Hangar, the centre for art research and production in Barcelona, Spain, is one of the nicest places for doing workshops and experimental performances and has an amazing team of people running it (see the THANK YOU list below!). Having performed there for the very first time in 2018, we were delighted to be invited to do another set of workshops and a performance on 12 July 2019, as part of the Hangar Rarefacció series, curated by the lovely Sergi Botella.
Tuna relocated to Barcelona from Istanbul shortly before we did the Hangar performance in 2018, so she was already in town. Ada was travelling around Europe for the summer and arrived to Barcelona by train from erm … France was it??? Nela flew in from London, UK on a Thursday morning (having just got back from doing a workshop in Zadar and a FLO perfomance at the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb, Croatia a week before that), and went straight into Hangar to meet Ada and start the tech-prep 🙂
From the performance we did in Zagreb, where we had 6 co-located performers, 4 remote performers, streaming of dance art videos (by Fumi Tomioka and Aki Kawashita) to all the remote performers and sound diffusion in 6 channels, we already knew we would need 3 computers and 2 mixing desks to run the performance diffused in 4 channels at Hangar. Luckily for us, when Marc (Hangar’s equipment guru) opened up the ‘gear cupboard’, we found plenty of stuff we could use (including a nice camera and an audio recorder that Marc set-up to capture the performance!).
What we couldn’t anticipate, however, is that computers, as well as outboard hardware gear like audio interfaces and mixing desks, can sometimes behave in unpredictable ways, especially when you are: a) trying to use soundjack platform to bring in the live stream of cello improvisations (from Magda who was in Warsaw); b) mix that with the live streams from the Locus Sonus soundmap (sent by Maria, Sonia and Ariane using LiveSHOUT app from their mobile phones whilst out and about in London, Melbourne and Arraial d’Ajuda) and c) mix that with live performances (by Nela, Ada and Tuna located at Hangar).
To make things even more complicated (as we like a good challenge), we decided to stream the full performance mix to Andrea (who was in the VR lab at her university in Copenhagen), so she can draw VR visuals in real-time and stream that back to us 🙂 Yep! You get the picture!
Cue in 3 days of tech with lots of testing, re-testing, re-re-testing and re-re-re-re-testing by Nela, Ada, Tuna, Marc and Alexander (developer of soundjack platform), alongside lots of WhatsApp messaging, Skype calls, Zoom testing, remote log-ins, cable repatching and … erm … yes … lots of coffee breaks and ‘head scratching’!
In the midst of this tech-troubleshooting-bonanza, we somehow also managed to deliver 2 afternoon workshop sessions (culminating in a short performance) with our lovely workshop participants, Maribel and Jackie. Doing the workshops is always great fun and it makes us super happy when we have female participants who are interested in learning about the music-techy stuff we like to tinker with so THANK YOU ladies for joining us!
After lots of trials and tribulations, we finally got the set-up working just in time to start the performance that Friday evening! Phew!!! This laptop orchestra stuff is not for the faint-hearted folks for sure!!!
YES, we celebrated with vermouth and beer! YES, we went to the beach, had amazing food on the roof terrace of our hotel with the most amazing sunset and walked around the lovely Barcelona neighbourhoods where Hangar is based, looking at the beatiful street art wearing sun hats and 50+ SPF! The hard stuff and the fun stuff are all part of the experience of being in FLO! WE LOVE IT and CAN’T WAIT TO DO MORE OF IT!!!
Here are some photos that tell the story much better!!!
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It all started with a lo-fi sketch of the performance set-up 🙂
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When we resolved the network issues, we hit some snags with soundjack …
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… so we called Alexander Carôt (from soundjack) to the rescue!
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When this was sorted, we tested Locus Sonus soundmap streams from Ariene, Maria and Sonia …
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… and streaming sound and visuals with Andrea …
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Despite all the technical challenges we had in the beginning, it all came together beautifully in the end …
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… and when we started packing, we realised we actually used 3 computers, 2 mixing desks, 1 projector and 1 mobile phone just to run the performance (which is a lot of gear to operate with 2 hands for sure!)
A short excerpt from the performance can be found on the FLO YouTube channel, the audio recording of the full performance can be found on the Hangar website.
A few weeks after the concert, Natalia García from Hangar talked to Nela about the motivations for starting FLO and the relationship between female empowerment and working with technology and music. You can read the full interview here.
A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who supported FLO performance of Transmusicking III at Hangar Rarefacció 2019 in various ways:
- The awesome Hangar team: Lluís Nacenta (director of Hangar, who keeps kindly inviting us!), Sergi Botella (curator and organizer of Rarefacció 2019, who’s also an artist!), Luciana Della Villa (who sorted out all the web announcements for our workshop and performance), Matteo Zappa (the systems guru who helped us set up all the computers on Hangar network) and the incredible Marc Ribera Valls (who has the biggest smile and huge amounts of patience – which was certainly needed to test, re-test and re-re-test all the gear and connections many times over during technical set-up!)
- Our lovely workshop participants Maribel Segoviano and Jackie Neon, who we are looking forward to collaborating with in the future 🙂
- The amazing Alexander Carôt, developer of soundjack.eu (the online platform we have been using in the past few performances), who logged in remotely to troubleshoot computers and all connected hardware and help us reconfigure the set-up so we can do the performance! What a star!!!
- Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica and RØDE Microphones for supplying FLO with software and hardware!
A BIG THANKS to EVERYONE who came to see the concert and asked us questions! We love sharing our artistic practice and talking about the tools we use! We hope that by demystifying the process, we can inspire more folks to use the tools to start performing telematically 🙂
FLO 
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