Ikenobo Ikebana

Piece title: Ikenobo Ikebana
Output type:performance
Performance group: The Scottish School of Flower Arranging
Members: Graeme Truslove, James Wyness
Performance date: 27/06/2014
Location: Mosteiro São Bento da Vitória, R. de São Bento da Vitória 37, 4050 Porto, Portugal.
Event: xCoAx 2014 - The Second Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X.

The music of the Scottish School of Flower Arranging seeks to explore, by means of hand-made acoustic and digital tools, found objects and materials, an intimate sound world created from a few simple and basic elements which change slowly over time and which investigate asymmetry, materiality, irregularity, economy of means, and the emulation of natural processes. The name is derived from the Japanese zen-infuenced practice of flower arranging and pays homage to similar socio-aesthetic activities such as the tea ceremony, where the qualities of restraint, careful placement of elements and detachment are highly valued, as are attributes of wabi-sabi such as the imperfect, the impermanent and the intimate.

The Scottish School of Flower Arranging is a performance duo consisting of Graeme Truslove (laptop and electronic instruments) and James Wyness (handmade stringed instruments).

Graeme Truslove is a composer and performer based in Glasgow, Scotland. His output includes: sonic and audio-visual compositions, and improvised music – playing guitar and/or laptop in various solo and collaborative projects. His work is largely concerned with conficts between intuitive performance and the fixed-medium, often integrating microtemporal and immersive approaches to sound creation and performance. Truslove has performed and exhibited his work internationally, and has attracted awards from: Metamorphoses (1st prize), The Salford Sonic Research Commission, Creative Scotland, The British Council, PRSF, The Dewar Arts Award and others. He holds both an M.Eng in Electronics with Music, and a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Glasgow. He currently lectures in Composition and Music Technology at the University of the West of Scotland.

James Wyness is a composer with an interest in abstracting sounds from their generators, examining the morphological features of complex sounds in accordance with their inherent materiality, observing and structuring the birth and evolution of these forms as they unfold and in directing this complexity into music. He has an MA Honours degree in French Studies and a PhD in electroacoustic composition from the University of Aberdeen. Current research interests include semiology, anthropology, the origins of language and the history of language development, sociolinguistics, social theory, cultural theory and the political economy of the arts, morphology, determinism/randomness, set theory, topology, dynamic systems and evolutionary biology.