22 Jul 2026
Soundscape | @c
Essayby @c
Title: AZL2 (Several Species of)
Thank you to: Rodrigo Carvalho, Fernando José Pereira
“This piece is created by many agents interacting and dissolving into one another. It is a viscous place-time where sound objects, and the processes that drive them, enmesh and entangle, allowing the listener to join in through listening. AZL2 (Several Species of) is part of an ongoing series of live performances and (audio and video) compositions collectively titled 30×N, created with visual artist Rodrigo Carvalho.”
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"We make music with computers by exploring the rift between computers — as tools, instruments, alien machines that are intentional and cognitive systems — and us — as composers, performers, humans. We make music by designing sounds and the conditions for those sounds to manifest and mutate, and by organising systems of actions and events and the spaces for those to happen, sometimes independently of us as composers or performers. We perform and compose with computers, engaging in relationships where we expect the computational to have agency in the shaping of the performance, and where each performer is brought together in a way that allows them to feel the agency of the others while expressing their own. We make music by allowing the rift between every agent to be felt and to give rise to the pieces.
Each piece in this series results from the joint exploration of a phase-space, a process from which a situated, specific, place-time emerges. Recordings such as this one fixate a structure as one of the many possibilities to manifest from the tensions and rifts in this mesh. When we compose and program, but also when we perform and inject randomness to the process, or when we record, we experience what becomes from this system that we’re also a part of, we discover what may fall into place as the rules are set and let to run; we bring new sound objects to the system, transforming its phase-space. This is an ecological piece in which instruments, performers, composition, and space of performance are all melded, sometimes swapping positions or dissolving into one another, and all affecting each other, pulling and pushing and shaping the work."
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The Soundscape section is coordinated by Fernando José Pereira
BIOGRAPHY
Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela have collaborated as @c since 2000, composing, performing and creating installations. They often work with other artists and collectives in a practice marked by radical experimentation with computational sound. In 2003 they started Crónica, a label dedicated to experimental music and sound art.
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interview
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