Laetitia Sonami
[2000 Tic.Toc]
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Laetitia Sonami (Berkeley): solo interactive computer music/movement
http://www.media.mit.edu/%7Ejoep/SpectrumWeb/captions/Sonami.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9906/gann.shtml
Laetitia Sonami was born in France and settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the growing field of electronic music. Her work combines text, music and "found sound" from the world in compositions which have been described as "performance novels". She is creating and utilizing some of the most sophisticated technologies in order to create an intimate, spontaneous art form which transcends technology. For the past three years she has developed and adapted new gestural controllers to musical performance and composed works with these materials. Her latest creation developed at STEIM, Amsterdam, is a lady's glove made out of black lycra, embedded with sensors which track the slightest motion of each finger, the hand and the arm. The performance thus becomes a small dance where the movements shape the music.
"She sometimes looked like a human antenna searching the air for sounds, or like a dancer focused on her hands, or like a deity summoning earth-shaking rumbles with a brusque gesture. Her pieces are sparse but allusive, conjuring half-remembered dreams; they shimmer into catches, glide and gradually evaporate...." — New York Times
"With steely concentration Ms. Sonami seems to conduct the very air, extracting from it rich, ethereal soundscapes that feels more discovered than composed. Combining musical tones, sampled instruments, rumblings, twitters, hisses, voices, and even animal noises, Sonami molds sound the way a master sculptor shapes clay, building expressive monuments in fleeting temporality. Her complicated, at time humorous, always haunting compositions seem to tower above her even as she holds them in her two small hands." — Chicago Reader
In one of her composition What Happened she tells the story of a woman’s life, as the hand starts moving it affects the voice, ultimately deteriorating it and introducing musical phrases which develop in vast landscapes controlled by her gestures. Her recent composition "... She Came Back, Again" an abstract musical recollection of habitual patterns created in 1995-96, has been performed in major cities throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Other works have been performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Canada and Europe, among which the Ars Electronics Festival in Linz, the Bourges Music Festival in France, the Sonambiente Festival in Berlin, the Interlink festival in Japan, Bang-on-a Can, The Kitchen and Other Minds, S.F. Has-Had (1997) received an honorary mention from the Prix ORF–Ars Electronica '97
She is currently performing her latest composition "Why___ dreams Iike a loose engine (autoportrait)" with the lady’s glove controlling hobby motors. Her most recent installation "Shaky Memories" based on motorized kitchen gloves was presented at the Touch Festival in Amsterdam.
Four of her compositions are included on CD releases, Imaginary Landscapes (Nonesuch), Another Coast (Music and Arts Program of America), Jewel Box (TellUs 26, NYC), The Time is Now (Frog Peak Music). Lovely Music Ltd. is scheduling a release of a solo CD for the Fall of '98. She lives in Oakland, California.
"Sonami is sultry and magical... a striking talent.... Her combination of French accent, California technology, and Tibetan perspective is darkly American... expect something inexplicable, compelling and deeply personal.” —Village Voice
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