Altered Images @ Rediscoveries 4

Rediscoveries 4 Poster Altered Images will be performed as part of Rediscoveries 4, a new series of performances of electroacoustic music and sound art events, presented by SERG (Sound Emporium Research Group) from the Department of Music at University of Aberdeen. A new iteration of the Discoveries series which dates back to the early 1990s, the series allows audiences to (re)discover works from all over the world. This performance includes:

More info here and the concert takes place at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen.

Interview and videos from Buenos Aires performances – April 2015

pete_arg In April 2015 I went to Argentina for performances and to work with the improvising group Fulgor al Bies (Fabiana Galante, José María D’Angelo, Eliseo Tapía and Luis Conde). Fulgor visited Aberdeen in November 2014 when they performed at the sound festival.This was my 4th visit to Buenos Aires, but the first time I’d been there as a performer/composer – previously it had been working with Crear Vale la Pena helping them set up workshops on creativity for artists and teachers in the city.

As well as working with students at UNTREF, I gave a talk and concert for LIPM, Argentina’s research centre for electroacoustic music, at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. Carlos Murat took some video of the talk (simultaneously translated into Spanish by Fabiana) and put it on YouTube as a number of videos. The quality of the audio for the pieces is not good but the talk will hopefully be interesting. They can be found here:

Bonus track – Fulgor al Bies (feat. Pete Stollery); Work in Progress (improvisation) – my first time, but almost certainly not the last!

Whilst I was there, I gave an interview to Bernardo Piñiero from CEIArtE which can be found here.

A genius who invents a noise

Following the successful première of From Aberdeen, to the hamlets of the Argentine for alto sax and fixed media last year, composed to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Adolphe Sax, Richard Ingham will perform the piece again in the sound festival on Nov 5th at King’s College Chapel, University of Aberdeen. The piece will be performed along with the other seven commissioned pieces from composers / performers: Sally Beamish, Mary Ann Kennedy, Martin Kershaw, Richard Michael, Pete Stollery, James Ross, Fraser Burke, Stuart Semple all of whom will be present to perform their pieces with Richard.

City of Ghosts

The Aberdonian photographer George Washington Wilson (1823-1893) was a pioneer of commercial photography not just in Scotland but internationally. His images of Aberdeen’s civic grandeur in the late Victorian period helped to establish a proud vision of the city’s distinctive identity. The photographic collector Jonathan Ross, a contemporary of Washington Wilson’s, described early photographs of urban space as creating “cities of ghosts”, because long exposure times meant that figures passing through the frame while the shutter was open were glimpsed only as blurred traces of movement.

In March 2015, the photographer John Perivolaris revisited locations around the city photographed by Washington Wilson and his team, recording the urban environment of contemporary Aberdeen. It soon became clear that several of their vantage points had disappeared or were difficult to find, obscured by the barriers and security devices which regulate movement in contemporary cities. Compensation was to be found in the sweeping panoramas opened up by the roofs of Aberdeen’s numerous multi-storey car parks. Thus, it seems that a fundamental question to emerge from this dialogue with Washington Wilson concerns the current meaning of ‘public’ or ‘civic’ space, a concept that Washington Wilson’s images of nineteenth-century urban life do much to articulate.

City of Ghosts is an exhibition of fifteen photographs of revisted sites. I have created a soundscape to accompany the 15 images, played over 8 equally spaced loudspeakers. Sounds are recorded in and near the locations of the photographs, along with others recorded in the city, to enhance what the visitor is looking at as well as providing an overall image, a 16th image which combines elements from each of the latent soundscapes within the photographs.

The exhibition runs from 16th October to January 2016 and is situated in the Gallery space in the Sir Duncan Rice Library at the University of Aberdeen. The fifteen photographs taken by John can be seen here.

Granite Sound

As part of National Theatre of Scotland’s Granite! celebration of Aberdeen, join us for a one-hour sound walk with accompanying radiophonic soundtrack listened to over headphones, composed by Pete Stollery and Suk-Jun Kim, featuring music by Phillip Cooke and students on the MMus Sonic Arts programme at the University of Aberdeen and broadcast by SHMU.

A number of locations, or dwelling points, will be joined together via the walk and will reflect an aspect of granite and the history of Aberdeen through sound and around themes of excavating and exporting.

More details here and details of the routes will follow shortly.