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INTERRUPTIONS #2 Once Upon a Time in CA 12.01.2011 (60' ) Curated by Chris Brown Just as the struggle for the Western U.S. in the late 19th century revolved around the construction of the railroad, the struggle for global domination was waged around the development of the new electronic communication technologies during the late 1970s and 1980s in Silicon Valley. It was a free-wheeling time for start-ups run out of garages by a bunch of do-it-yourself geeks and venture capitalists. Hanging around its edges and feeding off the surplus of its aircraft and electronics industries, a gaggle of music experimenters were dreaming of a future where technology might enable new kinds of musical freedom – freedom from orchestras and scores, freedom from scales and temperament, freedom from the academy, freedom from the music business, and, most of all, freedom for noise. Free improvisation was the lingua franca where jazz musicians, junk percussionists, instrument inventors, and computer hackers could come together to play. It was within this rag-tag musical stew that six idealist musicians, seduced into computer programming, connected their primitive 8-bit microcomputers into a network in search of complexly beautiful, automated behaviors. They were inspired by the home-brew orchestra of Harry Partch, the indeterminacy of John Cage, the electronic noise of David Tudor, with side helpings of the mysterioso of Captain Beefheart and the sonic ritual of Sun Ra. Living within a hippie backwash nirvana philosophy but confronted by the reality of wars launched from their own backyards into El Salvador and Nicaragua, their music was a quixotic swords-into-plowshares fantasy morphing uncontrollably into shouts of joy and rage. Listen or download here: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial/interruptions_chris_brown/capsula ==== Paul Brown - based in OZ Nov 2012 to March 2013 http://www.paul-brown.com == http://www.brown-and-son.com OZ Landline +61 (0)7 3391 0094 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900 OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown ==== Synapse Artist-in-Residence - Deakin University http://www.deakin.edu.au/itri/cisr/projects/hear.php Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html ====