re:VOLT (Jill Fraser, Peter Grenader, Thomas Klepper) performing Morton Subotnick's Sidewinder and Maurice Ravel's Soarbo at the 22nd annual San Fransisco Electronic Music Festival on September 16th, 2023.

re:VOLT is a Los Angeles-based electronic music quartet of like-minded half-crazy avant-garde synthesists/composers/producers who fell down the same sonic rabbit hole. Separately they have had lifelong careers infusing experimental music into the collective cultural zeitgeist by scoring feature films and countless television commercials and video games, winning international music festivals, being featured in the Patch CV documentary and multitudes of electro-acoustic/multimedia performances – including selling out the REDCAT Theater — winning Cleos, serving on the board of SEAMUS, and being awarded a RIAA Gold Record for electronic sound design for the progressive metal band Tool.

ON SCARBO:

Jill Fraser has created this unabashed electronic orchestration of Scarbo, the last movement of Gaspard de la nuit, written for piano in 1908 by Maurice Ravel. Notoriously difficult to perform and loosely programmatic (based on Aloysuis Bertrand's 1836 poem Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot). It's was Ravel's intention to craft a musical nightmare in every sense of the word: disorienting, terrifying, and unsettling, with Fraser's unapologetic electronics augmenting the madness of the original Bertrand poem.

ON SIDEWINDER:

Part 1 - in four movements

Part 2 - IN three movements

This adaptation of Morton Subotnick’s seminal 1971 electronic work Sidewinder has been on the radar of Jill Fraser and Peter Grenader – both CalArts alumni who worked with Subotnick, for years. The process began with an abridged orchestration where the quartet was encouraged to both replicate his soundscapes and develop more interpretative timbres for the individual parts. With that, two general rules apply:

1. Following the original gestalts using more interpretive timbres.

2. Mirroring Mort’s original timbres but taking the progression in our
own direction.


Video of this performance:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAutU3Cp09g

SFEMF official site:

www.sfemf.org

Special thanks to: Pamela Z, Amy X Neuburg, Tom Duff