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Proceeds from this show will be split between the artists and Anti-Recidivism Coalition's Firefighter Fund, which supports incarcerated firefighters working as part of the LA fire relief efforts.
Sonic practices today often resemble acoustic experiments of the past. Yet the experiments and writings of early acousticians are often historicized as purely scientific explorations and the modern musical descriptor "experimental" typically serves a mere taxonomic purpose for genre or style. Robert Blatt and Michael Winter's Harmonie Universelle reimagines the history of acoustics as a history of experimental music by considering the experiments, technologies, and observations of early acousticians as modes of composition, instrumentation, and listening. Experiments investigating sonic characteristics such as speed of sound, interference patterns, and resonance become musical material. Scientific instruments such as sirens and tuning forks become musical instruments. And texts and images by Hermann Helmholtz, John Tyndall, Sophie Germain, Ernst Chladni, Jules Lissajous, Marin Mersenne, and Leonhard Euler, among others, are read and projected as artistic observations and reflections that occupy a liminal, transitory space between the qualitative and the quantitative. Within a performance-installation environment, these elements come together in an experimental tracing of the history of acoustics as music.
Michael Winter's practice as a composer and sound artist ranges from music created by digital and acoustic instruments to installations and kinetic sculptures. His works typically explores simple processes and often reflects his related interests in phenomenology, mathematics, epistemology, algorithmic information theory, and the history of science. He often collaborates other artists, mathematicians, and scientists bringing objects, ideas, and texts from various domains as structural elements in his pieces. His approach to sound aims to subvert discriminatory conventions and hierarchies by exploring alternative forms of presentation and interaction, often with minimal resources and low information. Winter's work has been presented at REDCAT, Ostrava Festival of New Music, Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival, Huddersfield New Music Festival, and Umbral Sesiones at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca. Recordings of his music are on XI Records, Another Timbre, New World Records, Edition Wandelweiser, Bahn Mi Verlag, Tsonami Records, and Pogus Productions. In 2008, he co-founded the wulf., a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to experimental performance. From 2018 to 2019, he was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude. He currently reside in Berlin.
Robert Blatt is a composer, artist, performer, and writer. His practice explores expanded situations that reevaluate sound and listening through environment, community, and language. His body of work ranges from experimental music to installation, new media, performance, photography, poetry, print/bookmaking, and video, alongside hard-to-pin-down occurrences in the everyday. Recent projects include the essay "Considering Non-anthropocentric Music" published in Solitude Journal, which has developed into an artistic collaboration with Carla Cao on plant acoustics at Minimal Intelligence Lab, Universidad de Murcia; Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound, a three-month performance project with poet David Abel at Passages Bookshop in Portland—featuring realizations from Blatt's text score collection How to Read a Book, forthcoming as an artist's book made in residence at Kala Art Institute and in a day-length performance at Motto Berlin; and The Free Air on Andromache Records—C84 cassette tape with field recording and voice, and book with score and Blatt's essay "Music and the Weather." From 2018 to 2019, he was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.