When Emilio approached me for a KARJAKA New York design of his up coming concert at roulette with contemporaneous featuring his collaborative works with composer Michael Folmer Hansen, I immediately thought of, an evening with Emilio Guarino considering I already had the photos from just under a decade ago. But then I got the details and the picture started coming into focus.
Music is all about collaboration. You’re constantly performing with others, whether in person or solo, composers dead and alive and the like. Throw the legendary Artist Hego and contemporaneous in the mix, and now it’s a party.
This story starts as stories often do, over an Endpin…
The backstory of this project is it’s a collaborative concert. Michael Folmer Hansen and I met through my bass endpin project around 2016-2017 and that relationship eventually grew into a lot of writing and releasing music together which he releases on streaming services under the alias folmR. – Guarino
“So what info should we relay in this edition?”, I asked Emilio. Me, Aleks, personally, I hate reading interviews, in all honesty, I’d rather watch. See the expression and inflections. Reading, he said this and she said that blah blah, and suddenly no one is reading in today’s world. So here’s the information the gents would like to convey…
The Boiler Plate
Long story short I have a pretty big concert com- ing up in September at Roulette with Contempo- raneous performing about an hour of music I’ve writ- ten with an Australian/ Danish composer named Michael Folmer Hansen. It started with a bunch of music we wrote during covid using Ableton Live, never thinking it would actually be played live. But we were able to come up with the money to do it for real.
The gig is Sept 24, 8pm at Roulette. Tickets are free but there’s a pay what you want option, so if you choose to buy the proceeds get donated to Free Arts NYC which provides arts programs for under- served youth.
The compositions for the Roulette concert began as melodic and harmonic sketches Michael came up with using Ableton Live and hardware synthesizers. Most of that is up on streaming and bandcamp and was done in the depths of lockdowns when live music was closed everywhere on earth and we had no idea when it would be back.
For the concert, Michael and I picked 4 pieces each (a total of 8) across a variety of these projects that would make a good concert program, represent the work, and would be practical to orchestrate. Although one of the pieces for the show originally used a string plugin with about 400 people playing pizzicato that we’re taking a big leap in trying to translate to a group of 30 people.
The collaborative process with us is a bit varied. Sometimes Michael just throws me a basic idea and I’ll run with it. A couple of the other pieces were more finalized and I mostly orchestrated from what he sent. When I say “finalized” in the last point it’s fun to point out that Michael never sends me traditional scores, it’s mostly in MIDI form or sometimes just recorded audio. As you know I did the whole music school thing and studied it formally in an academic setting, Michael did not. So he’ll often experiment with recording hardware synth arpeggiators or generating material in the computer, then send an Ableton session over with a bunch of tracks containing some wild piano rolls feeding synths or plugins.
Tickets are free with an option to purchase, which will be donated to Free Arts NYC to help fund after school programs for underserved youth. Michael and I did this for opposite reasons. I credit a lot of my involvement in music to luck—I happened to have really good music teachers around growing up who nurtured my interest and talents in a big. Michael says he had terrible music teachers growing up and is on a mission to prove them wrong!
Meanwhile FolmR writes, “I got talking years ago with our local Melbourne (Australia) barista. In Melbourne you’re more loyal to your barista than your partner! Anyway he did multidisciplinary visual art, I did music, so a friendship developed. His amazing drawings were based on numerous discussions and a stick drawing from me. We’ve done a couple of joint visual music shows in Australia.
HEGO is probably best know for his murals of Indigenous soldiers from World War I, but is represented in several Australian museums.”
EMILIO GUARINO is a performer and producer with experience that ranges from orchestral performance to contemporary electronic music, modern improvisation, and multi-disciplinary collaborative works.
As a bassist, he has performed or collaborated with a wide variety of creative personalities that include conductors, composers, soloists, and producers. Highlights include performances with Sir Simon Rattle, Matthias Pintscher, Renée Fleming, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Todd Machover, The MIT Media Lab, and Glenn Kotche of Wilco.
Emilio has also been invited to appear at major festivals including the Stavanger Kammermusikk Festival (Norway), The Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), The International Society of Bassists biennial conference, and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s contemporary ensemble-in-residence, SoundLAB, at the Barnes/Stokowski Festival.
MICHAEL FOLMER HANSEN is a Danish composer living in the Australian Alps.
Michael’s Roland SH-2 and MC-202 synths, Boss DR-55 drum machine and fretless Rickenbacker knock-off were stolen in 1984. The items were uninsured and he is still seeking revenge, doing a Gauguin in 2015 and dropping his suit and tie for the life of an artist. He is having fun and exacting revenge by creating music under his own name and the monikers folmR and Sthurmovik.
Co-producer of the Phillip Glass Buddha Machine, Michael is also a life member of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio.
After more than a hundred albums on his own and with collaborators Michael’s output is equal parts prolific and eclectic, hard and soft, and in the neo classical output includes 2 operas, a choral work, a piano concerto, a collection of etudes and 4 symphonies.
CONTEMPORANEOUS is an ensemble of 25 musicians whose mission is to bring to life the most transformative music by living composers through performances, commissions, recordings, and educational programs. Described as “exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing” (The New York Times) and “leading new music towards its better self” (I Care If You Listen), Contemporaneous particularly champions the creation of large-scale works and “dream projects,” which composers might not otherwise have opportunities to realize due to scale.
Based in New York City and active throughout the United States, Contemporaneous has premiered over 200 new works, and has been presented by such institutions as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, PROTOTYPE Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, MATA Festival, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Bang on a Can and has worked with such artists as David Byrne, Donnacha Dennehy, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dawn Upshaw, and Julia Wolfe. Contemporaneous’ programming has also received acclaim from community members, artists, and press of all kinds, with the ensemble’s recent performance of Stranger Love being listed as one of 2023’s “best classical music performances” by the New York Times.
