Improvisations – Acoustic – Electronics (EISing the Cake): In the Deep Listening duo, Oliveros and Gamper direct attention to sound and sounding simultaneously while anticipating the future and past of all sounds performed, aided by the Expanded Instrument System (EIS).
David Gamper (1945-2011) moved freely among the worlds of music performance, improvisation, and electronic instrument design. These passions merged into performer controlled sound processing environments he created for acoustic improvising musicians. He was a member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) since 1990. He appears on many recordings with Deep Listening Band and others, and performed world-wide. Gamperʼs solo piece Conch was in the Whitney Museum of American Artʼs BitStreams exhibition and is on the CD of sound art from that show.
In addition to his long time work with the Deep Listening Band, David collaborated with his wife Gisela Gamper with a project entitled See Hear Now, a real-time music and video collaboration that merged the sonic and the visible, and transported the performers and audience to a transcendent experience. The sounds were expanded through live electronic transformations and spatial diffusions, retaining the power of natural sound; and were paired to Giselaʼs videos and imagery. David Gamper performed at Roulette numerous times, with Deep Listening Band and with Gisela for See Hear Now. —Bio as of 2019
Pauline Oliveros‘s (May 30, 1932-November 24, 2016) life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ’50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960’s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY,The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and The John Cage award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.
Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded “Deep Listening ®,” which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. —Bio as of 2019
