Award-winning composer/performer Bhob Rainey (Nmperign, The BSC) will present “Axon Ladder”, a quadrophonic piece he developed with Chris Cooper (Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase, Fat Worm of Error) over the past two years. The composers embraced their love for sci-fi / horror, utilizing utopian and dystopian genre concepts as generative material – namely, machine learning and artificial life. The striking poetic qualities of these algorithmic techniques in operation reveal music that is teeming with activity – complex, dense, playful, terrifying. Axon Ladder is a highly immersive experience with immense energy and emotional content that somehow manages to elude crass spectacularization – within all these layers of noise, there is warm silence. Bhob Rainey will perform a live diffusion of the full, 60-minute piece.
Bhob Rainey is an award-winning composer/performer whose work extends to the realm of electronic and algorithmic composition. He is known for a masterful yet often understated technique that transforms the soprano saxophone into an electronic-like, textural, or percussive device. Rainey has contributed a significant set of extensions to the SuperCollider language, collaborating not only with algorithms and electrons, but also with regarded composers such as Ralf Wehowsky, Jason Lescalleet, and Chris Cooper. In 2013, Rainey was awarded the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts for his work in these areas. In 2014, the American Composers Forum (Philadephia Chapter) awarded him a Subito grant for work on Axon Ladder. bhobrainey.net