April 6, 2006
San Francisco, CA

TrioMetrik plays NuRoque Music

New Media Compositions by Jaron Lanier, Jay Cloidt, and Keith McMillen
Friday and Saturday, April 28-29, 2006 @ ODC Theater (3153-17th Street, SF)
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Also performing at Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, UC Berkeley on April 23


Keith McMillen, founder of the TrioMetrik music ensemble, is a ground-breaking instrument builder, entrepreneur, and musician. At ODC Theater’s “avant-garde maverick” series, McMillen will premiere TrioMetrik plays NuRoque Music, the culmination of McMillen’s twenty-five year musical exploration with sound and technology. NuRoque (from Neo-Baroque) combines progressive technology with the heartfelt desire to create a new beauty.

Based on the concept of enhanced instruments coupled through an intelligent network, NuRoque is the sophisticated integration of live instruments (played by Ashley Adams, Marielle Jakobsons, and Keith McMillen) that are extended beyond their original function with MACIAS, an advanced music program and interface system. MACIAS is an intelligent system that receives, interprets, and operates on the sounds, notes, gestures, and intentions of the musicians.  The result is NuRoque, an interactive musical esthetic for the 21st century that encourages complex structures and sonic adventure. Samples can be heard at www.triometrik.org.

Keith McMillen describes NuRoque as a process in which “knowledge and control is distributed among the musicians and guided by the composition.  Direction to the performers is conveyed through an array of graphic windows on a display that replaces the traditional score and music stand. The musician’s gestures, the score, audio processing, and other structures are permitted to interact with each other in ways that lead to modifications in performance.  Broadly stated, sometimes the musicians follow the score, other times the score follows the musicians.  The result is a system - a new intelligence - designed to augment and control the compositional structure beyond notes and transitions. While these concepts have been explored individually, NuRoque represents the first time a refined and integrated approach has been evenly and fully applied across all of the components that comprise a musical entity.”

This April, TrioMetrik takes NuRoque beyond the realm of technological curiosity.  To flesh out the musical potential McMillen invited notable composers/innovators Jaron Lanier and Jay Cloidt to create original compositions for TrioMetrik’s concert at the “avant garde mavericks” series at ODC Theater.

Jaron Lanier is best-known for his work in Virtual Reality.  Lanier coined the term “Virtual Reality” and founded VPL Research in the early 1980s, the first company to sell VR products.  As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new “classical” music since the late 1970s.  He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia.  He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played instruments in the world. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Terry Riley, and Pauline Oliveros.

Jay Cloidt is a San Francisco-based composer and sound designer who collaborated with many groups including Kronos Quartet, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, California EAR Unit, and dance companies including ODC/San Francisco and Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.  The SF Chronicle dubbed Cloidt “the Spike Jones of the Bay Area new music scene.” Cloidt has remarked that TrioMetrik’s MACIAS system is “a tremendously flexible composer’s and performer’s toolkit.  I look forward to seeing composers find ways to adapt the system to their individual styles and formal obsessions.  Orson Welles once said, that a movie studio was ‘…the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.’ I think TrioMetrik just may be the modern composer’s electric train set.”

Keith McMillen, TrioMetrik founder, composer, inventor, entrepreneur, has been at the forefront of the audio and technology industries for the last 25 years.  He founded Zeta Music in 1979; the company’s revolutionary electronic instrument designs reinvented the violin and Zeta is the world’s leading purveyor of modern violins, cellos, and basses.  McMillen has started and sold multiple audio companies and has spent 25 years developing MACIAS – an integrated composition performance system that is the foundation of TrioMetrik’s music.

TrioMetrik plays NuRoque Music is a co-production of ODC Theater and the BEAM Foundation.  BEAM’s mission is to create the conditions that will spark a new music movement – the NuRoque.  NuRoque takes its inspiration from the musical revolution that new instruments and esthetics caused in Europe in the 1600s.  Four hundred years later humanity is at a similar inflection point and the BEAM Foundation is promoting advancements in technology to foster a new instrumentation and new art forms.

Don’t miss TrioMetrik at ODC Theater! Discover the NuRoque experience and see what Paul Dresher has called “the modern composer’s dream come true.”