Lia Sfoggia / Guilherme Bertissolo
Base
video, live piano and electronics (2017) – 5’30”

Base is based on two interdependent axes: Ambiguity of Technology in Metropolis and the relationship between body and technology mediated by culture. The film express the ambiguity of technology and allow the artists to argue the contemporary debate about man- machine interface. The problems of the man-machine interfaces can be understood through the contemporary body, taking the movement and its cultural significance as a point of view for discussion. The piece is written for piano, electronics, and videodance, in a collaboration between the composer Guilherme Bertissolo and the dancer/choreographer Lia Sfoggia.

Guilherme Bertissolo is Professor of Composition of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA); in 2011-12 he spent six months at the UCR doing research for his PhD dissertation; Lia Sfoggia is completing a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the UFBA, focusing Capoeira as a source for artistic processes in Dance. In 2017, Bertissolo and Sfoggia spent one month as artists in residence at the UCR working mainly at the Experimental Acoustic Research Studio (EARS), directed by Paulo C. Chagas.

Francisco Rangel
Entrance and Exit
video and live piano (2017) – 2’24”

Entrance and Exit is based on the scene in the film Metropolis when the main protagonist Freder is searching for his true love Maria. The music attempts to explore the ambiguity of technology and address the question of what happens when technology stops working for us? The automatic doors keep Freder from finding Maria. The dramatic conflict between the doors and Freder is where the underscore is created.

Francisco Rangel (b. 1996) is a fourth-year Music Major with a concentration in performance at the University of California, Riverside. He has taken several composition courses and seminars, but this is his first public performance of one of his compositions.

Vitor Kisil
Metropolis: Thy Soul
video, live piano and electronics (2017) – 8’50”

It is a piece that poetically explores the theme of “Soul” in the field of artificial intelligence, correlating music, poetry and the Maschinenmensch character from “Metropolis”. The declamation of “Thy Soul”, poetry by André Kisil (1922-2017) – grandfather of Vitor – was recorded in the 1960s but the tape was found only recently in 2017. In “Metropolis: Thy Soul” it is alternated with an English version recorded for this video by Sophia Tomazelli. Several layers of performance compound the piece. The images were generated through interactive processes in MAX and then mounted in a video editing software. The music uses a live piano, sounds of cymbals recorded with a piezoelectric sensor, electric sounds generated by hardware hacking the circuit of a portable radio and a melody played on the musical saw. The live piano plays along with these sounds, all combined and processed in audio editing software.

Vitor Kisil is a composer, performer and researcher on different forms of musical art such as interactive works, music for short films, and musical composition and performance. He holds a degree in Music from the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP) and teaches “Electronic Music Production” at the University Anhembi Morumbi in São Paulo. He actively participates on groups of interactive art as composer and designer of tools for live audio composition and processing. He participated in several national and international projects of contemporary music and digital arts.

Patrick Gibson
Music Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) video, live piano and digital orchestra (2017) – 9’30”
I. Maria
II. Interlude
III. a) Rotwang’s Laboratory; b) The Experiment; c) The Transformation

Music Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), for live piano and digital orchestra, is a multimedia work employing scenes from the film, and focusing on three characters: Maria, the heroine; Rotwang, the corrupted scientist; and The Man-Machine, an abomination born of Science that threatens Maria’s individuality and spreads a false “gospel” of violence and chaos. The images give rise to the music, which, in turn, gives voice to characters from a distant past.

Patrick Gibson is a composer, electric guitarist, educator, and Ph.D. student in the Digital Composition Program at UCR. He holds an M.M. in Composition from Cal State Long Beach, an M.Ed. from National University, and a B.A. in Music Theory/Voice from Loyola Marymount. Works include: Missa Familiae Sanctae (SATB/Pierrot Ensemble), Speed Metal through the Viewfinder (String Quartet), Sonata for Electric Guitar (Rock Power Trio), and Mars Chamber Symphony (Modified Pierrot plus Harp).

Ethan Castro
Remixing Metropolis
music video, featuring Gabrielle Lee (voice) (2017) – 3’50”

The utopian society – where everything is perfect and balanced – or so we think. Usually when a situation is too perfect, the universe has a way of bring chaos to order, and order to chaos. Truly the only way to avoid being disappointed is to be comfortable with chaos. “Repeat” is an example where we see the continual fascination with the idea of the ‘perfect’ entity, only to be continually disappointed when expectations fail to become realized, begging the question – if every utopian society humans have generated is upended, why don’t we focus on embracing chaos in our current society?

Ethan Castro is a hard-of-hearing Digital Composition PhD Student at UC Riverside. Despite being born with complications that nearly destroyed his hearing, Ethan has been developing and operating the music industry division of his company, EDGE Original Inc., since he was 14 years old. Through his company, Ethan has performed with Artists all over the world, DJing, Drumming, and Producing. Through his studies at UC Riverside, Ethan is working on some literally earthshaking methods to change the way the audiences experience music, using his own productions as a testing ground.

Beto Machado
“Du hast mich gerufen — Da bin Ich…!”
video and electronic music (2017) – 6’56”

Audiovisual composition based in a compilation of fragments of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, exploring the possibilities to reconnect Love & Fear, Seven Sins & Death in a short trajectory between a kiss and the last breath… The sonic texture and sound atmosphere to this new interpretation is a collage remix of processed sounds & noises using granular technique…

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1965), Beto Machado studied Composition at FAAM – São Paulo (2006), and Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, Netherlands (2013/14)… Composer, sound artist and electronic musician, interested in field recordings, noises, audio-visual installations & technology, modular synthesizers, developing music softwares, building electronic instruments, everything related to produce material for new compositions and implement platforms to live performances…

Walter Ruttmann / Antonio D’Amato
Opus III
video and sound track (2017) – 3’25”

This piece is a soundtrack composed expressly for a short abstract movie by Walter Ruttmann, titled Lichtspiel Opus III (1925). Previously I had composed a couple of pieces inspired by modern abstract paintings, where I tried maximizing the transmission of emotions through a synesthetic transposition of abstract paintings into music. Art synesthesia is an interaction of different sensory modalities, assumed that in certain conditions a single sense could activate the others. The first idea came up while I was visiting an exhibition on Italian futurism at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unfortunately the work by Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, who were two filmmakers associated with the futurist movement, has been lost. We just have an article (Abstract cinema – Chromatic music, 1912), where they describe their attempt to realize a direct translation of music into colours and shapes, applying coloured paint directly to film frames. The connection with Prometheus, the Poem of Fire (1908-1910) by Aleksandra Scriabin – where the composer also wrote a visual score with coloured shapes and lights, to be performed on the stage by a keyboard controller similar to an organ – is intriguing. The abstract movies by Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann, dating around the 1920s seem to be an expected evolution of the above mentioned research. We could really call their artwork visual music, because of their emphasis on qualities as rhythm, tempo, movement, counterpoint and harmony, in the kinetic of colours and forms. Ruttmann was a violinist and cellist, but he wasn’t casual. Ruttmann, formerly a painter in his early abstract films followed the futurists’ idea of coordinating music with colours and moving shapes. In his effort he used some animation techniques that would be adopted later in the animation industry. In this experimentation the author investigates the possibility of a new grammar of forms and colours, through a dual reduction of forms into basic shapes and colours into basic tints, and the study of the mutual relations in their kinetic movements. However he didn’t adopt an invariable correspondence of colour or geometric shape and pitch, opting for a subjective and more expressive relations of elements. Though Opus III was created as a silent animated film without soundtrack, few years later Hanns Eisler wrote the music for this film, for a performance at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1927.

Here I propose my piece composed as a soundtrack following strictly – frame by frame – the original silent movie. I adopted a free association of forms and sounds, working mostly on progressive timbre mutations, where the same shape appears many a time. The dislocation of the shapes is mostly reflected in a pitch change, but the behaviour is occasionally reversed or more complex. The goal is to achieve the merging of communicative strengths from different art forms.” – Antonio D’Amato.

Roberta Medina / Davi Valois / Bruna Cabral
Metrohit
video and percussion (2017) – 3’02”

Metrohit uses the idea of a percussion power as being able to become science. As the theme we chose: Machine (Wo)Man/Android. We decided to use some scenes from a Concert from Bruna Cabral with the transformation scene from Maria in Metropolis. Here the percussionist is trying to do it for herself, trying to become better… better… until she turns into a not-human being (the video will still be worked on). Using some noises and sounds from the presentation of Bruna Cabral, and the composition from Davi Valois, we were able to put together a scene where the percussion becomes able to create in a Laboratoy an android being. When you are trying your best to get the maximum power you have, even if it means turning yourself into a Machine.

Davi Valois is a Brazilian composer, arranger and bass player resident in Belém do Pará. Started his music studies at age 12 studying classical guitar, music theory and harmony with local music teachers and musicians. After switching to the Electric Bass a couple of years later Davi started to play in the local music scene with other music students. After finishing High School he began formal academic studies at Conservatório Carlos Gomes as an undergraduate student in the musical composition and arrangement course in the Pará’s State University (UEPA) studying with renowned Brazilian composers like Sergio Molina and Paulo Tiné, also studied with professor Nestor Alderete from the University of Cordoba(Argentina). Davi is currently working in a great variety of musical contexts from pop/rock to jazz, classical and Avant Garde both as a composer and performer.

Bruna Cabral is a graduate student at Folkwang Universität der Künste, Master in Professional Performance, instrument: Percussion, in the class of Michael Pattmann. Has B.A. with focusing in Music, habilitation in Percussion at Universidade do Estado do Pará (UEPA) partnership with Carlos Gomes Foundation, class of 2013. Began her studies in music in 2007, at Carlos Gomes Institute (Belém do Pará, Brazil), in Technical Course of Music in Percussion and Drum Set. Had studied with the following Teachers and Professors: Ms. Cláudia Oliveira (BRA/MEX/FRA), Esp. Ricardo Aquino (BRA), Mariano Primo (BRA), Cláudio Costa (BRA), Marcos Matos (BRA), Mário Cruz (BRA), Flávio Souza (BRA) and Luiz Roberto Cioce Sampaio. She had played in many Music Festivals commissioned by the Carlos Gomes Foundation, such as the Internacional Music Festival of Pará (FIMUPA), Rhythm Fest (Percussion Festival), Brazilian Music Festival, Bands Panel of FUNARTE, as well at others National and International Festivals, performing Premieres Solo and Group pieces.

Roberta de Lacerda Medina is 32 years old, from Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. There she completed her bachelor’s degree in communication / media studies (Advertising in the main study). After her studies, she gained a lot of experience with audiovisual production for advertising and television programs. In Germany (since 2011) she has also worked with videos production, online marketing, social media, theater and festival organization. In September 2015 she began her master’s degree in “Professional Media Creation” at the SAE Institute (Bochum) in cooperation with the Folkwang University and will now be finished by the end of September.

Alexander Pettai
Prelude of The Instant World
shots from the silent film “Metropolis” and generative sound (2017) – 1’54”

This work is an experiment, and the experiment comes from all sides. We will try to explain the way our perception of art works. When we watch a movie, we try to understand what did the author mean by making those shoots. When we listen to a piece of music, something from the past may come to our mind because of associations. But what the work of art consists of as itself, that is created by the author, and what is it made of – all of that will always be a great mystery of creation and inspiration.

This work is technically neither a result of a film director or videographer’s work, nor a musical composition, but is still totally new self- contained work. How has it been created? The picture you see contains the shots from the silent movie “Metropolis” made 90 years ago and the shots are all blended and mixed. The color correction is made on the shots so they might not be recognized, but the author underlines how important is the presence of those shots. This is because every piece of art bears the inherited memory of what has been made 90, 200, 1000 years ago. Also the music track has not been generated by the author but with help of a special program, which may actually translate the image of every shot into a piece of sound. All of that may seem like throwing stones into water or something like that but you may feel that this is a real piece of art both from the side of music and video art. It is worth mentioning that the name reminds us that everything in this world is connected with thin threads but people rarely speak about it.

Alexander Pettai was born in Estonia (1959) and lives in Moscow since 1977. He studied at the Moscow Art School (1982-86) and at SCAN (Interdisciplinary Expertise Centre for Computer Graphics, Computer Animation and Multimedia), Groningen, The Netherlands (1993-94). His works consist on paintings, drawings, computer graphics, and media art; they are in private collections in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the U.S.