Collins (his first local concert since ’04) and Koch (Chicago debut) present a night of electronic music by and for the masses. Alternating solos, duos (their first together), and ensemble works (with several students and maybe you).

The program includes: Waggle Dance, for laptop marching band, unplugged; the Chicago premiere of the benchmark consort, a study in digital failure for an orchestra of crashing laptops; Salvage, in which seven performers attempt to revive dead circuit boards from discarded appliances; and other works for hacked CD players, backwards electric guitars, smart-bomb video, and flame-controlled oscillators. Koch brings a new piece of analog gear called the blippoo box. The concert also will feature performances by the legendary SAIC Sinfonietta.

If you have a laptop (Mac or PC), bring it along and participate in the benchmark consort.

Hans W. Koch (b.1962, Heidenheim/Brenz, Germany) is a composer and sound artist from Cologne, Germany. Since 1996 he has explored the potential of computers as a hardware/software unity. Some of these explorations are carried out by directly attacking the hardware (computermusik I – exploded view), while others exploit certain hardware features with the help of software, such as bandoneonbook, where filtered feedback between the built-in microphone and speakers is used to create an accordion-like instrument. He tours extensively and has been a visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts.

Nicolas Collins (b.1954, New York, N.Y.) studied with Alvin Lucier, worked with David Tudor and has collaborated with numerous musicians around the world. He lived most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal. He teaches in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A new edition of his book, Handmade Electronic Music—The Art of Hardware Hacking, will published by Routledge in April 2009. He has the dubious distinction of having played at both CBGBs and the Concertgebouw. Collins first appeared at Lampo in October 2002.

Organized in cooperation with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Sound