The world of BiLE is a busy one recently! On January 3rd we were featured in an article in the Financial Times about Laptop Orchestra’s
Thanks to Alex Newman for writing the article. The article also makes reference to Network Music Festival, which is taking place in from 27-29th January in various locations around Birmingham.
The festival will featrue performances, workshops and lectures from national and international laptop ensembles and performers including Benoît and the Mandelbrots – we both performed at Laptops Meet Musicians Festival in Venice last year – and BiLE
Local journalist Ross Cotton interviewed BiLE ahead of our performance next week:
With elements of both art and music within their sound, BiLE fuse together two creative outlets and present their experiments through performance.
“It’s very much a musical background that we all come from, and I think that translates into the approach that we take” says Iain.
[…]
“We’re more about exploring other avenues alongside the other things that we are doing. But the stuff that we’re doing in BiLE is definitely influencing my other compositions. Working with a group of composers with other ideas just opens your eyes to other avenues.”
“We are always trying to create interesting music”, says fellow member Chris.
“We’re not about technical fetishes or using technology for the sake of it, we are just using technology as a way of enabling us to do interesting and new things.
“The technology is much more of an enabling factor, rather than a necessity. It’s about new ways of expression, rather than genre-based roots”, he says.
Full interview is available here
BiLE will be performing XYZ and will be premiering Laptopera. In terms of visuals, for this performance I wanted to move away from using pre-recorded videos and instead use purely generative visuals. This required me to learn a lot about using particles in GEM – [part_head], [part_velocity] etc. Here’s a preview of the results for XYZ and Laptopera.
It still needs a bit of work, but it’s coming along nicely!
Tickets for Network Music Festival can be bought from the website and costs from £8 for day tickets to £25 for a weekend pass.
