[pe158]Pet The Tiger
Hail The Traveler
[pe156]Philip Gayle
Mammoth Flower
[pe155]Seeded Plain
Badminton, The Volleys
[pe154]Bryan Day & Dereck Higgins
Woven Territories
[pe153]John Krausbauer & David Maranha
[pe152]Evan Lipson
Echo Chamber
[pe151]Guro Skumsnes Moe & Philippe Petit
[pe150]Brasilia Laptop Orchestra
10 yEars aLive
[pe149]Bill Brovold
Pi
[pe148]Illusion of Safety & Z'ev
[pe147]Naturaliste
Temporary Presence
[pe146]Euphotic
Isopleths
[pe145]Pet The Tiger
Gaze Emanations
[pe144]Ashtray Navigations & Anla Courtis
Protozoic Rock Express
[pe143]Alan Sondheim
Future Speed Future
[pe142]Albert / Day / Kreimer
Mutations
[pe141]Bill Brovold's Stone Soup
Michael Goldberg Variations
[pe140]Michael Gendreau
Polvo Seran, Mas Polvo Enamorado
[pe139]Hélène Breschand & Elliott Sharp
Chansons du Crépuscule
[pe138]Alan Sondheim / Azure Carter / Luke Damrosch
LIMIT
[pe137]Collision Stories
Those Missing Will Complete Us
[pe136]Ghost In The House
Second Sight
[pe135]Henry Kaiser / Alan Licht
Skip to the Solo
[pe134]Peter Aaron / Brian Chase Duo
Purges
[pe133]Alan Sondheim / Azure Carter / Luke Damrosch
Threnody
[pe132]Ou
Scrambled!
[pe131]Many Arms & Toshimaru Nakamura
[pe130]Ben Bennett / Jack Wright
Tangle
[pe129]Period
2
[pe128]Music For Hard Times
City of Cardboard
[pe127]Tetuzi Akiyama & Anla Courtis
Naranja Songs
[pe126]Massimo Falascone
Variazioni Mumacs
[pe125]Auris + Gino
Rub
[pe124]Honnda
Fantasy Remover
[pe123]Azure Carter & Alan Sondheim
Avatar Woman
[pe122]Various Artists
The Unscratchable Itch: A Tribute To Little Fyodor
[pe121]Nels Cline / Elliott Sharp
Open The Door
[pe120]Pretty Monsters
[pe119]Cactus Truck
Brand New For China!
[pe118]Belcher / Bivins Double Quartet
EXO
[pe117]Normal Love
Survival Tricks
[pe116]Ron Anderson / Robert L. Pepper / David Tamura / Philippe Petit
Closed Encounters of the 4 Minds
[pe115]Philip Gayle
Babanço Total
[pe114]Dino Felipe
Sorta' Bleu
[pe113]Ydestroyde
Synzosizer
[pe112]Pilesar
Radio Friendly
[pe111]Little Fyodor
Peace is Boring
[pe110]Courtis / Yamamoto / Yoshimi
Live at Kanadian
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Viovox
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60 Metonymies
[pe107]Shelf Life
Ductworks
[pe106]A Tomato a Day
The Moon is Green
[pe105]D + D
[pe104]The Mighty Vitamins
Take-Out
[pe103]Smut / OVO
Split 7"
[pe102]Bill Horist / Marron
Sleephammer
[pe101]Richard Trosper
The Ocean
[pe100]Shinyville
No Sleep till Babylon
[pe99]Lisi
Damn It!!
[pe98]Poormen
[pe97]Emily Hay / Marcos Fernandes
We Are
[pe96]The Machine Gun TV
GO->
[pe95]Monotract
Live In Japan
[pe94]Mike Pride
The Ensemble is an Electronic Device
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Cinética
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Automatic
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[pe83]Knot + Over
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Vertonen 9
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Lovely Hazel
[pe80]Mogami
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Oceans in the Sun
[pe78]Diaz-Infante / Forsyth / Scherzberg
A Barren Place of Overwhelming Simplicity
[pe77]Angels
[pe76]Khoury / Shearer / Hall
Braille
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Live in December
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[pe70]The Bunny Brains
Holiday Massacre '98
[pe69]Jack Wright & Bob Marsh
Birds in the Hand
[pe68]Free From Disguise
[pe67]Jad Fair & Jason Willett
Superfine
[pe66]Baker / Baker / Bloor
Terza Rima
previous


Brasilia Laptop Orchestra - 10 yEars aLive
(Brasília, Brazil)



-XFM12-VI Filosofia e Ficcao (2013)
-Pulsos (2014)
-Impromptu Holofractal #20 (2015)
-XFM11-Jaime del Val Impromptu (2016)
-Tubo de Ensaios Impromptu (2017)
-Lis Marina Impromptu (2018)
-Dia Mundial da Agua Impromptu (2019)
-Covid-19 Impromptu Genomico #10 (2020)
-Insetos Impromptu #4 (2021)
-Bonus Track - Chuva Radioativa-Fallout (2020)




Featuring Conrado Silva,Eduardo Kolody, Ramiro Galas, Victor Valentim, Kiko Barretto, Philip Jones, Elias Melo Filho, Ricardo Borgmann, Victor Hugo Araujo, Joenio Costa, Jackson Mainho, Anesio Azevedo, Biophillick, Bryan Day and Eufrasio Prates

Reviews:
In the 10 years since its inception as a spin-off from founder and principal programmer Eufrasio Prates’s doctorate research in 2012, the Brasilia Laptop Orquestra has become both a regular institution on the Brasiliense experimental and electronic scene, and an uncompromising and challenging pioneer of new compositional ideas and technologies. The orchestra itself is a loose, ever changing collective that, over the years, has attracted a variety of musicians – trained and amateur, electronic and acoustic, experimental or just curious and open-minded – to participate in a range of performances and collaborations. Many of these musicians have appeared under other identities on Dionysian Industrial Complex in recent years. Eufrasio himself has exorcised his heavy metal identity as euFräktus, and collaborated as part of Bioborgs and within a larger supergroup on Enantiodromia. Nevertheless, it is BSBLOrk that represents and showcases the full extent of Eufrasio’s commitment to an avant-garde strategy: his ambition to push both musicians and audiences beyond the rules and conventions they already know, and to explore new systems of music making. The first feature of note, BSBLOrk is a live configuration for performance, where each member has their own speaker and is their own source of sound. The totality is mixed “in the air”, with all the acoustic qualities (and sometimes weaknesses) of the performance space; and every listener hears a subtly different version of the event depending on their position relative to the musicians. In some performances the orchestra is scattered throughout or even encircles the public. This obviously makes preserving and archiving the music a challenge. Until the COVID pandemic obliged BSBLOrk to adapt to a new kind of online performance, most of the recordings were snapshots from specific locations within an acoustic space. Often caught on mobile phones. On some pieces here, you will hear fragments of audience conversation or extraneous noise. Nevertheless what IS captured, is the essential situated embodiedness of the orchestra. Neither electronic music, nor experimentalism should be taken to imply that this music is an abstract, cerebral exercise, detached from the world. Quite the opposite. BSBLOrk is embedded within the world and embraces all aspects of it fully. This is particularly clear when considering three concerns that have cut across many works of the orchestra, throughout its 10 year history: physicality, play and political engagement. The most visible fact of BSBLOrk’s performance is the heavy use of camera as input and control device for its musical software. The players, either sitting or standing, are always in motion in front of their cameras. Whether through subtle hand manoeuvres or grand sweeps of the arm, there is a necessary physicality to performing these tracks. At the same time, Eufrasio’s software, with its fractal and chaotic nature, introduces resistance to the intentions of the players, forcing them to fight against it. The physical world is not so amenable to human attempts to order it, and the instability inherent in the software creates and reveals this physical dynamism in both musician and music. Furthermore, the cameras are often turned on the audience, inviting or pulling in their presence and movement as further input and evidence of the chaos of the world. This intersects BSBLOrk’s second dimension of concern: playfulness. Many scores are improvised through the enactment of, or ludic desecration of, game rules. In the “Pulses” scores (exemplified on this album with Pulsos Impromptu (2014)), players roll comically large dice to generate a sequence of random numbers that determine microscopic changes of frequency and rhythm in a field of drones and pings. (These dice have been used repeatedly in BSBLOrk’s history, to direct both musicians and collaborating dancers.) Playfulness is what mediates between rules and rule-breaking in Eufrasio’s work. Every BSBLOrk score starts with some kind of rule-system. But often spontaneous opportunities to subvert those same rules are enthusiastically seized upon. In fact, the release of this album on Dionysian Industrial Complex, is itself a subversion. To the extent that DIC has “rules”, it is that the music should be “composed” and “chosen” rather than a mere record of an improvisation. And yet, here we are with an album that is, in essence, a record of improvisations. The final dimension of BSBLOrk’s embrace of the world, is a political and social engagement: its music ranges from political satire, through environmental lament and on to eschatological role-play and theatre. This music is intended to mean something beyond the mere pleasures and pains of the listening experience. Again, the ludic sensibility is invoked to mediate between apparent opposites and sometimes to make horrors almost bearable. From the first track in this compilation, which was once performed live in a squatter camp of the MTST homeless workers movement, where children danced joyfully in front of the cameras, delighted at the absurd noise they created (the version here is different); to the final track, where the musicians are engaged in a fictional game of Mutually Assured Destruction, hurling virtual nuclear missiles at each other. The voices of politicians are transmuted into insects on Insetos Impromptu #4. On the Impromptu Lis Marina, accompanying the installation of the artist of the same name, musicians role-playing branches of dysfunctional government, wheel and deal, and even encourage the audience to bribe them to change their musical policies. In 2020, when the world obsessed with Covid-19, BSBLOrk sought to find beauty in converting its newly sequenced DNA to MIDI. In other words, BSBLOrk’s music is never comfortable or easy. It is always ABOUT something real. And reality can be both ugly and beautiful. BSBLOrk’s music is unpredictable and uncontrollable by design. It rejects and insults musical conventions. (In Holofractal Impromptu #20, performed at the Understanding Visual Music conference, trumpeter Ricardo Borgman is thrown into one-man battle against an array of randomized samples of classical music) Even its own members are sometimes frustrated by Eufrasio’s stern refusal of anything resembling rhythm and melody. But it continually throws down a challenge to its own members and the wider experimental music community. Demanding we resist the temptation to do what is easy or predictable. BSBLOrk shows that you can have the courage to continue to explore beyond the frontiers, that you can embrace both rules and rule-breaking, and investigate new kinds of order and new kinds of chaos, and ultimately find extraordinary sonic worlds there. Which are also your own world, heard in a new way. This album, which has appeared in appropriate physical CD format thanks to the encouragement and support of Bryan Day’s Public Eyesore records is a welcome documentation and celebration of BSBLOrk’s first 10 years. It reminds us of what the orchestra has achieved so far, but also gives us a tiny glimpse of possibilities waiting to be explored in the next 10.

(Bad Alchemy) Bryan Day führt hier nach Brasilia, zu Eufrasio Prates alias euFräktus, dem Schizocitizen, Semiotician, PhD in Arts/Performance, Guitar player, DJ, Max/Msp developer und Gründer des BSBLOrk. Über das Netlabel Dionysian Industrial Complex ist er vernetzt mit Phil Jones (Mentufacturer, River of Electrons), Biophillick (Jhavier Loeza) als Technoschamanen aus Mexiko, dem informationstechnologisch versierten Victor Hugo Alves Araujo, djalgoritmo, Jackson Marinho und dazu weiteren Gesinnungsgenossen, die seit 2012 bei BSBLOrk andockten - wie Victor Valentim (Miniestereo da Contracultura), Elias Melo Filho mit Geige, Ricardo Borgman mit Trompete... Borgs, Orks und der metahumanistische Polymath Jaime del Val (Stichworte: Metabody, Metaformance, Ontohacking) taumeln da als havarierte Aliens durch eine zu exotistischem Kitsch verkommene, vom Öko-Kollaps bedrohte Welt, durchschallt von Frankensound, zu dem kafkaesk mutierte Käfer breaktanzen. 11 holofraktale, algorithmisch-aleatorische Impromptus, bei denen Klang u. a. durch visuell verarbeitete Bewegungen erzeugt wird, zeitraffen das BSBLOrk'sche Jahrzehnt, in dem Prates & Co. anarchistisches Spiel, szientistisches Detournement, Katastrophengespür und kritischen Impetus auf einen Nenner brachten. Mit schnarrender Oszillatorik, fröhlichem Chaos, konvulsischem Klingklang, euphonen Resten, raunenden oder verhackstückten Stimmen, surreal pfeifenden, absurd surrenden oder tropfenden Klangspuren. Die Trompete quäkt stoisch an gegen medialen Klangschleim, die Violine geigt – unter Wasser! - ähnlich tapfer gegen Getrommel und Gezwitscher an, der Teufel schüttelt, mit links und groovy, im Reagenzglas das nächste zwitschernde Update. Das 'Dia Mundial Da Agua'-Impromptu beklagt Umweltsünden, in den Babbel-Wellen bei 'Covid-19 Impromptu Genômico' ist eingefangen, wie Brasiliens 681.006 Tote klein geredet werden, 'Insetos Impromptu' veräppelt Politikerphrasen über das Artensterben durch Mickey-Mousing. Und bei 'Fallout: Chuva Radioativa' heulen Sirenen, kurvt ein Kampfflugzeug, klirrt ein Windspiel im prasselnd verstrahlten Wind. Brasilianische Brainiacs am Puls der Zeit. - Rigo Dittmann

(Avant Music News) The Brasilia Laptop Orquestra celebrates its ten years—so far—of existence with this survey of ten tracks arranged sequentially from 2012-2021, with a second track from 2020 as a kind of coda. The Orquestra, which was founded by principal programmer Eufrasio Prates in 2012, is a collective whose floating membership is made up of electronic sound artist as well as the occasional acoustic musician. The ensemble is a vehicle for live performances that incorporate the idiosyncracies, both acoustic and physical, of the performance environment into the sounds and architecture of its semi-aleatory, interactive pieces. The group often uses liberally-interpreted scores as the basis for shaping the various parameters of their overall sound. If there’s such a thing as what Wittgenstein described as a language game—a use of words according to context-dependent rules that are to some degree flexible-then an Orquestra performance is something along the lines of a sound game. 10 yEars alive is a kind of official bootleg many of whose tracks have an audience-recorded feel to them. But that just gives the album an immediacy that enhances the experience of listening to it. The sounds interact in interesting and complex ways reminiscent of the plastic relationships of forms and colors in an abstract painting, and some of their spatialization—an important feature of Orquestra performances—comes through when heard through headphones. Here’s to ten more years, at least. - Daniel Barbiero

(Disaster Amnesiac) Ten years is a pretty long spell in which to do anything, and as such seems deserving of some kind of acknowledgement. So it has been done for Brasilia Laptop Orchestra by way of Public Eyesore's release of 10 yEars aLive, a compilation of tracks culled from the years 2013-2021( if you're reading this in the year 2022, don't worry, their first performance was in 2012). Across eleven tracks of what can be lazily called Electronic Music, BSBLOrk as they call themselves, journey into varied zones of sound. These sounds, and the parameters in which they are generated, are subject to initiatory sources such as large dice being thrown, cameras as input/control devices, and audience participation. These sources fuel the primary concerns of BSBLOrk's aesthetic: physicality, play, and political engagement. The sense that Disaster Amnesiac gets is that the ensemble are concerned with not evolving into a dry exercise in academic music, but instead of morphing into a more living entity. Another sense that I get is that it's important to see this group, for the listener to inhabit the same space in which they are producing their music. Not existing within a vacuum would serve to prop up all three of their stated goals, that's for sure. Back to the sounds. They are varied and wide-ranging, I'd imagine in large part due to the non-fixed nature of the personnel. On yEars, I have heard DNA sequences floating within the ethers of protoplasm, primitive 1960's synthesizer blooping and bleeping, disembodied voices howling up and down from their respective spatial coordinates, Cosey Fanni Tutti's pocket trumpet, Bryan Day's junkyard gamelan, fizzing squalls of dying circuitry, spaceship docking instructions, crazed beings preaching their cosmologies, etc. etc. Returning to that idea of having a morphology, BSBLOrk certainly does seem to have that characteristic, at least for this listener. The music that is documented on yEars is juicy and breathing, nowhere staid. I imagine that this is the desired effect, so kudos to Brasilia Laptop Orchestra for their achievement. What do you think music production will be like in 2032? Disaster Amnesiac imagines that most of the members of Brasilia Laptop Orchestra have pondered that question. Until that time, I'll try to figure out how to say "cool set dude" in Portuguese as I (hopefully) see them play via some streaming platform. I'm glad to have a copy of 10 yEars aLive to jam in the interim. - Mark Pino

(Foxy Digitalis) The machines are getting real weird on this strange and beguiling document. Recorded over a decade in various places, 10 years aLive is a delightful sonic playground filled with alien sounds. Electronic squiggles scrawl out warped, melodic arpeggios over glassine shimmers and a roiling splintered sea. Rhythms appear as bleeping whirlwinds and subsonic rumbles, but they propel this music into different, otherworldly plains. There’s a maximalist, throw-everything-at-the-digital-wall approach here that is so appealing and results in so many unexpected tonal combinations that it’s dizzying. I love it. - Brad Rose

(Vital Weekly) When I first saw laptops used in concerts, maybe around 1997 or 1998, I thought, 'how can these poor musicians afford such expensive machines and aren't they afraid it breaks, get stolen or crash? These days, the laptop seems to have disappeared from concerts or is less prominent at least, so imagine my surprise to see a release by something that is the Brasília Laptop Orchestra. At the end of the review, I will list the members. I am not sure, but I don't think I have heard of any of these people before. The orchestra started in 2012, and "they have been committed to incorporating the human body and movement into their production of sounds and images. And to create 'ecosophic' works that emphasize respect for the environment, social inclusion and the promotion of conscious human development and liberty". The orchestra is not fixed in membership, and amateurs and professionals are next to each other. Each player has their own speaker and their own source of sounds, sometimes encircling the audience. In that respect is, the stereo mix on a CD only half the fun. They use cameras to record their hand and body movements and translate that into music. Again, something is not present on the CD. As much as I like the music on this CD, I find it also hard not to think about the things we don't see and hear. In that respect, the CD falls short of the true thing. And, certainly, with the use of laptops, this is important. One of the things that saw them disappear off stage is that audience had no idea what the laptop did: "is the musician checking his email?" was heard a lot in the first decade of this century. The music reminds me of early electronic music and musique concrète and not as much of the much-used glitches, crackles and sine waves that crowded stages in the previous decade. The music is sometimes spacious, but that is also because these are live recordings picked up with a microphone. Among the pieces, there is a fine amount of variation to be noted, and throughout these pieces are around five minutes, which keeps this in some fine speed in the music, urgency if you will. Next time a DVD, please! - Frans de Waard

(Lost In A Sea Of Sound) Many minds and years went into the creation of 10 yEars aLive, a title that represents the long running duration of the Brasilia Laptop Orchestra or for short BSBLOrk. From the work collective's web page, this is a very good description for BSBLOrk that needs to be relayed, google translate was used."BSBLOrk - Orquestra de Laptops de Brasília is an experimental interactive algorithmic music collective, inspired by innovations in the format of computational music performance -- initially by the use of individual acousmatic amplification, when playing through multichannel hemispheres, now incorporating intercontinental teleperformance via network live streaming and Artificial Intelligence agents. Since its foundation in 2012, at the 11th edition of UnB's "Tubo de Ensaios" festival, has the proposal to integrate the human body in movement to the production of sounds and images directly derived from it, as a means of carrying out ecosophical works that emphasize respect for the environment, awareness for the human development as freedom and social inclusion." Over the ten years of material composing years 10 yEars aLive, the following artists are the principal contributors. Conrado Silva,Eduardo Kolody, Ramiro Galas, Victor Valentim, Kiko Barretto, Philip Jones, Elias Melo Filho, Ricardo Borgmann, Victor Hugo Araujo, Joenio Costa, Jackson Mainho, Anesio Azevedo, Biophillick, Bryan Day and Eufrasio Prates. This list of artists follow the track order and seem to be in a chronological order with overlap throughout. The sounds within 10 yEars aLive push the thresholds of harmony to a place where patterns and chaos are massive tectonic plates under pressure. Holding, beautiful, serene, a slip and the sonic landscape crumbles to form something splendidly new. Even though an earthly metaphor was used as a base description, the aural atmosphere within this composition is most of the time, completely otherworldly. Dreamlike fragments of experiences turned askew in a brilliant sonic kaleidoscope, the complete depth still unexplored til future thought is applied. Released on Public Eyesore Records in compact disc format. This is catalog number one hundred and fifty for the label. Pretty amazing in thinking about this voluminous body of work and all of the artist involved. - Ken Lower

(KFJC) The Brasilia Laptop Orchestra (BSBLOrk, for short). is an experimental music collective based in the capital city of Brazil. This collective produces acousmatic, often-improvised music that serves as a social commentary. Issues tackled include – human-quantum connection and something called the holofractal theory (track 1), philosophy of fiction (track 2), climate change and The Great Filter (track 8), the pandemic (track 9), and nuclear war (track 11). The collective has performed all over Brazil, and some of these tracks are based on live shows (e.g. track 6). The tracks are very electronic. Very acousmatic. Very avant-garde. Very KFJC.


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