By Bean With Gino Robair

Artists who customize or build instruments to realize their singular artistic visions often make the most exciting music. Three female performers who take that route—Krystyna Bobrowski, Miya Masaoka, and Kaffe Matthews—make groundbreaking music that transcends gender and conventional musical expectations. Composer and instrument builder Bobrowski integrates a curious collection of organic materials with motors and contact mics for extraordinary performance-based installations. Composer and performer Masaoka blends computer-enhanced instruments, gestural language, and assorted living creatures to express a musicality that melds futuristic and ancient sensibilities. Sampling wizard Matthews works with found sounds in an immersive improvisational performance environment.

Each daring performer has a different approach to producing music that is as experiential as it is impossible to reproduce. They rely on the element of surprise, welcome the unexpected, embrace the unknown, and explore the relationship among sound, self, and the audience.

Krystyna Bobrowski
Years of liberal-arts studies formed a solid foundation for Krystyna Bobrowski’s keen interest in physics and natural phenomena. Much of Bobrowski’s work exploits the sounds that result from demonstrating basic scientific principles in unusual ways. Mundane actions and objects are also important elements in her pieces.

Many of Bobrowski’s installations employ simple mechanical devices in novel ways, often using a computer for control or data processing. She especially enjoys working with motors and contact microphones in conjunction with natural materials. As if to prove the point, Bobrowski’s work space is strewn with everything from electronic parts to large pieces of drying bull kelp.

Rock On
 Bobrowski came up with the idea for the piece Rock On during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. “Rock On is a collection of six amplified and prepared rocking chairs,” Bobrowski says. “The preparations include motion switches and electronics. The chairs rock on amplified surfaces, including newspaper, a car hood, nuts and bolts, and pools of water.”

When she borrowed rockers for the piece, Bobrowski found that owners had stories to tell about their chairs. Those tales inspired her to create themes for each rocker. “Each chair includes a speaker that plays prerecorded material relating to the theme of the chair,” she says.

The first chair features recordings of Bobrowski’s grandmother reminiscing about the artist as a young child. In addition to recordings of her grandmother’s voice, the chair was amplified by contact mics. Bobrowski created a program in the Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL) to interpret the data initiated by the rocking motion. She used an Anatek Pocket Pedal to translate the voltages into MIDI data.


Reprinted with permission from Magazine, April, 2001
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved


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