John Bischoff, an early pioneer of live computer music, makes his Chicago debut.

Recently, Bischoff has fashioned pieces that combine electronically-triggered bells with synthetic computer sounds. Here, he distributes the bells around the performance space in a pattern distinct from the speaker locations. His idea is to disperse the sense of “source” in electronic music—to release the music from being trapped in the speaker enclosure—while highlighting the beauty of speaker-transmitted sound at the same time.

John Bischoff (b.1949, San Francisco, Calif.) is acclaimed for his solo constructions in audio synthesis as well as ground-breaking work in computer network bands. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world’s first computer network band, and he helped found The Hub (1985-1996). Bischoff has been part of the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 year as a composer, performer, teacher and organizer. He is on faculty and staff at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California.

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