Travis Thatcher – C-VILLE Weekly

Telemetry series at The Bridge takes off

Open-minded listeners looking for a new sound experience should head to The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Sunday night for the Telemetry series. Developed by programming committee members Peter Bussigel, a composer and intermedia artist and professor in UVA’s music department, and Travis Thatcher, technical director of composition and computer technologies in that same department, the regular series is a place for music that Thatcher says is “often electronic but not necessarily always.”

The last two events “have been really successful, with [more than] 50 attendees,” says Thatcher.

Telemetry
May 14
The Bridge PAI

On Sunday, three local acts from UVA and Charlottesville, plus Curved Light out of Austin, Texas, will deliver performances of sound that challenge typical notions of musicianship and instrumentation. Here is an idea of what’s to be experienced, according to the artists themselves.

Curved Light

“I’ve always been attracted to ambient sound, but not necessarily its function in the background,” says Peter Tran, who along with Deirdre Smith creates psychedelic synth sound and vision as Curved Light. “I wanted to recontextualize [ambient sound] in a live context where an audience would be forced to engage, utilizing more direct textures and immersive visuals to create an expansive, psychedelic environment.” Audience members can expect “both intense visual and aural stimuli that explore the limitless possibilities of the modular synthesizer” from a Curved Light set, says Tran. It’s not something that’s easily categorized, and for that reason, “each concert is absolutely a journey.”

Travis Thatcher

Thatcher will perform what he says is “an ambient pastoral Berlin School sort of set.” (The Berlin School was a movement in 1970s West Berlin that explored the creative potential of the synthesizer through ambient sound often combined with sequenced runs of notes—think Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel.)

For the set, he’ll play an original Oberheim Two Voice synthesizer that he’s restored in the past year. This particular instrument is a “relic,” Thatcher says, explaining that when the Two Voice appeared in 1975, it was the first commercially available polyphonic synthesizer, in that it could play two notes at once. While technology has advanced since 1975, the Oberheim changed the electronic music landscape for good. Plus, Thatcher adds, “I think it just sounds cool.”

Ghost Fortune

Ghost Fortune’s Ron Geromy thinks that chaos sounds good. “People’s expectations of such sounds are very different than other genres of electronic music, so it creates an interesting space to explore live,” he says.

Ron Geromy, a UVA student, explores that space with noisy patterns of interference created between the soundwaves of rather fragile homemade synthesizers. He makes his own synths by printing a 3-D shell and soldering buttons, switches and knobs to a Schmitt trigger chip—it’s an easy circuit to make, Ron Geromy says, one that “produces a very pleasant square wave.”

On the edges of those systems, he has “discovered a lot of very beautiful, transient sounds produced by the feedback overloading [the] mixer and speakers, that once pursued further, disappear. These could be tones, or textures, or even just rhythmic patterns created by clipping,” he says. “But none of them can be sustained for too long.”

“People’s expectations of such sounds are very different than other genres of electronic music, so it creates an interesting space to explore live.” Ron Geromy

Molasses

Molasses, Will Mullany’s solo drum performance project, developed out of what Mullany says is “a dissatisfaction with the alienating and detached nature of a lot of live electronic music. To the uninitiated, a lot of electronic performances can be hard to relate to, merely because the mechanism of the sound production is hidden away in synths, effects boxes and computers.”

With a performance built around a drum kit that Mullany has augmented with sensors, microphones and digital elements that capture sound from the drum kit then “mess it up and spit it out anew,” Mullany aims to give more physicality to digital sound. He says he’ll likely use other sound-making gizmos he’s found or made, too.

Molasses is “a pretty transparent ploy to summate my formerly incompatible interests in digital and analog sound processing, DIY instrument building, avant-garde rock and free-improv,” says Mullany, adding that he won’t decide the exact setup until the night of the show. “I’m going to play drums and things are going to come out of the speakers and beyond that, I’m not sure what else is going to happen,” he says.

Anything goes in the world of synth experimentation

The bleeps and bloops of modular synthesizers can be heard all over music these days, says Travis Thatcher, the technical director for the composition and computer technologies program in UVA’s music department. It’s audible in pop music, techno, house, trap, even indie rock and hip-hop, and that’s precisely what makes it interesting. Plus, he says, “synthesizers allow you to endlessly explore new sounds if you have the patience.” The instrument naturally lends itself to experimentation.

“Electronic and experimental music…allows anyone to express themselves creatively, even if they’re not traditional ‘musicians,’” says Crimson Youth, a UVA student who enjoys the anonymity that his moniker affords him. “Music is a very subjective experience, and having a place or genre where anything goes pushes people to redefine what they think a musical experience really is.”

Here are four local acts that push against the boundaries of the traditional listening experience. Plug in some headphones, close your eyes and just listen.

Crimson Youth

“I like the idea of longing—for love, a time or place, a feeling, a person—anything,” says Crimson Youth. “I’m interested in the idea of being nostalgic for something that a person has not lived through or could not have lived through.”

On Valleys, a record loosely inspired by the time between youth and adulthood, Crimson Youth sampled clips from old ephemeral movies he’d found—educational films, weird corporate videos and nature documentaries—and manipulated the audio into original keyboard parts he’d improvised or previously written. On the track “Grief,” he starts off with a haunting string sample before adding synth and the found audio to create an emotionally ambiguous sound. “It’s a sad song, but in almost a confusing way, like you’re crying and you don’t know why,” he says. “The looped sample at the end epitomizes for me the idea of youth. It’s carefree and happy, but placed over the rest of the song, it takes on a more melancholy feeling.”

Personal Bandana

Thatcher and Dave Gibson perform as Personal Bandana, drawing influence from Krautrock groups like Cluster, Eno, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. The Krautrock, or cosmic music (kosmische musik in German), movement emerged out of the psychedelic/avant-garde/experimental rock scene in late 1960s Germany and contributed to the evolution of electronic music, ambient music and post-punk and new wave. Personal Bandana keeps minimalism “at the core” of its lengthy, outer space-y jams, Thatcher says, as he and Gibson limit their instrument usage to some simple drum machines and Casio CZ-101 phase distortion synthesizers. They plan to drop a tape sometime in the next few months.

Winterweeds

Joseph Zehner, who records and performs as Winterweeds, says he turns to a synths-and-guitar-pedals setup when there’s no solution to something that’s bothering him—“playing music is the only thing I’m really capable of when I’m in that…debilitated but introspective state,” he says. “You Are My Horizon,” a track that Zehner released last year, is a one-take series of random, layered sequences, only some of which involve rhythms. The changes throughout the nearly 20-minute song are so subtle and gradual that by the time you reach the middle, it sounds different from the beginning, but you wouldn’t be able to tell unless you tracked back to the start.

“Even if I wanted to play the same thing twice, I wouldn’t be able to,” says Zehner, who runs Valence Shows and books music at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. “So, [music is] a kind of forced evolution for me. Memories cannot be relieved. The recordings are there, but only to be replayed, not reperformed.”

Tanson

“I’m pretty into science fiction and I have a very optimistic view of technology,” says Alexander Tanson, whose tape, The Eventuality of Destiny, was influenced by ideas of artificial intelligence, technological singularity, people becoming cyborgs and space exploration. Its 7:58 lead track, “Deep Learning,” which opens with a deep, vibrating synth that expands into a sonic cavern of shifting noise patterns, is about artificial intelligence developing consciousness. It makes sense, then, that Tanson’s songs often flourish from experimentation on hardware synths and a drum machine. “Either I come up with a melody on my own or by accident with a sequencer,” he says. “I’ll record that, or incorporate it into a live set; I don’t like doing production or anything. It’s nice to have tangible instruments as opposed to just using software. I heard someone say it’s kind of like herding robots. I like that analogy.”