M.E.M.E. Gatherings:
July 18, 1998 & August 1, 1998
Here is a photo of John and André
at the July 18th meeting.
M.E.M.E. convened twice recently in an abbreviated fashion, sort of mini-MEME's. The first of these occurred on the 18th of July 1998 in Naperville, and consisted of Michael Firman, André Stordeur, and John Papiewski. At this meeting three experiments were committed to tape, a warm-up improvisation based upon patches that exhibited chaotic responses (this was inspired by a recent article in CMJ), a piece that was based on the concept of silence consisting of each player being assigned a limited palette of sounds (John had a S/H sound and a Phaser sound, André had percussive sounds, and Mike was assigned Ring Modulated and FM sounds) and instructed to "open up" the soundscape by allowing intervals of silence within the piece, and finally an experiment with tonal centers.
The second meeting took place in Milwaukee on the 1st of August 1998, and consisted of Michael Firman, André Stordeur, and Grant Richter. Again three experiments were committed to tape. The first was an extension of the "open soundscape" piece that was done at the last meeting. The same sort of instructions were in effect but this time two of the items in the sound palette were rhythmic figures. The second piece was also an extension of an experiment done at the last session, that being the "tone center" concept. This time we worked around a simple scale fragment (after everyone tuned together) with the working concept being "beauty". The last piece that we worked with was a duet between Grant and André based on Indian themes with various impressions of Indian instruments being realized on synthesizer and samplers.