PARANEURO: 11/10/2004
ELECTROACOUSTIC STRUCTURES FOR THREE IMPROV MUSICIANS AND AUDIO PROCESSORS
Three musicians of varying ages, interests, character.
Diverse experiences with a diverse range of music, different lives lived in different countries.
Three different worlds.
In the beginning, there is only silence.
And then a new world is born.
On the boundary between dreams and reality, where the real and the virtual meet, music is born on the wave of the present moment.
Three worlds become one, at least for the HERE and NOW.
No need for anything.
No need for plans, no need for words.
Only the silence in the beginning.
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PARANEURO is an international association of improv musicians who combine traditional acoustic instruments with modern digital technology. The instruments' sounds are modified using effect processors, and a sampler integrates several different sounds, often further modified, into the concert performance. Analog synthesizers create surfaces of immediately modulated and processed sound. Traditional percussion instruments are complemented and replaced by the clanging and banging of metal objects. Musical notes and industrial "noise" form two opposing poles of the same musical language. Combining these possibilities opens up new perspectives which would have been unimaginable not too long ago.
PARANEURO originally emerged by splitting off from the NEURO. The absence of a harmonic instrument (in Neuro played by pianist Emil Viklický) allows the musicians to free themselves in order to improvise with sound and all its layers and colors. In this way, the group's members started to consciously work with what had originally been a make-shift solution for combining acoustic and electric much more consistently and comprehensively than in their original quartet. The new approach offers them a continuously evolving musical language, with each concert offering an ever more subtle combination of sounds.
In light of its international membership, the trio performs infrequently. This recording for Czech Radio represents the peak of the group's work to date. Over its seven years of existence, PARANEURO has performed at various festivals (e.g. Alternativa, Next Wave, Valašský Špalíček) and also provided music for a staging of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen at Liberec's F.X. Šalda Theatre.
PARANEURO: 11/10/2004 was created for Radioateliér's PremEdice and is an edited collage of an original amount of around seventy minutes of musical material recorded on 11 October 2004 at Studio B in Karlín, Prague.
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Jarmo Sermilä (1939, Flügelhorn, electronics)
composer and organizer of musical events in Finland. His work includes a large number of compositions for various instruments, including large orchestral compositions and musical pieces for ballet. The main focus of his work, however, is chamber music and electroacoustic music. In the 1970s, he was the director of the Finnish Music Information Centre. Around the same time, he co-founded Finnish Radio's Experimental Music Studio, where he was active as art director. From 1987 to 1999, Sermilä was the art director of the Viitasaari/Time of Music contemporary music festival. In addition to his activities in the field of contemporary music, he is also a well-known and acknowledged jazz trumpet player, and he runs his own music and record label.
Miroslav Posejpal (1952, cello, electronics)is an improv musician who was active in various groups (together with saxophonist Jiří Durman) on the Czech alternative music scene from 1977 until the early 1990s. Since 1992, he has been a member of Alex Švamberk's Tonton Macoutes. He later collaborated with Švamberk on the album vs. (Viklický vs. Švamberk) and in the ensembles NEURO and PARANEURO. He also composes his own electroacoustic music.
Alex Švamberk (1961, sampler, metal, percussion, electronics) creates performances and audio structures. His sound collages reveal the influence of industrial, electronic, and alternative music. Since the early 1990s, he has headed the Tonton Macoutes, who straddle the line between electroacoustic "chamber music" and performance, in particular Butoh-influenced dance. Shortly afterwards, he also became a member of the industrial noise group Suicidal Meditations and their successor S/M.