Elektrodome
is the successor to 'Uncle Jambo's Pendular Vibrations' which with
Martin Kiszko, we founded in 1982. This was in responce to ideas
about the use of 'electronic music' in live performance; about
its value in enabling a much broader range of people to make music,
and about its relationship to other performing arts in their own
developnog electronic modes.
These ideas were - are - an evolving response to the emergance of electronics
into the mainstream of music and music making, and to their subsequent
effect on our own aesthetic and techniques, combined with a rejection
of the rigid time cionstraints, which mechanical methods of repoduction
can impose on the performance of electro-acoustic sounds.
During the 1980s,
with Martin Kiszko - and later, with Mark Newbold - we devised ways
of giving the musicians thenselves control of a complex of electronic
devices for modifying their own acoustic sounds in real time. Subsequently,
with a respectful and admiring salute to "Inter-Moduation",
the pioneering electro-acoustic group of the 70's we set out to
test these techniques in live performance.
At
the same time, we had begun to appreciate the way in which developments
in electronics could make both the composition and the performance of
music accessible to a new range of people, whose musical education had
been, and indeed is still, in many schools, regarded as inapproriate,
and - for economic reasons - impraticable. Uncle Jambo's peformances
and hands-on workshops with violist/composer Duncan Druce, trombonist/composer
James Fulkerson, flautist Anna Noakes and electronic artist Brian Johnson
at Bretton Hall college (1983), Wakefield College, the 1984 Huddersfield
Festival of Contemporary Music and the 1985 'Art ino Music into Art'
festival at Bath - were part of our response.
Reborn in 1990 as Elektrodome, our collabaration with Brian Johnson
resulted in 6 'Improvisions' (broadcast by Channel 4) - followed by
work with several instrumentalisits/composers, dancers and performance
artists (summerised in our video 'Three Projects for Live Peformance')
- and led in 1995 to our 'Showcase Concert' at the Bristol Watershed
Arts and Media Centre. We are now working towards the development and
performance of 5 new pieces of electronic music theatre for our 1999
'Transformations' performance/workshops project.
Edward
Williams - Judith Williams Elektrodome, Bristol January 1999
