Lauren Sarah Hayes brings the intense physicality of her hybrid human-machine sonic performance to Seattle, with support from local computer synthesists Sebastian Camens and RM Francis.
Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish improviser, sound artist, and scholar recognised for her embodied approach to computer music. Her music is a mix of experimental pop/live electronics/techno/noise/free improvisation and has been described as ‘voracious’ and ‘exhilarating’. She is a sculptress of sound, manipulating, remixing, and bending voice, drum machines, analogue synths and self-built software live and physically. She is excited by what can happen in the vulnerable relationships between sound, space, and audience. Her shows are highly physical, making the performance of live electronic music more engaging for audiences. Over the last fifteen years she has developed and honed a deliberately challenging and unpredictable performance system that explores the relationships between bodies, sound, environments, and technology.
Hayes has been commissioned by major festivals including the London Jazz Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with a live BBC Radio 3 broadcast as part of its 2017 International Showcase, and Sonica, for which she gave four sold-out performances inside Hamilton Mausoleum, Scotland, famous for once holding the longest echo of any man-made structure. She has performed extensively across Europe and the US, including as part of her tenure with the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop at Kings Place, London. The Wire described her 2016 album MANIPULATION (pan y rosas discos) as “skittering melodies and clip-clopping rhythms suggesting a mischievous intelligence emerging from this web of wires”. Her 2021 release Embrace (Superpang) was included in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of February 2021.
Sebastian Camens is a Dutch/Australian multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle. With releases on NADA and Conditional, his work aims to push the boundaries of the subversive within computer music.
RM Francis is an artist based in Seattle working with computer-generated sound and language via recording, installation, and performance. He has presented work at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music (Oakland), The Lab (San Francisco), Kolonia Artystów (Gdańsk), and at festivals including Diffusion (Baltimore), Algorithmic Art Assembly (San Francisco), and Parken (Vienna). His practice foregrounds computation-based compositional strategies, focusing on methods that exploit discrepancies between human and artificial auditory systems. His current work exploits latent phonological data extracted from non-linguistic sound in order to generate the tonal, rhythmic, and semantic content of synthesized speech. The resulting asubjective narration articulates the potentialities of speech decoupled from embodied human expression, navigating between abstract sound and uncanny characterological specificity.
His oeuvre spans multimedia work incorporating sound, video, performance, and chocolate (Hyperplastic Other, 2017), investigations of historical computer synthesis methods (A Taxonomy of Guffaws, 2020), procedural text works for a chorus of synthetic voices (Every Single Person Has Some Muscle, 2022), and hallucinatory duets between dictation apps and deep learning networks (pedimos un mensaje, 2023). In addition to his solo projects, in recent years he has collaborated with Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher, Jung An Tagen, and farmersmanual, among others.