A rare Los Angeles live set by RM Francis. Ellen Phan opens the evening!
RM Francis is an artist working with computer-generated sound and language via recording, performance, and installation. He has presented work at venues throughout North America and Europe, including the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music (Oakland), Gray Area (San Francisco), Parken (Vienna), and Kolonia Artystów (Gdańsk). In recent years, his work has been centered around an exploration of the unique perceptual effects of the simulated human voice and the unstable auditory personae that emerge within the gap between artificial and embodied speech systems. Alongside this inquiry into the material properties of the voice, he is engaged in an investigation of the semantic affordances of spoken language decoupled from its capacity for the communication of human intention. These processes yield a synthetic sprechstimme that traverses a continuum of vocality ranging from abstract sound to uncanny characterological specificity.
His oeuvre includes multimedia works incorporating sound, video, performance, and chocolate (Hyperplastic Other, Nada, 2017), interrogations of historical computer synthesis methods (A Taxonomy of Guffaws, ETAT, 2020), procedural text works for a chorus of synthetic voices (Every Single Person Has Some Muscle, Flea, 2022), and hallucinatory duets between speech-to-text apps and deep learning networks (
Ellen Phan (b.1986, Fountain Valley, Calif.) is a computer music artist. Therapeutic-specific methodologies are employed as source material, modulated through a variety of processing and synthesis. Her work is a distinctly hallucinatory psychoacoustic sound world aimed directly, with intent and focus, at the subconscious mind.
She has performed at Lampo, Chicago; CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), Stanford University; Algorithmic Art Assembly, San Francisco; Hangar, Barcelona; The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles; Desert Daze Festival, Lake Perris; Corridor Festival, Seattle; Indexical, Santa Cruz; and High Desert Soundings, Wonder Valley. Her music has been published by Bánh Mì Verlag, Anòmia, Nada Recs and Rope Editions.