007-2023), where she founded the Spatialization and Auditory Display Environment (SpADE). Currently, she is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and President of the International Computer Music Association.
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Varun Kishore
Fracture
electric guitar, ebow, effects
Fracture began life as an exploratory improvisation drawing on the sonic language of drone metal and electronic music, seeking to discover and inhabit points of collision, collusion, and disintegration within the system that produced it—electric guitar, Ebow, and effect pedals. In its current form, these interstitial interactions enable the performer to build on and navigate from one specific system-state to the next. The title also evokes facture, an attribute referring to the manner of making and execution of an artwork (especially painting—brushwork/materials/texture, etc), which provides another useful frame for conceptualizing the trajectories and textures present in the piece.
Varun Kishore is a guitarist and composer from Kolkata, India. His work explores interdisciplinary approaches to music technology, literature, and the audiovisual, with a focus on designing frameworks for composition and improvisation to investigate what he sees as the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of creative practice. Varun’s recent work has been performed by LINÜ, Tokyo Gen’on Project, Popebama, and Hypercube, and has been presented at SEAMUS, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Performing Media Festival, Ignite The Arts Festival, and Arts Electronica. His current areas of interest include drone and experimental electronic music, maximalism, metal studies, digital instrument and interface design, alternative notation, and video. Varun is a graduate of the University of West London (BMus Popular Music Performance, 2012) and Goldsmiths, University of London (MMus Creative Practice, 2019). He is currently a PhD candidate in the Composition & Computer Technologies program at the University of Virginia.
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Wilfrido Terrazas
My Shadow Leads the Way
Flutes, small percussion, spoken voice, and fixed media
My Shadow Leads the Way was published as an album by Transvection Records in 2022. From then on, I have occasionally selected a few of the tracks to perform alongside them in live versions, using the original tracks as fixed media electronics, as a sort of “concert suite” derived from the album. This will be the US premiere of such version.
Credits:
Wilfrido Terrazas: compositions, flutes, percussion, spoken voice
Original poems in Spanish by Ricardo Cázares, from his book Latitud
English translations by Joe Imwalle
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Andrew Munsey at Studio A, Warren Lecture Hall, UC San Diego, February-April 2022
Original album produced by Wilfrido Terrazas
Wilfrido Terrazas (Willy/he/él) is a flutist, improviser, composer, and educator based in San Diego, originally from Ensenada, Mexico. His work explores the edges of notation, improvisation, and collective creativity. He has premiered over 400 works, composed more than 80, and recorded 60+ albums released internationally. Wilfrido has appeared at leading festivals and venues across 22 countries, including Lincoln Center and MATA (NYC), Frequency (Chicago), High Zero (Baltimore), Matik Matik (Bogotá), Creative Fest (Lisbon), ¡Escucha! (Madrid), Festival Cervantino (Guanajuato), Splendor (Amsterdam), Flagey (Brussels), Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Teatro Nacional Cervantes (Buenos Aires), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), St. Ruprechtskirche (Vienna), and REDCAT (LA). He is a core member of Generación Espontánea and Liminar, two of Mexico City’s leading experimental music collectives, and co–organizes the Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada. He has also carried out residencies at Omi International Arts Center (NY), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture (Greece). Since 2017, he has been a professor of music at the University of California San Diego.
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Adam Wilson
Adam James Wilson
The Fourth Man
for fretless electric guitar and real-time electronics
“The Fourth Man” is the latest in a series of pieces, spanning fifteen years of iteration, for fretless guitar and “automatic improvisation” software. Prior works in the series have been performed in Europe, East Asia, and throughout the United States — many at the New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit between 2016 and 2025. “The Fourth Man” presents as a microtonal jazz fusion quartet — live guitar with virtual bass, drums, and harmony instruments. The drum section is algorithmically pre-generated from a short kernel of composed material, while harmonies are generated in real time. Accompaniment develops, in part, from a factor oracle representation of the improvising guitarist’s output; a simple probability model is used to traverse the automaton to produce idiomatic recombinations of material. This process is augmented by a novel contour-based pattern matching algorithm that recognizes and exploits repeated motives in the soloist’s output. The software instruments deployed in “The Fourth Man” can be thought of as virtual hyperinstruments; they largely mimic the capabilities of human performers, but are extended to include some subtle impossibilities.
Adam James Wilson is a composer, guitarist, and software developer who programs computers to improvise with human musicians. His music incorporates algorithmic music composition and real-time generative techniques. Wilson performs with his software experiments on the fretless electric guitar, an instrument that caters to his penchant for microtonality. He has performed/presented his work in Tokyo, New York, Paris, Montreal, San Diego, Brussels, Washington D.C., Boston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Belfast, Baton Rouge, Palo Alto, and elsewhere. Wilson co-founded and serves as director of the New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit, an annual concert series featuring music by artists focused on the integration of music improvisation and real-time interactive computer systems. He is currently Associate Professor and Director of Emerging Media Technology, specializing in Computer Music, at New York City College of Technology (CUNY City Tech).
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