Computer music pioneer Carl Stone performs unreleased recent works, including Don Dae Gam and Sun Nong Dan, named after favorite restaurants, in this special concert for Lampo.

Stone studied with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney at CalArts during the early 1970s, and, while still a student, began using appropriated material to generate work. His exploratory techniques led to a body of complex sound collages, widely credited with laying the groundwork for the entire sampling movement, and defining the arc of his singular practice over the decades since.

He has proven a prolific and imaginative voice in electronic composition, mashing together notions of high and low culture and recontextualizing diverse ethnographic materials, from Purcell to Spears, into immensely beautiful, time-bending music.

Carl Stone (b.1953, Los Angeles, Calif.) has composed electroacoustic music almost exclusively since 1972, and has used computers in live performance since 1986. He was among the vanguard of artists incorporating turntables, early digital samplers, and personal computers into live electronic music composition. An adopter of the Max programming language while it was still in its earliest development at the IRCAM research center, Stone continues to use it as his primary instrument, both solo and in collaboration with other improvisers. He is currently a faculty member at Chukyo University in Japan. Two retrospective volumes of his work, Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties (2016) and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties (2018) are available from Unseen Worlds.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation

Artist Talk: In 1975, while an undergraduate at CalArts, Carl Stone worked in the school’s music library, tasked with copying every LP in the collection onto cassette for backup. To speed the process, he was set up with three turntables and three tape recorders, dubbing several albums at once. The result was accidental polyphony—jazz, world, electronic, early, and contemporary classical music bleeding together—an experience that sparked Stone’s long-standing fascination with musical quotation and appropriation. Tonight, he reflects on those early days and explains how they led to some of his compositional techniques, including his “Sukothai” process. Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #1656. Friday, November 30, 6 p.m.