Ensemble Decipher / Sidebad / Warp Duo

Ensemble Decipher, Sideband, and Warp Duo are teaming up for an exciting night of live electronic music! Come out to Washington DC’s Rhizome to hear music on the cutting edge of experimental electronics on Friday, March 31, 2023 at 7:30pm (6950 Maple St NW, Washington, DC 20012). Tickets are $10-20.

Ensemble Decipher is a modular, experimental music group that performs with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies. Founded in 2017 by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, the ensemble strives to redefine performer virtuosity by drawing on the technological advancements of our time to highlight new voices and ways of listening. Ensemble Decipher seeks to reflect on and challenge the power structures that lace the field of electronic music by reexamining technology’s role in their performance practice. Recent works commissioned by the group have mobilized network technologies, accelerometers attached to rocks, boxes trained via machine learning to respond to touch, acoustic instruments, and laptops.
Ensemble Decipher has collaborated with notable composers and technologists including Mari Kimura, Margaret Schedel, Daria Semegen, Kamala Sankaram, Jose Tomás Henriques, Mara Helmuth, Yaz Lancaster, Paul Leary, and Lainie Fefferman and premiere works by many others. Recent feature performances include concerts at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, International Computer Music Conference, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Network Music Festival, Earth Day Art Model, and an ensemble residency at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark.
Current members include Joseph Bohigian, Robert Cosgrove, Eric Lemmon, Chelsea Loew, Taylor Long, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh. For the current season, Decipher will be in residence at Michigan State University; perform at the Sylvia Adalman Chamber Series at Peabody Conservatory, NowNet Arts Conference, and Silo City; and have commissioned new works by Bora Yoon and Erin Rogers to be premiered in 2023.
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Using specially designed and custom-made hemispherical speakers and a fleet of laptops, Sideband turns each member of its ensemble into an island of sound, returning a sense of acoustics and space to electronic music. Sideband is an evolving project that inspires composers, performers and audience members to reevaluate the role of computers in music.
Sideband’s parent ensemble, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), was formed in 2005 by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook. Sideband was conceived out of a desire to explore the PLOrk model of music making in a more sustained fashion, outside the annually changing context of academic classes. Formed in 2008 to premiere a piece with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Sideband is currently made up of a group of long-term members whose skills range from orchestral percussion to installation art, research in machine-learning algorithms, traditional Norwegian folk music, solo performance, electroacoustic music, software design, and scored composition.
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Warp Duo is the newly formed collaborative project between sound artists Scott Li and Levi Lu which focuses on electroacoustic improvisation utilizing acoustic instruments such as the voice and violin in combination with live electronic systems, including live processing in Max/MSP, digital feedback, modular synthesis modules, and many other systems. Wails, visceral violin scratching, and broken bow hairs accompany ethereal, reverberant soundscapes and melodies, all guided, above all, by pure feeling.