Alex Carpenter (Guitar, Laser, Live Video & Audio Delay Systems) :: James Ross (Guitar, Live Audio Delay System) :: Richard Lainhart (Guitar, Electronics, Film):: An Evening of New Immersive Audio Visual Work :: June 26, 2010; 8:30 - 11:00 pm :: Youth Group Gallery, 19 Hope St. (Basement), Brooklyn, NY.

image: Alex Carpenter’s live video delay system - Photo by Laura Coady

ALEX CARPENTER is an Australian-born musician, video artist and researcher based in New York City. He has performed extensively as a soloist playing guitar, keyboard and electric zither through a self-designed multi-amp and delay network he calls the Live Audio Delay System, and has also independently produced and coordinated over twenty large-scale ensemble performance and multi-media events under the moniker Music of Transparent Means.

Music of Transparent Means was Alex’s chief project in Australia from 2002 to 2007, initially providing a platform for his meticulously-tuned wineglass inventions, then later incorporating instruments such as prepared guitars, woodwind, strings, percussion and brass, and featuring as many as 21 performers at a single time.

Alex’s most recent performance activity has centered on his own Live Video Delay System, an extension of the audio system which employs multiple cameras and extreme color isolation to facilitate a unique looping and layering of live laser drawings. The system received its first test session at MELA Foundation, NYC, in September 2009, and continues to be seen in performance by New York audiences.

Alex has performed alongside artists such as Francisco Lopez (Madrid), Will Guthrie (Melbourne), Kyle Bobby Dunn and James Ross (NYC), and has produced several CD and DVD releases on his own label, Vanished Records. See:
http://www.myspace.com/theliveaudiodelaysystem

RICHARD LAINHART is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker - a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, Field Studies, Infrequency, VICMOD, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 150 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, a full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection. In January 2010, he performed as a featured Live Media audio-visual artist at Netmage 2010 in Bologna, Italy. See: http://vimeo.com/rlainhart

JAMES ROSS is a guitarist and composer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, he has studied guitar at the University of Pittsburgh and the Mannes College of Music in New York City. He is currently studying North Indian classical music and composition with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.

A composer in a variety of genres, James has written music for orchestral and chamber ensembles, as well as solo music for the guitar and the zhongruan (a type of Chinese lute). In addition to scored works, he has created electronic pieces and recordings of improvised music.

Recent performances as a composer and performer on the electric guitar, laptop and other instruments include sets at The Bell House; a performance with Kyle Bobby Dunn at Issue Project Room; at Goodbye Blue Monday with David Beardsley; providing live music for Katherine Liberovskaya and Ursula Scherrer’s OptoSonic Tea series at Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn; with video artist Alex Carpenter at The Tank in Manhattan; and at Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center as part of the guitar ensemble for Rhys Chatham’s “A Crimson Grail.”

As a classical guitarist, James has performed as a soloist and ensemble player throughout the Northeastern Unites States. He received a Solo Recitalist Fellowship in 1992 from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and won the 1993 Mannes College of Music Concerto Competition, resulting in a performance of Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Fantasia para un Gentilhombre,” at Symphony Space in New York City. See: http://www.facebook.com/jrossmusic