kaffe

British composer and improvisor Kaffe Matthews finally bids farewell to the violin with this set of live processing work, drawn from a series of European perfornances. Matthews’ obsessively intricate tinkering with violin squeals and long droning notes has been replaced with a new concern for low-level urban ambience – distant looping radio waves, audio interference, eerie nocturnal pulsing – and at points it bears close relation to Robin Rimbaudís city soundings.

Also included here is the final violin performance from Italy in 1999, but it’s the newer stuff that’s the most interesting, with the minimally rippling ‘pool in the basement’ pointing the way to some startling new areas.

David Keenan, The Wire, April 2001

In the mid-60s John Cage placed microphones in and around the concert hall, deploying them in the formation of a graphic score from a previous piece, to create the “environmental collage” Variations IV. In so doing he opened up the world for both Robin Rimbaud and Kaffe Matthews. But whereas his concern was with synchronicity and the “spatial aggregates” of recognisable sounds, the ensuing years have given rise to technology that enables Kaffe Matthews to instantaneously process her sounds sampled in and around the venue rendering them unrecognisable. And whereas his approach was compositional she uses a laptop to improvise with her material. Creating her music live gives it a sense of a deadline, she has only a certain amount of time to make this work – a sense that informs all improvised pieces – but the pace is unhurried and she deploys her resources sparingly, looping and unfolding sounds with a gentle sensuality that belies the grittiness of her glitch-laden textures.

Over the years the violin has moved from its role as central sound source to become redundant. Thus the central piece ‘The Last Of The Violins’ (1999) is bookended by more recent work in which she is free to concentrate on moulding her material with greater focus and integrity to produce another beautiful album.

Gus Garside

ELECTRIC LADYLAND BY BEAN WITH GINO ROBAIR, Electronic Musician, Apr 1, 2001

Artists who customize or build instruments to realize their singular artistic visions often make the most exciting music. Three female performers who take that route – Krystyna Bobrowski, Miya Masaoka, and Kaffe Matthews – make groundbreaking music that transcends gender and conventional musical expectations. Composer and instrument builder Bobrowski integrates a curious collection of organic materials with motors and contact mics for extraordinary performance-based installations. Composer and performer Masaoka blends computer-enhanced instruments, gestural language, and assorted living creatures to express a musicality that melds futuristic and ancient sensibilities. Sampling wizard Matthews works with found sounds in an immersive improvisational performance environment.
Each daring performer has a different approach to producing music that is as experiential as it is impossible to reproduce. They rely on the element of surprise, welcome the unexpected, embrace the unknown, and explore the relationship among sound, self, and the audience.

KRYSTYNA BOBROWSKI
Years of liberal-arts studies formed a solid foundation for Krystyna Bobrowski’s keen interest in physics and natural phenomena. Much of Bobrowski’s work exploits the sounds that result from demonstrating basic scientific principles in unusual ways. Mundane actions and objects are also important elements in her pieces.

Many of Bobrowski’s installations employ simple mechanical devices in novel ways, often using a computer for control or data processing. She especially enjoys working with motors and contact microphones in conjunction with natural materials. As if to prove the point, Bobrowski’s work space is strewn with everything from electronic parts to large pieces of drying bull kelp.

ROCK ON
Bobrowski came up with the idea for the piece Rock On during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. “Rock On is a collection of six amplified and prepared rocking chairs,” Bobrowski says. “The preparations include motion switches and electronics. The chairs rock on amplified surfaces, including newspaper, a car hood, nuts and bolts, and pools of water.”

When she borrowed rockers for the piece, Bobrowski found that owners had stories to tell about their chairs. Those tales inspired her to create themes for each rocker. “Each chair includes a speaker that plays prerecorded material relating to the theme of the chair,” she says.

The first chair features recordings of Bobrowski’s grandmother reminiscing about the artist as a young child. In addition to recordings of her grandmother’s voice, the chair was amplified by contact mics. Bobrowski created a program in the Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL) to interpret the data initiated by the rocking motion. She used an Anatek Pocket Pedal to translate the voltages into MIDI data.

“As a person rocks back and forth in the chair, a mercury switch senses its position,” Bobrowski says. “The switch data is translated into a MIDI message, which is fed into the HMSL program on the Mac. That, in turn, triggers samples of my grandmother speaking while simultaneously fading the speaker volume up and down. There’s a nice interaction between the voice and the chair. My grandmother has a very high voice with a thick accent, which blended really well with the squeaks of the chairs.”
The “grandmother chair” is the most technically complex rocker of the group. “The other chairs are more simple in that the rocking motion merely raised and lowered the volume of a long loop as it played,” Bobrowski says. “The loops have an inherent rhythm to them. When the rhythm of the rockers was superimposed as volume changes over the loops, interesting moiré patterns resulted.”

She dedicated a different chair to her father. That chair rocks on amplified nuts and bolts while playing recordings of Bobrowski’s father singing lullabies over the phone. Still another, the “news chair,” plays sound bites from a talk-radio station while rocking on amplified newspaper. Not surprisingly, Bobrowski dedicated the chair to friends who obsessively listen to the news.

The “rap chair” rocks on an amplified car hood, which triggers rap beats as it creaks and thuds on the hood’s uneven surface. Bobrowski immersed another rocker in a pool of amplified water, accompanied by an ocean soundtrack.

The smallest chair is a child’s rocker, which sits on a speaker. Rocking the chair triggers loud squeaks that are pitch-shifted down until they sound like violins and cellos. “Although it was the smallest chair in the room, it was the loudest,” Bobrowski says. “But you couldn’t sit in it. You had to push it with your hand.”

Bobrowski put on a performance version of Rock On called Rock Her at the Alternative Museum in New York City. For that incarnation, she choreographed a quartet of performers in prepared rocking chairs.

RIGHT AS RAIN
Bobrowski feeds on the challenge of creating site-specific pieces, and she enjoys working in large sonorous spaces. The Chapel of the Chimes – a beautiful columbarium in Oakland, California, designed by architect Julia Morgan – is one such environment.

For Playing Rain, Bobrowski uses a dozen brass flower vases that are scattered throughout the columbarium. As visitors pour water through the vases, the liquid drips onto plates with piezo triggers strategically placed underneath to sense the droplets. The piezos are connected to a Roland PM16 pad-to-MIDI interface that sends input data to a Mac for triggering samples of gamelan instruments. “The first time I heard gamelan music, it reminded me of rain,” Bobrowski says. “I used gamelan samples in this piece because of their chimelike quality, which seemed to fit the theme of the performance environment.

“The water droplets trigger samples with randomized pitches in a Javanese tuning system,” Bobrowski says. “However, the rhythm of the samples is in sync with the drips. This gives control over the density of the sound to the visitors of the exhibit.”

Bobrowski is also interested in the contrast between the way musicians and computers perform similar musical tasks. The performance version of Playing Rain pits performers against a computer as both attempt to synchronize with the drips.

The musicians play melodic gamelan instruments known as slentem, gender, and saron, in 5- and 7-note tunings called slendro and pelog, respectively. Bobrowski uses a Peavey DPM SP sampler as the computer’s sound source. Because the gamelan instruments’ bars are highly resonant, players must dampen a ringing note before striking a new one. The combined striking and damping action limits the speed at which performers can play wide intervallic leaps. At high speeds, the musicians tend to play in limited areas on their instruments and cannot hit octaves or achieve as wide a range of notes as easily as the computer can.

“The piece begins with the instrumentalists trying to sync with the drips,” Bobrowski says. “As the piece progresses, the dripping frequency increases, and it gets too difficult for the musicians to keep up. The computer then attempts the same process, which results in a contrast in errors between the human performers and the computer. Both make mistakes but in different ways. For example, the computer often interprets a quick succession of drips as one drop. Also, the sounds are sometimes triggered by the computer so quickly that you end up with a series of drones – especially when the piece is played in a reverberant space.”

STRINGS AND THINGS
For her String Quartet:Music Box, Bobrowski created a prepared string quartet by playing a cello, viola, violin, and quarter-size violin with flexible materials attached to the shafts of small DC motors. The materials include leaves, grass, rubber bands, flexible plastic strips, and tape (see Fig. 1). Bobrowski connected a Variac variable autotransformer to the system to control the motors’ speeds. “There are several motors per instrument,” Bobrowski says. “By changing the voltage going to the motors with the Variac, participants can change the tempo of the piece.”

In a variation on the instruments-played-with-motors theme, Bobrowski wrote a score in revolutions per minute for her piece 0002?2000 RPMs. In that piece, Bobrowski gives performers handheld motors with wooden dowels attached to the spinning shafts. Little flags of tape attached to the ends of the spinning dowels are used to play the instruments. Although performers control their own motors, the composer controls one section of the piece with a Variac. The instruments – acoustic and electric guitars, cello, and violin – survived the lashings unscathed.

PLUMES AND FOLIAGE
As part of an installation called Leaf Litter, Bobrowski crafted “leaf speakers” by gluing piezos to a collection of leaves and using them as playback transducers. The sounds of people walking through leaves and children playing in leaves are played through the speakers, creating self-referential filters.

“When you play sounds through normal loudspeakers, you’re usually looking for the purest representation of the original sound,” Bobrowski says. “I wanted to take environmental sounds – in this case, sounds involving leaves – and see what happens if you play them through the material itself. I was interested in hearing the resonances and filtering effects that would result from playing leaf sounds through leaves.”

LIQUID AUDIO
Bobrowski’s most recent work, Oceans in a Box, involves an acoustic instrument she devised called the Gliss Glass (see Fig. 2). Gliss is short for glissando and refers to the instrument’s ability to create six simultaneous glissandi. The instrument uses six custom glass containers connected by plastic tubing and valves to a large water container. Each glass is open at the top, and the valves control water flow to each glass through a hole in the bottom.
Musicians can play the instruments in several ways, including rubbing a wet finger around the glass’s rim, tapping and striking the glass, and splashing the water (see Fig. 3). Each player has an effect on the other glasses, depending on the glass’s height and valve position.

“The Gliss Glass is based on a simple property in physics where a body of water tries to return to equilibrium due to atmospheric pressure,” Bobrowski says. “By raising or lowering the glasses, the performers disrupt the equilibrium in the entire system. As the glasses are played, the audience hears rising and falling glissandi as water enters or leaves the glasses, respectively. The Gliss Glass gives you the sonic impression of this physical phenomenon.

“When I built the instrument, I was thinking of closed systems, such as our ecosystem or the body’s circulatory system,” she says. “There are a lot of analogies you can draw from this instrument based on hydraulic principles.”

Bobrowski created Oceans in a Box for six female vocalists and the Gliss Glass. Each vocalist plays one glass, usually one that best matches her vocal range. The piece is a structured improvisation using graphic notation that indicates valve position (see Fig. 4), glass height, glass types, and vocal sounds to be used. In the score water flow is the basic time structure rather than metronome markings. The musical result is an exquisite blend of slippery harmonics and vocal and glass textures.

MIYA MASAOKA
Miya Masaoka is a composer and improviser with training in both Japanese court music and contemporary music. She has collaborated with an impressive roster of musicians, including Pharaoh Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Dr. L. Subramaniam, George Lewis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Fred Frith, Steve Coleman, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

The main motivating factors behind Masaoka’s work are sound exploration and its relationship to the audience. However, her desire to expand the traditional playing techniques of the koto, a zitherlike Japanese instrument, fueled the development of her electroacoustic invention, the Laser Koto (see Fig. 5).

“The Laser Koto combines the traditional Japanese koto, in this case a 21-stringed instrument, with a computer interface and controllers,” Masaoka says. “I use several different controllers – pedals, sensors, and lasers – and have a library of more than 450 samples of koto-related sounds. The challenge is to have immediate access to this tremendous number of samples in a musical way during a performance.”

EXTENDED BODY LANGUAGE
As an artist-in-residence at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in the early ’90s, Masaoka worked with Tom DeMeyer to develop a computer interface for her instrument. Their collaboration began with a system that included ultrasound rings, an ultrasound receiver, pickups, pedals, and switches. “The rings are worn on one finger on each hand, and each ring has three sensors for capturing gestures in two-dimensional space,” Masaoka says. “This information is fed to samplers and sound modules through STEIM’s SensorLab voltage-to-MIDI converter.” (For more information about the SensorLab, see “The Outer Limits” in the August 2000 issue of EM.)

Masaoka began using this performance setup to trigger sounds and control feedback. Through trial and error, she and DeMeyer found that some ideas that worked well in STEIM’s studio did not work as well on stage and vice versa. “Sometimes too many samples or processes would get triggered when I moved my hands,” she says, “so we were always fine-tuning the system. For example, in a 6-foot range of the instrument, you could trigger dozens of samples or six samples, as well as have different degrees of effects.”

Returning to STEIM with a laser harp designed by Donald Swearingen and built by Oliver DiCicco, Masaoka continued to develop performance techniques while she explored ways to map performance gestures in an electronic environment. Swearingen’s laser design uses a grid of sensors mounted on a pair of camera tripods that flank Masaoka’s koto. In performance, she uses a can of Fantasy FX smoke spray to highlight the laser beams and to reveal the virtual instrument to the audience.

Along with her SensorLab voltage-to-MIDI converter, Masaoka uses a combination of STEIM’s Spider and Cycling ’74’s Max software. An audio feed of the music created live is routed into Max, where her samples archive is organized by timbre and pitch. While she plays, Masaoka mixes and matches her phrasing on the acoustic instrument with the phrasing in the samples. Because of Masaoka’s fine use of extended techniques and her subtle control of the balance between the electronic and acoustic sounds, it is often difficult for the listener to discern the real koto from the virtual one. That is the exact effect Masaoka strives for.

“Having such a huge range of sounds available – and to be able to work with the computer in this way – is very exciting,” Masaoka says. “The Laser Koto expands people’s awareness of the koto as an instrument. The physicality required to play the instrument is something I’ve always emphasized; whether I’m bowing or scraping the instrument, it’s a very physical act. The Laser Koto is an extension of this, meshed with the Mac G3 PowerBook.”

Masaoka believes that the relationship between acoustic and electronic music is closer than most people think. To extend her instrument’s timbral range, Masaoka often prepares the koto by weaving objects between the strings. For example, she emulates synthesized sounds by bowing a small cymbal stuck between the strings.

As a result of her years playing Laser Koto, Masaoka has created a gestural and timbral language all her own. She plucks, strums, scratches, and bows the koto acoustically while waving her hands through the laser beams to layer an additional 12 koto-derived sounds.

Complementing Masaoka’s fully loaded PowerBook is a DigiTech TSR 24S connected to a MIDIWizard RFX Foot Pedal, which she uses for changing patches. At home she relies on a Mac G4 with Digidesign’s Pro Tools and BIAS’s Peak for recording, sampling, and editing.

Currently Masaoka is collaborating on new developments for the Laser Koto with Matt Wright from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley. “The ongoing development of the instrument has been with the help of Matt – right down to the core of the whole system, including how the pedals, samples, and controllers work together,” Masaoka says.

HOW DOTH THE BUSY BEE
Drawing on her interest in the relationship between nature and technology, Masaoka has created works utilizing ensembles of insects. Her Bee Projects series explores the social order and sonic behavior of bees.

In Bee Project #1, Masaoka combines violin, percussion, and bowed koto with an amplified beehive onstage. The piece sets up an interplay between the musicians and bees that highlights the slowly developing rhythmic patterns created by the droning hive. During the premiere performance, the drones were punctuated by the occasional solo statement of a stray bee near a microphone.

Masaoka also fashions pieces that use the human body as a canvas on which she builds dramatic soundscapes and confronts the audience with issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. One such piece, Bee Piece #6, was a collaboration with Joe Anderson, a specialist in sound spatialization. For that piece, Anderson’s SoundField ST250 4-capsule microphone is cautiously lowered into a beehive while videos of bees navigating Masaoka’s body are shown (see Fig. 6). Anderson’s careful placement of speakers throughout the venue lets the audience share the experience of being inside the hive.
In her work Ritual, Masaoka reclines amid an array of motion sensors from Radio Shack, covered by an invited gathering of giant wingless Madagascar hissing cockroaches (see Fig. 7). As the cockroaches crawl over Masaoka’s nude form, they interrupt the sensor beams and trigger samples of cockroaches hissing, creating a random soundscape.

Masaoka relies on the human body for the material in Naked Sounds. “In Naked Sounds, I’m treating the body as a potential orchestral source,” she says. “Using medical equipment, I chart and interpret brainwaves, heartbeats, and the sound of the blood coursing through the veins. The brainwaves are output as a musical score that can be realized using Cycling ’74’s Max and MSP or performed by musicians. The subject’s brain activity can also be translated into MIDI data. The interface I’m using for this piece is the Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer from IBVA Technologies.” (For more information about IBVA Technologies, see “The Outer Limits” in the August 2000 issue of EM.)

“I think of the skin as a barrier between the internal and the external world,” Masaoka says. “The sounds from the body reveal what is hidden, what is undiscovered. These sounds are always there within us but are so mundane and functional that we ignore them. Naked Sounds reminds us of what lies within.”

KAFFE MATTHEWS
Kaffe Matthews describes herself as a “live converter.” Although she electronically processes sound events in real time, every aspect of her performance is improvised, and her spontaneous reactions to the surrounding environment define each performance. That approach highlights an event’s temporal nature as she samples, resamples, alters, and regenerates found sounds with her live-sampling setup.

“By working with sound generated at the performance or in another space at the same time as the performance, you’re bringing in another place with all its dimensions and history,” Matthews says. “It doesn’t just expand the sonic palette. It also means that the musician is actively using place and event as material for real-time perversion.”

An impromptu trip to study drumming in West Africa laid the foundation for Matthews’s complete immersion in electronic music. The journey came at a time when she was open to deep listening and could sense the effect of small changes on a complex sound’s tonal characteristics.

AUDIO HARVEST
Matthews’s exploration of musical color and texture developed during an intensive phase of performing solo improvisations. She wanted to develop new ways to play the violin while introducing sounds outside the instrument’s traditional realm (see Fig. 8). However, the more she performed in public, the more she found inspiration in the unforeseen nuances of each location. A courtyard’s ambience, bar noise, even sounds from the band downstairs became source material to be layered into the emerging sonic fabric (see Fig. 9).

Matthews revels in the experience of creating something fresh and unexpected every time she plays. She occasionally works with prerecorded material but only if the sounds are extraordinary, such as the kite-flying samples she created during a recent trip to the Scottish Isles.

Matthews arrives to performance venues early to assess their layouts. Before a show begins, she places lavaliere and PZM microphones around the venue to capture diverse sound material. Then Matthews pulls out the gaffer’s tape and judiciously embeds the microphones within the environment. Often the best material comes from close-miking a sound that changes regularly, such as a fan, water faucet, or beer tap. Matthews usually designates another mic for ambience and might strategically hide it beside unsuspecting diners, patrons at the bar, or near another club’s sound system. The artist reserves the third microphone for a prime location within the performance space so she can resample herself as she plays

DISCOVERING LISA
Like Masaoka, Matthews has been an artist-in-residence at STEIM. With STEIM’s Jorgen Brinkman, Matthews retrofitted her violin with a pad of six controls that serve as remote-to-MIDI switches for her Peavey PC-1600x MIDI controller. Despite the upgrade, Matthews prefers to concentrate solely on using microphones and live sampling and has temporarily suspended using violin in her solo performances (see Fig. 10).
Matthews is one of the few musicians actively using STEIM’s proprietary live- sampling software, LiSa. Matthews says the software is intuitive and works well for sampling, processing, and playing material in an interactive performance situation. She creates performance templates that let her make spontaneous music – without spending endless hours programming.

Matthews takes full advantage of LiSa’s ability to control sampling and processing using MIDI data from external controllers, such as a keyboard, faders, pedals, or strings. For example, Matthews uses the PC-1600x to send sampling commands and to play samples. She employs foot pedals to send continuous controller messages or to determine a loop’s starting point or length. LiSa also lets Matthews immediately access and play the samples in a variety of layered combinations. The sonic results range from fuzzy, chopped, and twisted to eerie and ethereal.

Matthews runs LiSa on a Mac G3 PowerBook; she also uses a Behringer 8-channel mixer and a Boss SE50 FX unit, in addition to the PC-1600x. She occasionally augments that setup with ultrasonic tracking sensors for converting movement into MIDI data. This allows a dancer or audience member to use his or her body to produce sounds, whether deliberately or unintentionally. Although Matthews has collaborated with a number of choreographers, she generally prefers to use unwitting participants as primary contributors to an event.

STAY TUNED
What do these these three artists have in common? They possess large doses of imagination, motivation, and determination that keep them creatively vibrant and make them exemplary sources of inspiration for anyone creating electroacoustic music.

Through self-reflection, research, and good old-fashioned hard work, Bobrowski, Masaoka, and Matthews have developed highly individual approaches to music making that transcend technology. Whether it’s transforming physical phenomena into sound, extending a classic instrument’s vocabulary, or using the environment as source material during an improvisation, the restless energy these artists exude will keep them at the forefront of creative music for years to come.

A visiting scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University, Bean is tearing up the school’s Entertainment Technology Center while teasing new ideas for collaborative music-making schemes from the students. Gino Robair is an associate editor at EM.

Immaculately presented as always with images suggestive of places and spaces without clarification. Memories from place with sounds from the space.

The CD opens with an edgy surface noise that ruffles from calming hovering rushes of melody that dissolve into harsh industrial harmonics that seem to devour the speaker and cough out a transparent spittle of silver music.

And questions arise – is ‘The Last of the Violins?’ a requiem for the final occasion of applying her unique approach to the violin live? From the undulating and indeterminate scratchings it is hard to tell, the language so buried within a live processing that it’s as if the face lift has brought about a whole new soundscape a full step away from imagined sounds of the violin.

The beat of a telematic clock, the glitchy heavy metal drones, the broken frame of percolating fizzles, bubbling up from beneath, hypnotic frequency rushes in the ‘Pool in the Basement’ that push and pull at the sealed skin of the speaker, all of these moments add up to the fourth in a series that is as mesmerising as it is unpredictable.

What makes this music so beautiful is the ability to listen repeatedly and constantly finwd fresh nuances and effects with the densely filled soundscape. I will now listen to it once more and continue my exploration.

Robin Rimbaud

This following on from her previous CDs Ann and Bea, is naturally enough the third in a series of recordings by the very able Matthews – who’s highly valued as a free violinist in improvising circles. However the Ann and Bea CDs (so I have read) actually feature progressively less violin playing and by the time we check in here at stage Cècile, thereís very little of it at all! Instead Matthews plays the self appointed role of a “live convertor on the case”, performing extensive live reprocessing of sounds, no doubt using the LiSa (live sampling) software which she has made all her very own. Interesting that Phil Durrant is another UK improv violinist who is also heavily into live processing (of himself and others playing), and equally interesting that Kaffe Matthews has her own voice, entirely distinct from his. It’s the artist behind the paintbrush that counts, not the paintbrush – even when that paintbrush is a sumptuous electronic tool like this one.

In three long suites (recorded in London, Oslo and Chicago) Matthews delivers an unfailingly excellent and intense barrage of simply beautiful noisy music. It can be a devastating rush of closely edited noises to form a continuous tornado wind of sound, or a softly crackling passage of static. Some of it is as fast as a jet plane, some is slow and weird, like some bespectacled intellectual worrying away at an algebra problem. Perhaps we should be stressing the live / real time aspect of the work, rather than stressing the electronic-ness of it, because it’s in her quick thinking and intuitive moments that Matthews truly shines as a gifted and hard-working creator. If you ask me, any buffoon can tinker with their material in a studio until it achieves that overcooked perfection they so desire, but it takes real guts to take on the forces of unprocessed noise and wrestle with them live, in the amphitheatre surrounded by sweaty grunts (indeed it seems that often the noise of the audience themselves also get sampled into the warp and woof of the music), and this plucky musician manages to pin the opponent to the mat more than once. And itís not simply testosterone-driven feedback-feasting, much as I love that scene too! Matthews is turning in real craft, every jolting explosion and manic loop qualifies as a fully embroidered, triple fired, hand painted work of art.

In Resonance magazine (vol 6 no 2) Matthews enthused about her lovely toy, the LiSa device and all the peripherals associated with it. The software was designed in an Amsterdam studio by Frank Baldè and the great Michel Waisvisz, he whose “crackle board” turns up on a Derek Bailey LP and who played a strange monophonic synth with Steve Lacy (and others) in 1974 (see the CD Emanem 4024).

The possibilities this technology opens up inspire Kaffe Matthews: As a process for making new music as we end the 20th century, this seems an optimistic path to be taking. A whole music, that plays in sound but makes pictures, that crossers borders, that is rich and new, is active and involving, not mere spectacle; that is made through the place and the people there and then. Now, this seems something worth doing.

And is it worth hearing too? In spades!!!

ED PINSENT

The imprint’s motto is set out boldly in the packaging for ‘CD Cecile’: ‘Annette Works is a label set up to produce works which use a realtime exploitation of electronics in a particular place at a particular time.’ Thus here we have Kaffe Matthews with 3 lengthy real-ambience pieces (for a total of 70 plus minutes) recorded live in London England in February of this year, in Chicago in December of last, and in Oslo Norway in January 1999. Most interesting is that each track truly seems to reflect the location. Recorded in the UK, ‘Contact C’ sounds like a living, breathing city of industry; you can almost feel the grime as you listen to the vehicular hum and manipulated static. Similarly, ‘My Love Gave Me A Blue Plastic Watch’, the American soiled piece, is a bustling, busy, no-time-for-anyone affair with sighs, honks, screeches, and a great feeling of distance, as if you just can’t get close to it no matter how hard you try. ‘Skagerrak’ is equally effective with its ability to bring forth images of ice, vastness, and those trying to get things done.

A remarkable release likely to gain approval for those lovers of Pole, Oval, and Pan Sonic who would like a bit more with their snap, crackle, and pop.

–Andrew Duke

Drift was a three day event of sound art and acoustic ecology across Glasgow. Drift was poorly publicized, coming across at by accident as we do. We knew Kaffe Matthews was playing but did not know anything past the inclusion in the CCA booklet, which did not detail the scope of the season, and unfortunately we had other plans for the rest of the weekend.

The CCA is Glasgow’s Center For Contemporary Arts and the last time re:mote induction team were here was for Baustelle, a season of German electronica. This time we are here for Kaffe Matthews, another experiment for us as we know little about her. Our interest is motivated by reading of her work with artists like Pan Sonic and Kingsuk Biswas (of Beduoin Ascent). And it is a curiosity which is rewarded.

According to the Drift booklet Kaffe uses a series of microphones, attached to various objects or placed in the street. This is how she collects the sounds she processes into layering and varying soundscapes using her midi-violin and live sampling software. As one would expect from that no performance is the same and each is specific to the environment of that event.

The CCA is currently residing in the McLellan Galleries – which allows it access to a large, domed gallery space. Kaffe sits in the center of the room with her violin, laptop, knobs and levers. In circles round her are chairs for the audience with speakers placed round the axis of the outer circle. This means that we surround our performer tonight, as her sound surrounds us. A performance which perhaps is better suited musically to solitary appreciation follows, and as such many close their eyes. But with the rise and falls and shift in sound from speaker to speaker it is clear that the level of sound to be appreciated can only be done so in an environment and set up like this one.

RVWR: PTR
November 1999

Law and Auder records.

Essex female and live electro acoustic improviser, Kaffe is a unique musician dedicated to live solo improvisation within a highly stylized context of her own creation.

Her music evolves from three interfacing elements, abstractly filtered through her psyche: a conventional violin, a heavy rig of special live sampling electronics, and the social and psychological space of the concert.

The last statement may seem pretentiously conceptual, but since her gigs exert an unusual sense of expanded mental space, it makes perfect sense. Her pieces are vividly emotional: gripping science-fiction landscapes which overlay the physical venue, altering the atmosphere with a dominating, somber delirium; as if the moment were being frozen, expanded, and cast into space. Because they are presented fairly neutrally without pretence and in long doses, the emotionality of her improvising can ring through, often moving into sincerely dark and dissociated moods. It is probably this emotional intensity, the strange personal sense of place she provides, which is the most original aspect of her work. The violin serves as a crucial kind of focus in this environment, with its miniature size and visual interest as a counter point to the layered masses of sound that Matthews creates.

Truth be told, Matthews is a fine violinist, and on cd ‘Bea’, more of her fiddling is heard than on the previous disc: in fact, some parts really soar in a derranged sawing sort of way. However, it is her ability to manipulate her electronics and the LiSa software she uses which makes her deserving of recognition as one of the most interesting live electronics players going. Specifically she has developed the technique of “composing” live with multiple streams of samples to an unprecidented level; like some of the best improvising drummers and pianists, able to keep many streams of discussion going at once–truly polyphonic and polyrhythmic improvising.

The technology she uses allows for this on a physical level, but her sense of timing and proportion is key. Dense droning layers are built up, cut out unexpectedly into choppy rhythms, and then suddenly turn the bend to become entirely else. Throughout, there is very little obvious looping or hackneyed manipulation in the sound, and the total result is more akin to composed orchestral music or tape-spliced musique concrete than the usual direction of solo electronics. A hidden microphone always in the space, used extremely sparingly to add eves-dropped room-sound into the mix, seems like a sort of mental fake-out, adding mainly mystery. The sound palette of cd ‘Bea’ covers a wide spectrum, often filling a large part of the audible frequency range with streams of transforming sound, the extraordinary thing being that 95% of the sound is generated by her violin, and then turned into something completely different: wind, noise, massed brass stomping in beats, then slamming a corner to swoop into luscious melody, a pair of geese seeming to flap nonchalantly across the screen. Other sounds are more mysterious, suggesting out-dated automatons, dry desert, household products amok, telephone s w itch disfunction. With its density and harmonic riches, her sound has something in common with the Stochastic string work of Xenakis, and of later makers like Elliot Sharp, Jon Duncan and Jon Oswald; but also has an opennesss and emotionality unusual in electronic music of this sophistication. in the midst of the buzzing drones, switching noise, and cascades of clattering, Kaffe Matthews is still there. In her wry way, she is keeping us company as we go.

Interviewer: Wim van de Herik.
24.8.99.

Wim: Can you tell me something about your musical background, influences?

Kaffe: I started playing violin aged 6 after being offered free violin lessons at school and having been turned on to strings and bows by the double bass player at a local production of gilbert and sulivan’s “pirates of penzance”. Became quite obsessed by this little vibrating wooden box, and did the classical thing till I was 16 . Stopped playing, and ran around for a while, got into all kinds of rock music and came back to the making of it by singing in a band .

Then the violin reappeared, and was asked to play bass in “the fabulous dirt sisters”(FDS)

Wim: I’ve read on your website that you did a lot on different musical areas, the stories behind it all?

Kaffe: The mid 80’s and the FDS and the local library’s record collection led me into all kinds of african and east European listening. Started to write tunes for the band, and managed to get to Senegal where I lived and played with some drummers for 3 months. Returned so inspired and with a new and clear understanding of the marriage of rhythm and sound.

Began to improvise and experiment more, and realised that through all those years of playing I had done little actual listening. Little listening to the details and the complexities and the textures of sound; and then the release of our 3rd album led me into the mixing desk and recording studio as an instrument. Hey, what you could do with sound with all those knobs. Here was the place to be able to make music with all that detail, with rhythm and textures and shape and all those other things inbetween.

The band split, and I got a tape op. job in an acid house studio where I was later engineering and doing pre-production work with rappers and dj’s.(1988) Got my own sampler and sequencer and was flung into a full time obsessed delirium of delight with this world I could play in. Reeled out of it to realise that I was not happy to use the keyboard as a means to trigger it, and at the same time discovered that there was such a thing as a midi violin. hey.

Got a grant to do a Masters in Music Technlogy at York university. Very weird to be suddenley flung into this institutionalised environment of programming and machines and few musicians. Certainly no experimenters/improvisors. But they got the midi violin attachment and I got to struggle with it . And this led me into composing big pieces where I was triggering samples (worked a lot with voice stuff at the time, all from purposeful or chance recordings) from the violin, and able to process them a little by how I played (bow pressure etc) or with pedals. Led me into doing gigs where I would be dancing around from one pedal to another so that choreographers and visual artists would be delighted by the performance of it all and say things like ” hey so did you write those movements and then the music was a result of that?! ”

Through this time I had also been invited to set up the Performance Technology centre at Dartington College of Arts (a fantastic college of the Performing Arts in SW England, actually has big connections with various schools in amsterdam. Mary Fulquerson and Katy Duck for ex. worked there for a long time etc.) for a year, but I ended up staying there for 4 and setting up a course and experimenting wth sound and prerformance and site and shape through playing and compostition with lots of students.

In 1995, I went half time to be able to have more time to perform my own stuff, so also moved to London (phew some urban reality) when in Jan’96 was invited to be a project artist at Steim. Here I was introduced to LiSa, live sampling software, and immediately knew that this was the gadget I’d been looking for all these years. At last I could play the violin but make big digital music realtime. I could improvise, start a show with an empty RAM, with no samples, leave all the precise fiddling in the studio behind, and do it all with the audience real time. Use the unique situation of each performance as raw material for the show.Now, what kind of music could this make? And well, I haven’t looked back since.

Wim: You worked with great musicians like Charles Hayward, Pansonic and Riz Maslen and more…your experience with them? what was the reason and have you planned more with them or others?

Kaffe: With Charles we had an amazing duo, where Iwas sampling and processing him or myself. We’d get very loud and steamy. It had amazing potential but we needed a 3rd to root it all. We are too alike really, 2 fiery sagittarian kids. We stopped playing together due to lack of time and other commitments, but when the time comes, will play together again I’m sure. It has much potential.

Performed with Pan-sonic, that was in the Rude Mechanic project in 1996(see discography for cd details). We were processing each other in a 6 hour thrash. I could barely see or stand up afterwards. Would be good to play with them again too. hey, for more time.

With Riz, we are planning to perform together next year in the US. I’ll just provide textures and funny noises. Sadly can’t play with her this autumn as I am in Australia.

Look out this year also for releases with Christian Fennesz, with performance artist Hayley Newman, with Andy Moor (the Ex), the weather music from the SYZYGY project and from whatever comes out from 6 weeks in the outeroutback with Alan Lamb.

Wim: You also worked as a lets say musical director, could you tell me more about that one?

Kaffe: Musical director?.

Well, I had my own duo and band and have written the music for lots of dance pieces, collaborating with the choreographer and sometimnes using sounds of objects used in show from which to generate the score. Most recent was Absolute Zero in Brighton, check out http://www.stalk.net/annetteworks reviews page under “absolute zero”.

Also for film, especially with Mandy McIntosh on Mobile home see Installations in www.stalk.net/annetteworks. Am about to collaborate with film director Meloni Poole on an interactive installation in the North of England in November, (look out for “a new house”) and am commissioned to make this time a greater than lifesize “sonic armchair” for the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital millenum Artshow, London. (see http://www.stalk.net/annetteworks, installations page “stokey” for sonic armchair mk 1)

Wim: What gave the you the idea to start working with samples? And what samples source do you use..you don’t need to mention names..

Kaffe: I use samples as they were and still are the quickest and most simple means for me to be able to grab and play with blocks of sound. I have never used anyone elses sounds as source. All my samples are made (now realtime) from the violin or other sounds I can pick up during a gig. You know don’t you that I make my samples during a gig? Nothing is prerecorded, and I process and improvise with what I get as I go. This has been the case for the last 3 and a half years.

Wim: What kind of instrument(s) do you prefer?

Kaffe: Stringed ones for the non-digital, otherwise a laptop with the right bits of software.

Wim: You appeared with a track on an female only compilation. I have read somewhere that the Law & Auder boss organized this, because he never released a track from a woman before. What do you think about his statement.

Kaffe: Buy the way I liked the compilation a lot. well it was quite odd to be on a cd that had such terrible 80’s looking WOMAN’S art work for a start. jeeze! and the title is terrible too. But it was great that he put it out, though Ii’m not interested in being released because I am female. The music should speak for itself, and sadly I think a lot of the stuff on this release is pretty dull.

Wim: What do you think about the position of women in music nowadays?

Kaffe: There are still not enough of us doing it for some ridiculous reason.

Wim: Tell me something about your way of working.. how do you create a song?

Kaffe: Well I don’t create songs. I make pieces through live sampling and playing with the place, timing, mood and energy of a gig, in the gig. The “best” of this stuff then appears on my cds. I write material for shows/films/theatre through jamming with LiSa and recordings of ideas related to the show. This then produces textures and shapes that I then begin the structure with, and push into little pieces. These then get taken to the performance/show venue, and I play with them with the performers, and in the acoustic of the space so that the whole thing develops as we find what works with them and the space and the spirit of the event. Glorious chance is a big part of it all of course.

Wim: Tell me something about Annette works… concept, idea..

Kaffe: Annette was my inspirational grandmother. I needed to set up a label to release my work, as I wanted to retain some hold of it I guess. And the idea of just releasing works made live through exploitation of electronics seemed like a good idea. So few of us do it. Now it still does seem essential, and we will be releasing other peoples work when we can. ie. when we have some time and find some $$$$!

Wim: Do you improvise a lot… in studio, on stage…

Kaffe: Yes. That’s how I make music. By doing it, by playing with it, by being physical with it, not by sitting around thinking about it. Of course that makes a lot of work for me, its a time consuming business, having to do it rather than sleeping for 3 days and getting up and going into the studio for 3 hours and recording something that you then remix/trigger in a gig situation. I know quite a few brilliant folk who work like that, but hey that’s not my game. Sound is a physical material and needs to be handled somehow. You never know what it might do/ you can put it in a situation to do next.

Wim: Tell me about the gigs I’ve seen:x-or, Rotterdam (with Andy)?

Kaffe: All improvised. the duo at X-Or was the first time we had met. The duo with Andy was the second time we had played together. That particular gig was pretty hard as we had had no time to sound check and couldn’t really hear each other. But, that duo has a lot of potential that we’re dead excited about. Look out there’ll be an astonishing release soon. Also Andy and I will be playing in Amsterdam on Thursday 9th September in town at some hospital squat restaurant. Will give you address later.

Wim: What do you think about the musicscene nowadays, does it inspired you a lot?

Kaffe: Music scene in london is tragic. There is nowwhere for someone like me to play. The way the word experimentation is used is hollow and means nothing apart from some kind of fashion gimic. London is full of concert halls or clubs with hundreds of desperate people trying and managing to make lots of money at it. The scene is therefore either on stage or dominated by the beat. I could stay around and make some kind of patch from which to play, but I’m asked to play in the rest of Europe or the US all the time, and I don’t really work like that anyway.

Kaffe: London is a great place to live (very dirty, very expensive, becoming more crowded every day ) and have my studio (which I have to move out of as the landlord is trippling the rent (so much for regeneration), anyone got some good studio space going?!); and for brief periods of respite,…… like now!

Wim: What sort of music do you listen to at the moment?

Kaffe: It changes all the time, but right now: all of the rereleased earth wind and fire stuff, a fab telex remix of very silly music, a millenium collection of 12′ pieces, Hitchcock’s sound tracks, Bach cello, Fear No Fall (a lowlands release), and the other noises that invade my auditory space, e.gg the film editors at work on a cowboy movie next door or the shower’s chorus in the swimming pool if all of them are put on at once.

Wim: Some words about the future…

Kaffe: More more more. I’ve only just started. Hey and folks, I’m a digital musician/composer, not a live sampling violinist. The violin is still there, but just another sound source. All that vibrates to sound with the audience in the venue at that moment is the material for music making. This summer I’ve been working with the weather a lot as a compositional ally, see http://www.newmediacentre.com/projects/syzygy/writers/kaffe.html

On this project I was working with 2 digital artists and some kite flyers and a programmer and we were reading light, wind, temperature and movement data, converting it into midi and I was using this to compose. Well I was setting up a system so that the weather would compose, and here at this site you can hear some of the results. There will be more from the eclipse ( we flew at a complete blackout festival in Plymouth for the eclipse) but that isn’t up yet, Then in september I’m off to Western Australia to play with Alan Lamb in the outeroutback for 6 weeks. We’ll have a 4 wheel drive truck, a heap of microphones and cables and wires and computers and DAT machines and solarpowered rechargers and water water water and a generator and a violin, all to make music out of the vibrations of telephone wires as they stretch across the desert in the changing weather of day and night. Plus 30°C in day, -5°C at night. So what might this make?

Wim: Much succes with the answers…Maybe it’s possible for you to send them back within 10 days. Greetings, Wim.

by Wim van de Herik
FAKE Magazine
Amsterdam

The crackle and pop of what seems to be vinyl – snaps “to.” Rhythms of it. Very nice Kunstkopf effect cadges its way in – moving from ear to ear, like a smile. The edges of the vinyl experience seem to be the focus – the grooves, man. And now, another presence – something similar yet simultaneously other. As lightning passing through storms of static, this music comes – tumbling and shivering through itself. Carved into dopplered waves of sound. The sound should fill a great hall and then there is confusi on – the mark of a rather fine recording – “what was that?” Cf. Did I hear something outside of this, in the “real” world – a noise, a commotion? How often does this happen – that the sound melds with the environment – and how great is that?

Chattering loops to the fore, now. Is the repetition of the loop meant to highlight certain sounds – precluding others? Including others? Does looped music act as a sort of aural Rohrschach test, picking the brain for impressions and details? The sounds shudder to a point, then another set of loops vaults slowly to the forefront. There is some attention to the space between – where sounds from the outside world (i.e. conversation, passionate cries, a telephone) could interject. Is this planned? Sounds fol low similar patterns, others fall out of phase – squeak, speak, creak. And the whirr and tumble of what seems to be machinery – plugs along. There’s a lull (slight return) and a more manic presence in the treble. Full stop.

The sounds come stealthily in, their presence made known like the travel of a faraway locomotive, breathing wind. And the seaside beckons – how the hiss of a tape sounds like a breaking wave, and Kaffe, my dear, we are on the same wavelength! Ah, well, just another drinking at thee psychick well ov. Varying levels of fuzzy static wend their ways off the track, and what to pick from the pans? It’s sound that isn’t necessarily obtrusive or intrusive. The overall effect – packaging, titles, locales – is a th at of diary. A love-letter from the road. In a way, it’s as if these sounds came from that special place of memory – and the attempt is in earnest to transmit those memories via the sound.

Electro-thought-phenomena? (DC) -David Cotner- www.freq.freeserve.co.uk

by David Cotner
FREQ Music E-Zine
http://www.freq.freeserve.co.uk