On November 17th at the Birenbaum, TIMARA majors were invited to showcase their works in an Electrophonics concert. As the first Electrophonics since our March 2020 Exquisite Electrophonics event, this was a particularly special occasion for the TIMARA community. The concert featured new works by nine students, including Maya McCollum, Claire O’Brocta, David Skaggs, Gabriel Baskin, Michael Gaspari, Sage Liem, Tempest Baum, Brock Bierly, and Rachel Yee.The evening featured stereo and quadraphonic electroacoustic compositions, audiovisual experiments, and live improvisation. 

Junior Maya McCollum kicked off the concert with her piece, Along a Petrified River. Maya’s piece featured live improvisation on her wearable sculpture, modular processing, and animation. Maya describes the sculpture as, a wearable map of a paddling journey through the Oswegatchie River and the Stillwater Reservoir in the Adirondacks. Items, frozen in resin, were collected from campsites along the way, and were chosen for their representations of these places of human/nature intersection at the moment of my visit. In her live improvisation, she aimed to reanimate these places, creating imaginary textures reminiscent of the water, the pathway that brought [her] there.

In A Supermarket Tour for Elders, First-year David Skaggs shared a 10-minute pre-recorded improvisation to vintage supermarket footage on TIMARA’s own Buchla 200 analog synthesizer. Sophomore Sage Liem experimented with quadraphonic sound in Emergence: (Destroyed/Rework) and senior Tempest Baum took inspiration from plunderphonics in revisiting material from their album, Midnight Depression to create a new work: Midnight Depression Revisited and Remixed: Halloween Computer Screen (An exercise in self-indulgent/self-destructive catharsis). Additional fixed media works by Gabe Baskin, Brock Bierly, Claire O’Brocta, and Michael Gaspari showcased the broad and diverse aesthetic world TIMARA majors explore in their creative practices. The concert concluded with a quadraphonic contemplation of the Fragility of Humanity by TIMARA junior Rachel Yee. 

If you missed this concert, don’t worry! We will showcase more new work by TIMARA students in the Spring semester Electrophonics concert.