Curiosity in Resonance

Music has always travelled with people, materials, technologies, and trade. Tonight, that idea takes on a particular resonance at Marshall Livehouse on Charoen Krung Road, in one of Bangkok’s historic riverside commercial districts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the surrounding Bang Rak area was shaped by movement along the Chao Phraya: warehouses, customs facilities, consulates, shipping companies, and European trading houses gathered nearby. Just a few sois away stood the Bangkok headquarters of the East Asiatic Company, whose activities included shipping, forestry interests, and the export of teak from Siam to international markets.

Within this setting, the evening asks us to listen to materials differently. In David Tudor’s Rainforest IV, found objects are made to resonate through transducers, their physical properties actively reshaping the sounds that pass through them. Around this central work, instruments, bodies, constructed setups, and electronic systems become sites of discovery—revealing how sound can change according to what carries it, filters it, resists it, or sets it in motion.

The programme then moves outward through a series of distinct listening situations: from dream memory and unstable sensation, to the physical possibilities of percussion and oboe, and finally to Synthderellar’s CURIOSITY KILLS THE RAT, where four modular systems enter into improvisation, uncertainty, rhythmic movement, and unexpected connection. Across the evening, sound is never simply delivered to us; it is shaped by the spaces, objects, instruments, and encounters through which it travels.

PROGRAM

• Rainforest — David Tudor

• Drifting Dialogue I — Wang Fei

• Shaking in the Garden — Hermione Johnson

• Listening within the Valley — Borjigin·T·Ayas (AYISI) 

• Tambour de Pan — Théo Mérigeau

• Studie über Mehrklänge — Heinz Holliger

• Curiosity Kills the Rat — Synthderellar

Rainforest IV

Between 1968 and 1973, David Tudor created a series of pieces titled Rainforest. Originally commissioned for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s performance of the same name, the piece evolved into various forms, including a performative spatial installation. The basic idea that runs through all versions is that of an ensemble of sound-producing objects played through transducers. The sounds played through them are altered by the specific resonant properties of each object. The physical object serves as both a filter and a sound generator. In a 1988 interview, Tudor commented: “My Rainforest, in its original version (1968), is a collection of small loudspeakers made from objects with different resonant properties. These instruments, each of which has a different ‘voice,’ represent a means of sound transformation without electronics: as the source sounds are transmitted through the materials, they are modified by the materials’ resonant properties.”

The objects used are mostly simple found objects. While the objects initially used were relatively small and appeared on stage as part of dance performances with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Rainforest I–III), Tudor also used large objects in 1973, during a workshop at the New Music in New Hampshire Festival, which he arranged for Rainforest IV in the form of a walk-in environment.

For the first time, a group of young musicians and artists was involved in the realization of this version; they not only selected and installed the objects but also performed live with them during a performance lasting several hours. Rainforest IV thus became an open and flexible—yet at the same time highly demanding—platform for the collective composition of (live) electronic music.

Resonance

From the resonating objects of Rainforest IV, the evening turns toward individual instruments and the different ways sound can be produced, shaped, and perceived. Wang Fei’s Drifting Dialogue I opens this sequence, followed by Hermione Johnson’s Shaking in the Garden, a 2020 work for oboe and viola using a graphic score. Johnson’s starting point is the memory of a dream: a square lawn on a sloping hill surrounded by tropical forest, with towering trees, loud insects, wet and dense yet cool air, and the unusual physical sensation of everything simultaneously rising and falling.

The focus then moves toward the physical construction and acoustic possibilities of instruments themselves. Théo Mérigeau’s Tambour de Pan is a solo percussion work commissioned by Ensemble intercontemporain and created for percussionist Aurélien Gignoux. Built around a specially conceived instrumental installation or setup, the work brings the performer into close relationship with a constructed sounding environment. In Heinz Holliger’s Studie über Mehrklänge, composed in 1971 for solo oboe, attention turns inward to the acoustic possibilities of a single instrument. The work explores Mehrklänge, or multiphonics—complex sonorities in which the oboe produces more than one pitch or acoustic component at the same time—bringing timbre, resonance, and the physical production of sound to the foreground.

The sequence closes with Borjigin·T·Ayas (AYISI)’s Listening within the Valley. Together, these works place very different kinds of listening alongside one another: a dialogue between instrumental voices, the unstable physical memory of a dream, a percussionist working within a specially constructed setup, and an oboe revealing complex sonorities within a single instrument. Rather than forming one continuous musical language, they offer a succession of different encounters with sound before the evening moves from acoustic and resonant materials into the electronic systems of its final performance.

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Curiosity Kills the Rat

By Synthderellar

The evening moves from resonant objects and acoustic instruments into a different kind of sonic environment. In Curiosity Kills the Rat, four independent modular systems venture into the unknown, navigating between uncertainty, sonic exploration, and rhythmic movement. Through improvisation, interaction, and unexpected connections, fragmented sounds gradually evolve into textures, pulses, and beats.

Synthderellar is a four-member modular synth group based in Bangkok, founded in 2024. The group blends analog textures, danceable rhythms, and experimental sounds in real-time performances. Each performance is shaped by improvisation, collaboration, and the raw energy of modular synthesis, allowing the relationship between four musicians and four independent systems to unfold differently each time.

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PERFORMERS

Musical Direction

Teresa Carrasco (Electronics)

Nicola Leonard Hein (Electronics)

Peter Veale (Oboe)

Hochschule der Künste Bern (HKB)

Cassandra Schurtenberger (Electronics)

Nina Roy (Electronics)

Studio Musikfabrik (SMF)

Alexander Kronbichler (Oboe)

Mia-Nurten Köseoglu (Viola)

Musikhochschule Lübeck (MHL)

Grigorii Osipov (Percussion)

Goeun Kim (Electronics)

China Conservatory of Music (CCM)

Wang Fei — Faculty / Composer

Borjigin·T·Ayas (AYISI) — Composer

Li Jing — Composer

 Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music (PGVIM)

Warudh Rudi Samansap (Trumpet)

Anna Takeda (Violin)

Chavanin Khemsom (Flute)

Jovelle Ong (Violin)

Nichakan Thanarakpokin (Violin)

Synthderellar 

May-T Noisejinda

Tossawat Chotivong

Sahalux Namboonsri

Pichsinee Pyth Noppichayathada

This performance is presented as a collaboration between the Hochschule der Künste Bern (HKB), Musikhochschule Lübeck (MHL), Studio Musikfabrik (SMF), , China Conservatory of Music (CCM) and Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music (PGVIM), with the generous support of Marshall Livehouse.