performances
20 videos, of performances from oldest 1977 to newest 2024 … stay tuned for more… thanks to all my great collaborators !
Video documentation of 1977 premiere performance of “Quay”, an improvised suite for solo inside-the-piano. at the Pangaea Arts Center in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. The recording was shot using the Sony Portapak reel-to-reel video recorder.
The Cyclone Gallery was an event produced in 1983 by Johanna Poethig at the South of Market Art Center in San Francisco. Paintings were installed on cyclone fences surrounding the outdoor patio area in front of the audience entrance to the large hanger-like building. Percussionists William Winant and Todd Manley improvised on gongs, springs, metal bowls, original instruments and other industrial materials. Their sounds were picked up with microphones and processed by Chris Brown with his newly built computer controlled analog signal processors.
His Master’s Voice (1983) was my first interactive solo piece that exploited a computer-based live data feedback signal processing system. Pitches and amplitude from the piano performance were applied directly to electronic modification and live-sampling of its own sounds. This performance was from the first European tour of The HUB which took place in the former Congress Hall of the DDR in Berlin in 1993.
Video of excerpts from the 1987 performance in New York City of The HUB collaborating electronically with half the group at the Clocktower and half a few blocks away at the Experimental Intermedia loft. The group coordinated performances of their pieces using original software, two 8-bit microcomputers and a 300 baud modem to share data at a distance way out of earshot from each other. Members of the HUB: John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Tim Perkis, Mark Trayle, Phil Stone, and Scot Gresham-Lancaster.
Transmision Naranja, 2002 in Mexico City, part of the Bienal de Radio. Chris Brown and Guillermo Galindo improvised on electronic instruments mixed into 4 channels that were broadcast on 4 different FM frequencies and tuned in by the audience holding portable FM radios. This was the first of our live audience interactive “Transmission” performances that we performed over the next decade that was modeled after Philippine composer Jose Maceda’s massive masterpiece Ugnayan (1974) for 21 radio stations tuned in by organized audiences throughout the Metro Manila area.
An excerpt of the HUB performing as part of the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in 2004.
Thomas Lehn, analog synthesist improvising with the computer network music band The HUB in a studio performance in Cologne, Germany, in 2005.
TeleSon 2005 premiere performance in 2005 in Barcelona, Spain opening the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference). It was the first performance of the ReacTable, an electronic musical instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface that was developed within the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain by Sergi Jordà, Marcos Alonso, Martin Kaltenbrunner and Günter Geiger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactable
A virtual quartet was formed by two performers playing one Reactable in Barcelona connected via internet and two other performers playing a 2nd Reactable in Linz, Austria. All sounds were generated by the players moving objects on the tables which activated sounds I composed using SuperCollider open source software. The players in each location heard and could interact with all of the sounds activated from both locations on the virtual table instrument, with slight differences in time due to internet delays.
An excerpt from an outdoor performance in on a weekend in August 2011 at the ShuMart mall in Quezon City (Metro-Manila). Titled GanGan-Cubao X it was a collaboration performance between a few of the leading electronic art and music performers in the Philippines and Chris Brown. Tad Ermitaño projected video on the sidewalk of the makeshift stage where Chris and composer Malek Lopez improvised computer music, the inimitable DJ artist Arvin Nogueras aka Caliph8 lay down beats from the turntables, while radical noise musician and promoter Tengal slammed on drumset. The heavily improvised music was organized in workshops at the Green Papaya Artspace, and it was transmitted on multiple FM channels to the car-radios of a Manila car club that was organized to expand the sound system. Shoppers and party-ers in the mall carried on — what a great night it was !
The HUB performing at the Network Music Festival in Birmingham, UK in 2013. Messaging connections between the performers were displayed for the audience.
Solo performance in the Auditorio Murray Schafer at the Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico City at “VIVO” festival 2014. Petals uses a spatial detector to inflect a stream of samples flowing from the laptop running homemade Supercollider software.
A duet performance in 2015 at Mills College. Van Anh Vo is playing the Vietnamese monochord instrument dan bao, which has a flexible bridge played with her left hand, like a “whammy bar”, to change the pitch creating sumptuous glissandi and elegant vibrati. My computer program tracks her pitches and I can use the distance of my left hand from a dome sensor on my keyboard to control the frequencies I captured from her instrument, changing pitch ranges, speeds and loudness of my synthesized voices.
A 2014 performance by the Frank Grabowski, Chris Brown, and William Winant trio at Roulette in Brooklyn 2017. The trio plays free improvs with an emphasis on live electronic processing of the sounds of all the players.
Nate Wooley, trumpet, Zeena Parkins, harp, and Chris Brown, piano playing the 13-11-7-6 section of Brown’s piece Six Primes. The music is played in a 13-limit just intonation. The performance was at The Stone in New York City in 2017.
FUZZYBUNNY in 2020 playing a trio on the “Principles of Non-Isolation in Audio” show of soundcrack.net.
Fuzzybunny is a high-powered electronic improvisation and composition trio consisting of Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Tim Perkis. All-out “carnallectual” electronic improv, rocky-roaded with pop-music fragments and sonic gags that define some kind of new style, difficult to describe. Edwin Pouncey in The Wire called them “a total meltdown of the senses…a trio of smartarses with nothing to say.”
The group’s members are a subset of members of the HUB. We played this show from our own homes, thanks to internet magic from soundcrack.net.
GOING UNDER (2020) Each of six players plays one gangsa, a small, bronze flat-gong from the mountainous Cordillera region, Luzon, Philippines, traditionally played in unison by ensembles where each gangsa produces a different pitch. Each player holds their gangsa over a tub of water, strikes it with a stick, then lowers it gradually into the water, producing a descending glissando.
The score for this piece consists of a six bar-graphs displaying the number of newly confirmed Covid-19 infections on every day between March 1 and June 30, 2020 in six different states of the United States. Each player plays the data of one of these states: New York, Florida, Illinois, Texas, Washington and California.
A performance on the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 2023 at The Lab. The performers are Ben Davis, cello, William Winant, percussion and Chris Brown, piano and computer. The electronic medium in this piece functions to assist the musicians in playing in complex polyrhythmic patterns. The rhythmic patterns of the piece are scored and they repeat a fixed number of times, but within the patterns all players improvise variations.
79 Passes of a Dumball (2023)
A video excerpt of …
A performance in the David Ireland House that follows the graphic score by the artist David Ireland in his home which is now an artist space in San Francisco. Chris Brown, keyboard electronics, Johanna Poethig, voice and actions, and Ava Koohbor, electronic music play the house, activating sound in the second floor performance space where simultaneously the audience moves freely around it to hear sound from every possible angle.
RhythmiChrome performance at the Angelica Festival 2024 in Bologna Italy. (excerpts)
Chris Brown, virtual piano and interactive electronics.
Johanna Poethig, video.
Jongleurs is the duo of Chris Brown, piano & electronics and Ben Davis, cello and percussion.
These excerpts are taken from a set at 2220Arts in Los Angeles in January 2024.