There's a real, genuine excitement when a collaboration truly works.

Here's a project that's exactly that - a tiered collective force working together in creating a week-long, immersive listening experience culminating in a night of live performance on a 13-speaker 3D sound system. For anyone at all interested in sound or art - or more importantly, the combined mediums - The Stream at Canada Water Culture Space is a must.

The independent sonic arts collective Call & Response teamed up with new music composer Ed Perkins and the avant garde ensemble Apartment House to present the project. They in-turn have worked with the Viennese sound art project TONSPUR who have curated the week long immersive listening space. Throughout the week you can expect to experience 8-channel sound works from Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner (UK), Dawn Scarfe (UK), Peter Cusack (UK), Sam Ashley (US), Georg Nussbaumer (AT), and Magda Stawarska-Beavan (PL/UK).

The weeks finale will feature live performances from Peter Szely (TONSPUR), plus work by Mark Fell, and finally The Stream - a work that's been developed with the support of Sound and Music, composed by Ed Perkins and performed live by Apartment House. In this interview, we talk to Susanna Eastburn, Chief Executive of Sound and Music (Britain’s national development agency for composers and new music), and the collective Call & Response. Together they talk about sound and space, the music of 'Now', warehouse raves in the 90's, hearing Stockhausen in the womb, and how it takes 10'000 hours to become a skilled composer. The Stream at Canada Water Culture Space, 24th – 28th June, with live performances on 29th June. soundandmusic.org  callandresponse.org.uk

Run-Riot: Can you tell us about Call and Response.
Call and Response: We are Jeremy Keenan, Matt Lewis, Nabil Ahmed and Tom Slater. We met while studying a mixture of sound arts and architecture related PhDs at Goldsmiths. We all share an interest in compositional, artistic practices that use sound and space as primary components. We formed C&R because of the lack of exhibition and performance opportunities for artists and musicians working multi-channel sound in the UK despite the growing interest in the use of the auditory in contemporary art.

Run-Riot: How do you describe The Stream to people for the first time?
Call and Response: The Stream is composition that generates itself in real time. The musicians from Apartment House each have a character that represents an important role in society; hunter, worker, medic, artist. What they play depends on their health and financial situation which is generated buy a central computer programme. The composition evolves unpredictably each time it is played out, just like a society might do given a range of fluctuating socioeconomic conditions.

Run-Riot: Where did the idea for The Stream start from? How has this project developed?
Susanna Eastburn: I’d like to think that this was a textbook example of good matchmaking - in this case between the composer Ed Perkins and the group Apartment House who will present The Stream. The Stream is being developed within our composer residency programme Embedded, which is geared towards spotting and developing emerging talent. We work really hard to ensure that there is a good ‘fit’ between selected composers and the groups they are working with, since the residency lasts over an extended period of time. Unusually for new music, this means that composers have the time and can build the trust to test and explore their musical and artistic ideas as far as they can go. Apartment House and their artistic director Anton Lukoszevieze are legendary for pushing at the boundaries of what new music can be and how it is experienced, and for this residency, we worked closely with them to find a composer who actively wanted to explore the notion of sound and how it can be synthesised with visual media. Ed came forward with the idea for this piece that centred around four different archetypal characters represented by four different but interlocking sets of musical and visual material. I have to say, it took some time for all the different components to come together and Anton, with the other musicians, were fantastic in helping Ed hone down what he wanted to do. It’s a great example of how an extended relationship can facilitate ambition and artistic risk-taking, and lead to something truly extraordinary.

Call & Response: We were in the middle of putting together this immersive audio installation and live show and thought The Stream would be a perfect fit alongside Mark Fell and TONSPUR.
 
Run-Riot: Why was the element of live scoring so important for the piece?
Susanna Eastburn: My take on that is that whilst The Stream depends on complex computer software and how it interacts with audio and video digitally generated material, it is also, profoundly, about life… The characters are archetypes rather than personalities, but the delicate and constantly shifting balance between them feels very human. In live performance, it becomes more than just a game, although it has aspects of gaming in it. It is extremely dramatic.
 
Run-Riot: What do you want audiences to walk away with?
Susanna Eastburn: I want them to come away thinking that they have never experienced anything like that before. The Stream is a profoundly absorbing and entertaining experience, and also disturbing. As a piece of art, it has that ability to affect the listener/viewer in ways that are hard to articulate…

Call and Response: The audience walk away with something unique, as The Stream will be different each time it's performed. We also aim to promote a greater appreciation of a much neglected element in music listening and performance: that of space. A sense that games can be profound tools for learning and interaction.

Run-Riot: Who inspires you at the moment in music, and the arts more broadly?
Susanna Eastburn: Lots of people inspire me but right now I think I’m going to talk about the inspiration I get from some of the young composers we work with. They’re still in their early 20s and show such energy and determination to get new music out there to as many people as possible. They form their own companies and do extraordinary performances in abandoned warehouses, car parks, cellars and clubs. I am awed by their talent and focus. It’s a constant fillip to our work at Sound and Music. We owe it to them to be successful in championing new music across the country.

Call and Response: We're really into interesting uses of sound in space. Mark Fell has done some very effective installation work using immersive 3D sound systems. Empty Set have produced some excellent architectural sound pieces and Ryoichi Kurokawa's installation and video work is some of the best around. Jacob Kirkegaard has an excellent sense of the ways that sound, space, and place interact. Matt Fuller and Graham Harwood are doing some excellent work that straddles so many different disciplines and issues.
 
Run-Riot: What got you in to new music in the first place?
Susanna Eastburn: I grew up in Cornwall where new music really wasn’t part of the picture, but we did have an amazing guy come and conduct our youth orchestra including a piece by Peter Maxwell Davies. I remember being absolutely gobsmacked by the fact that classical music could be by somebody who was ALIVE. I was obsessive about Messiaen’s music as a teenager, whilst simultaneously obsessing about the more experimental end of pop music (this was also, as it happens, the period when I was so painfully self-conscious that I could barely speak to anybody). I think the thing that hooked me in to new music was the sense that music could be about Now, that it could speak to and for contemporary life, rather than be a piece of heritage. I believe that more than ever today.

Call and Response: Warehouse raves in the 90's, hearing Stockhausen in the womb, the kind of sound that agitates one’s internal organs.
 
Run-Riot: Where is your favourite music venue in London?
Susanna Eastburn: Depends on the evening and the music. Sometimes, it can be experimental improv at Café Oto in Dalston followed by a plate of grilled meat at the Mangal. I associate hot summer evenings with turning up at the Royal Albert Hall and seeing the best orchestras in the world for £5. The Windmill near where I live in Brixton does some great gigs if I fancy something local with a beer. And I love the Southbank Centre: I’m a member, so I like to go and have a drink in the member’s bar before going to see a performance by the London Sinfonietta - that will set my mind fizzing.

Call and Response: Trailer TV in Deptford, it's a bi-weekly electronica night in the back of a trailer in south London. The Barbican is always good and we reckon something very special could be done with sound at the Tanks in the Tate Modern. Also, we dig St. Pancras Church.

Run-Riot: If you could do anything, what would you do to support composers in the UK? What would make the biggest difference?
Susanna Eastburn: It’s really difficult for composers to make a living through composing. Most composers teach, or perform, or organise events – it’s a classic portfolio career. With the recession, many arts institutions, who incidentally receive large amounts of public funding, draw back from commissioning and presenting new music because they think audiences ‘won’t like it’. I don’t believe that. Or rather, I think that there are more people than ever who would get excited by the unique experiences of new music, if they are presented to them in the right way. My worry is that composers are having less and less opportunity to compose, as there are fewer commissions around. The sociologist Richard Sennett has written that it takes 10,000 hours for a craftsman to acquire true artistry and becoming a skilled composer is no different. So I think the biggest difference would be for more resource to go directly to the composers. It is a balance – because composers need to work with musicians who are actively keen on working with them – but the balance doesn’t feel right at the moment.

Call and Response: Speaking for C&R, having a permanent space where composers, performers, hackers, programmers etc could experiment together in the making of work - and hold regular showings of the results. Sound systems utilising multichannel audio are in short supply outside of academic institutions; having time to actually produce work on these systems is a problem, as access is quite limited. Providing a place where artists could produce work specifically for our 13-speaker system would open up opportunities for people to create these works and for audiences to hear them.

Susanna Eastburn is Chief Executive at Sound and Music
@SusannaEastburn
soundandmusic.org
@SoundandMusic

Call & Response are Jeremy Keenan, Matt Lewis, Nabil Ahmed and Tom Slater
@CallandResponse1
callandresponse.org.uk

Call & Response in collaboration with Ed Perkins and Apartment House present:
The Stream
with support from Sound and Music and the Austrian Cultural Forum

The Stream
The Stream live multichannel performances
7.30pm – 11pm, 29th June

The Listening Space
12pm – 8pm, 24th – 28th June

Canada Water Culture Space
Canada Water Library
21 Surrey Quays Road
London SE16 7AR
More info soundandmusic.org callandresponse.org.uk