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JOHN BISCHOFF (b. 1949, San Francisco) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his ground-breaking work in computer network bands. Bischoff's music is built from intrinsic features of the electronic medium: high definition noise components, tonal edges, imperfections, transitions, digital shading, and non-linear motion. Through empirical play and investigation he builds pieces that can be described as sonic sculptures, shaped in real-time and present for the duration of a performance. Recently, he has fashioned pieces that combine electronically-triggered bells with synthetic computer sounds. In such works bells are distributed around the performance space in a pattern distinct from the speaker locations. His idea is to disperse the sense of "source" in electronic music—to release the music from being trapped in the speaker enclosure—while highlighting the beauty of speaker-transmitted sound at the same time. Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, and Robert Ashley. He has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 year as a composer, performer, teacher, and grassroots activist. His performances around the US include NEW MUSIC AMERICA festivals in 1981 (SF) and 1989 (NYC), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Roulette Intermedium (NYC), and the Beyond Music Festival (LA). He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künst in Berlin, Fylkingen in Stockholm, and TUBE in Munich. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world's first Computer Network Band, and he co-authored an article on the League's music that appears in "Foundations of Computer Music" (MIT Press 1985). He was also a founding member of the network band The Hub with whom he performed and recorded from 1985 to 1996. In 1999 he received a $25,000 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (NYC) in recognition of his music. Recordings of his work are available on Lovely Music, Frog Peak, and Artifact Recordings. A solo album, APERTURE, is newly released on 23FIVE INC. He is a Lecturer in Computer Music and on staff as Studios Coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, in Oakland, California. Bay Area composer and performer Chris Brown has spent the last twenty years pursuing music in the cracks between many traditions and styles. Beginning as a classical pianist, he was influenced by studies of Indonesian, Indian, and Afro-American and Cuban musics, and then took off on branches provided by the American Experimentalists in inventing and building a personal electronic instrumentation. He has been active as a pianist in performing and recording the music of composers such as James Tenney, Henry Cowell, Christian Wolff, William Brooks, David Rosenboom, Luc Ferrari, and Terry Riley. Collaboration and improvisation have been primary in the development of Chris Brown’s music for various traditional instruments and interactive electronics. He has had commissions for such pieces from the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, among others. He was a member with percussionist William Winant, saxophonist Larry Ochs, and electronic musician Scot Gresham-Lancaster of the pioneering group "Room", which explored the intersection of composition, improvisation, and electronics. Between 1986-97 he was also a member of "The Hub", an ensemble of computer musicians who developed "Computer Network Music", a genre whose sound arises from the interdependency of multiple computer-music systems. Recordings of his music and performances can be found on the Tzadik, Artifact Recordings, Music and Arts, Sound Aspects, Centaur, New Albion, Black Saint Records, and Elektra/Musician labels. Since 1985 he has also been active as an educator, first at the San Francisco Art Institute, and since 1990 as a faculty member at Mills College in Oakland, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) and Associate Professor of Music. Chris Brown's most recent works involve extending the Computer Network Music into new performance venues. An installation called "Talking Drum", which involves networked computers spread throughout a large space that are programmed as interactive drum-machines, has been produced in Montreal, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and in Groningen, Holland. This piece was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Prix Ars Electronica in 1996. A new series of concert works named "Inventions" have emerged from the polyrhythm generating software used in "Talking Drum." He has also worked with music programmer Mike Berry in supporting the development of the "Grainwave" live synthesis software for the Macintosh. A live interactive piece using Grainwave that linked performers from the U.S. and Germany called "Eternal Network Music" was performed in November, 1999 as part of the "net_condition" exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe. Scot Gresham-Lancaster (b. Redwood City, CA USA 1954) is a composer/performer/instrument builder/educator with over three decades of professional experience. He is dedicated to research and performance using the expanding capabilities of computer networks to create new environments for musical and cross discipline expression. As a member of the HUB, he is one of the early pioneers of "computer network" music which uses the behavior of interconnected music machines to create innovative ways for performers and computers to interact. He has recently performed in a series of "co-located" performances collaborating in real time with live and distant dancers, video artists and musicians in network based performances. For over two decades, he has worked with multimedia prototyping and user interface theory and its relationship to new markets as an independent consultant and at Interval Research, SEGA-USA, and Muse Comunications. He has been a composer in residence at Mills College. At STEIM in Amsterdam he has been doing ongoing work to develop new families of controllers to be used exclusively in the live performance of electroacoustic music. He is an alumnus of the Djerassi Artist Residency Program. He has toured and recorded as a HUB and Room, Alvin Curran, ROVA saxophone quartet, The Club Foot Orchestra , and the Dutch ambient group NYX.He has performed the music of Alvin Curran, John Zorn, and John Cage, under their direction, and worked as a technical assistant to Lou Harrison, Iannis Xenakis, David Tudor, and Pauline Oliveros among many others. His current projects include his occasional performances as Scot Gresham-Lancaster's Hot Flaming Skull and with FuzzyBunny He has worked on the sonification of digital elevation models in the piece Terrain Broadcast with Bill Thibault. Papers about this work are found in the proceedings of the 1992 International Computer Music Conference, and the Leonardo Music Journal vol. 7 for late 1997. Those interested in surround sound may find his beginners guide to surround sound mixing "Your Surrounded" in the issue of Electronic Musician supplement magazine from Fall of 2000 of interest. He is a lecturer at the Music Technology Center at Diablo Valley College and the Digital Audio Technology Department at Cogswell Polytechnical College. He is technical advisor for David Cope on the Plieades Project, an attempt to build and do research in SETI using a 140 meter Galilaen feed radio telescope, that would also be a large scale musical instrument. TIM PERKIS has been working in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, performing, exhibiting installation works and recording in North America,Europe and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of life-like properties in complex systems of interaction.In addition, he is a well known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with over 100 artists and groups, including Chris Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Luc Houtkamp, Yoshi Ichiraku, Joelle Leandre, Roscoe Mitchell, Gino Robair, ROVA saxophone quartet, Elliott Sharp, Leo Wadada Smith and John Zorn. Ongoing groups he has founded or played in include the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub -- pioneering live computer network bands -- and Rotodoti, the Natto Quartet, Fuzzybunny and All Tomorrow's Zombies. His occasional critical writings have been published in The Computer Music Journal, Leonardo and Electronic Musician magazine; he has been composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland California, artist-in-residence at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, and designed musical tools and toys at Paul Allen's legendary thinktank, Interval Research. His checkered career as a researcher and engineer has brought him a variety of interesting projects: designing museum displays for science and music museums in San Francisco, Toronto and Seattle, creating artificial-intelligence based auction tools for business, building scientific experimental apparati, consulting on multimedia art presentation networks for the SF Art Commission and SF Airport, writing software embedded in toys and other consumer products, and creating new tools for sound and video production and analysis. Recordings of his work are available on several labels: Artifact,Limited Sedition, 482, Lucky Garage, Praemedia, Rastascan and Tzadik(USA); Sonore and Meniscus(France); Curva Minore and Snowdonia(Italy); XOR(Netherlands). He is also producer and director of a feature-length documentary on musicians and sound artists in the San Francisco Bay area called NOISY PEOPLE to be released in 2005. STATEMENT I like to consider human-machine interaction as a new form of social interaction. What's interesting to me about computers is their ability to serve as a framework for embodying systems offering complexity and surprise. Unpredictability is what makes social life so interesting, it is what makes art so interesting, and it's what can make computers, as partners in art making, interesting. I don't use computers to simply carry out ideas I may have: I'd rather work in situations that force me to respond to surprises that are dealt to me by systems whose complexity and unpredictability are so high that their behavior can not be known in advance. All of my computer based art work has been concerned with creating social (or synthetic social) situations, which have enough complexity to behave like real life: in fact, to be real life of some new kind. The system in question in almost all of these pieces consists of human beings and machines in cycles of mutual influence and response. This double CD-set is the companion to the final book reporting on the activities of Het Apollohuis. The recordings on these CDs give an idea of the music and the sound art presented in concerts at Het Apollohuis in the priod from 1980 through 1997. Out of a total of 500 performances I chose 38, from which exceprts of varying lenght have been included in this anthiology. These have been arranged in chronological order. The diversity of the selected pieces is characteristic of the programme of Het Apollohuis. Only limited number of composers and musicians who performed can be heard in brief fragments o these discs. Consequently a considerable number has been excluded. There simply was no way to include them all (this selection does not imply we value one above the other). The choice of the particular musicians has been my responsability (P: Panhuysen). liner notes: René van Peer sound selection: René Adriaans mastering: Frank Donkersgoed design: Tom Homburg, Marcel d'Anjou (Opera) Per John Bischoff cfr. n. arch. 1.a/b/c