CARL STONE + GURUN GURUN
A major and long-deserved czech premiere of composer and musician Carl Stone. He is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed as “the king of sampling” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” His first computer compositions date from a time when the very concept of a laptop was being defined (and those machines were far from resembling todays laptops). Before Stone started focusing purely on digital environments, he had a jazz-rock band with Stefan Weiss or composed mostly drone pieces with a Buchla synthesizer and collages using gramophones and tapes, all while studying composition at CalArts under Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Even in digital sound he devoted himself to the perfectionist extraction of often very simple samples and he is a good twenty years ahead of his time. Carl Stone has been shuttling for many years between the West Coast of the USA and Japan, where he teaches at the university and has of course collaborated with many local musicians, including Otomo Yoshihide, with whom he has a very close relationship with gramophones. He is a composer whose importance bears
comparison with names like Steve Reich or Charlemagne Palestine on the one hand, while at the same time being the forefather of a sound we associate with SND, Oval or the Mille Plateaux label. In a live performance, you can expect a mix of both his more ambient position and an untamed display of samples.
According to their own words, Gurun Gurun have "chased" Carl Stone at almost every stop during their Japanese tour, but they finally manage to catch up with him only now in Prague. In fact, it would be hard to find a better suited act. The affinity with Stone is due to an affinity for Japan and a love of organically vibrant sound, which they approach with both humour and exploratory joy. Watching the Gurun Gurun quartet concert is like being part of an expedition of a troop of monkeys exploring the long-lost wreck of a spaceship. Their improvised sets are a mix of post-club deconstruction, metamorphosed acoustic and electronic sounds, generative music and musique concrète.
