The Transducers is a group of five composers and improvisers from diverse backgrounds. We utilize laptops, custom software, sound sculptures, circuit bending, custom electronics and interactive devices to produce unique sonic worlds.
Philip Mantione formed The Transducers in Spring 2009. He has composed music for orchestra, various chamber ensembles, electroacoustic fixed media, computer-interactive performance, multimedia installations, and experimental video. His music has premiered in New York City and Los Angeles and has been heard in festivals and on new music radio around the globe. Since relocating to Santa Fe from NYC in 2007, he has premiered a new work for computer and trumpet at the Center for Contemporary Arts. His involvement with the Santa Fe Complex includes leading the SFMax group, presenting the work of ten local composers, and the UUUUT Experiment (an improvisation workshop that has included over twenty musicians). In June 2009, he curated and organized, FrankenCircuit, which featured an enormous installation of kinetic sound sculptures and live performances at the Complex, involving over twenty artists, musicians, and technologists. After moving to NYC in 1997, he along with fellow composer, James Marentic and visual artist, Alysse Stepanian, co-founded M.A.N.Y. (Musicians and Artists in New York), a non-profit performing arts organization that presented the work of over fifty artists in five multimedia events that included, music, video, dance, spoken word, and performance art. Since 2005, Mantione and Stepanian have collaborated under the name BOX 1035 and have created five major multimedia installations including galleries in Beijing and Berlin, and the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, NY.
Martin Back is an artist, composer, musician and percussionist. A self-confessed dilettante, he explores a wide array of methodologies to create and perform his musical and sound works: graphic and text scores, digital computers and software, custom circuitry, hacked electronics, and custom percussion and stringed instruments. He has performed at numerous festivals and venues in New Mexico. Martin is founder and director of the Santa Fe Performance Collective and the composer’s workshop – Ancestral Groan Liberation Orchestra. He is also a member of the New Mexico SoundPainting Orchestra and the performance art/music group Buddha Pests. His video works have been exhibited at film festivals in the United States and Canada. Back studied for a B.A. in Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe where he was a student of noted media artist David Stout and renowned media historian and theorist Gene Youngblood. He worked as an assistant to Steina and Woody Vasulka from 2002-2007. Martin is currently taking private lessons with composer and sound artist David Dunn.
James Brody studied composition at Indiana University with Iannis Xenakis and Franz Kamin. Brody wrote the liner notes for the original Nonesuch LP of ‘Iannis Xenakis – Electroacoustic Music’. He was co-founder of the FIASCO group in Bloomington, CAPASA in San Antonio and the Baltimore Composers Forum. In 1970, he taught composition, theory and electronic music at East Texas State University. He has written many electroacoustic and instrumental works which have been performed at various international venues. Brody was a guest composer at the Electronic and Computer Music Studio of The Peabody Institute and is an active member and past president of the Baltimore Composers Forum. Background Count was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC as part of a concert of the SONIC CIRCUITS International Electronic Music Festival. Techqua Ikachi!, for four channel electroacoustics, four instrumental groups, chorus, singers and actors with a text by Frederick Schreiner based on the Hopi story of creation, was premiered at York College of Pennsylvania in 2004 where he was a member of the adjunct faculty of York College of Pennsylvania.
Christian Pincock is a performer of improvised and composed music on valve trombone and a computer-based instrument of his own creation with MAX/MSP. Using a variety of technology including buttons and sensors attached to his trombone, he is able to control sampled sounds and processing, integrating them expressively and musically into his musical work. His work is both dynamic and subtle, drawing from diverse styles such as improvised experimental music, contemporary classical, avant-garde jazz, noise, and electronica. He has performed internationally in events such as the 9th, 10th and 11th Soundpainting Think-tank in Woodstock, Sweden, and France, the Music Omi International Arts Residency in 2007, the Banff Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music in Banff, Canada in 2006, as well as venues such as The Stone (NYC), Roulette (NYC), Le Petit Faucheux (Tours, FR). He has a Bachelor of Music in jazz studies from New England Conservatory and a Masters of Music in jazz studies from Manhattan School of music. Currently living in Albuquerque, NM, he has been an active musician in New York City, Boston, and Berlin where he has produced and collaborated in diverse musical, multidisciplinary and multimedia projects. In addition to performing, Christian also gives workshops and masterclasses, and teaches privately.
Frank Rolla received an MFA in Sculpture at UNM and has taught basic robotics at the College of Santa Fe. Recent work includes Jerk and the Accelerants, an interactive performance for strings, and MIDI managed robotics, programmed using MAX/Msp, Rise, installation and performance of an articulated frame robotic sculpture, and Rail Sled, a powered radio controlled rail vehicle that will complete a run from the Santa Fe Railyard to Lamy. For FrankenCircuit, he will perform Harp, a work for fretless banjo and MIDI controlled gourd harp. He is also the designer of the FrankenSwitch.
Performances
re:Make IT! – a festival of curated exhibitions and performances at the Santa Fe Complex. See images here. (August 2009)
The Roost – concert series at The Filling Station in Albuquerque, curated by Mark Weaver. (September 2009)
Arts Lab – The Spectre Series in Albuquerque, curated by William Fowler Collins. (November 2009)
High Mayhem (February 2010)
Special Note
Our friend and colleague James Brody died tragically in an automobile accident on April 11, 2010 while attending the SEAMUS Festival in MN. Future performances of The Transducers have been indefinitely postponed.