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Charles Amirkhanian

Employed in the avant-garde world where classical and popular music sometimes intersect, Charles Amirkhanian expenses himself like a composer, percussionist, audio poet, radio maker, and practitioner of electro-acoustic music and text-sound structure. His magnum opus, maybe, can be Loudspeakers, a 1990 spoken-word family portrait of composer Morton Feldman, enduring 35 minutes. The task incorporates Feldman’s documented speeches and discussions. The following yr he made up A Berkelium Cannon, a “digital pianistic tribute to Nicolas Slonimsky.” Amirkhanian honed his abilities at audio and text message manipulation as music movie director of radio train station KPFA in Berkeley, CA, from 1969 to 1992. During this time period he also aimed the “Talking about Music” series at San Francisco’s Exploratorium from 1983 to 1992, and, with John Lifton, was founding co-director from the Composer-to-Composer Event in Telluride, CO, from 1988 to 1991. From 1993 to 1997 he offered as executive movie director from the Djerassi Citizen Artists System in Woodside, CA. From 1993 he also was connected with Additional Thoughts, a San Francisco-based, nonprofit global songs community. In the beginning he was the organization’s creative movie director; in 1998 he became its professional movie director. Amirkhanian’s bio says that his afterwards works, produced using the Synclavier digital synthesizer, integrate “sampled acoustic environmental noises (which he telephone calls “representational noises”) and traditional musical pitched noises (“abstract noises’) to build up dreamscapes that become disjunct narratives, evoking an environment of memory-triggers that creates a trance-like hearing state. Noises are selected both for reasons of mention of a topic and because of their sculptural and gestural beauty.” An initial example of that is Strolling Melody (A Room-Music for Percy Grainger), which combines organic sounds documented in Grainger’s indigenous Australia with violin melodies and fragments of the J.C. Bach aria.

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