Coppice Bypass and Bypass Ideal

Coppice was founded by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer in Chicago in 2009, as an inquiry into the capture and generation of music and its relationship to its physical sources.

Its compound studies include Bellows & Electronics (prepared pump organs, shruti boxes, and tape processors) between 2009–2014, and Physical Modeling & Modular Syntheses between 2014–2018; focusing on the interactions between direct and reproduced sound, and the perceptual links between original and emulated sources, respectively.

Its third study in Phonography & Fiction (in progress since 2018) scrutinizes the dynamics between its previous two studies, and their relationship to architecture and time: the acoustic preservation and obsolescence of the Yerkes Observatory’s refractor and reflector telescopes in Williams Bay being the locus of investigation.

With sustained interest in sound’s capacity to cross domains, Coppice crafts pathways between music and technology in a cross-disciplinary language, resulting in work that is an overarching documentation of experimental music in-formation. Operating in cycles of instrument construction and modification, recordings, and live presentations, its productions incorporate sound design, sculpture, installation, software, images, and video.

Bypass and Bypass Ideal

2013-2015

Photo by Julia Dratel

Prepared pump organ (Kinder)
Modified Boombox III
Transmitters

Bypass was conceived as a heavily amplified performance of Modified Boombox and prepared pump organ. Their sounds were set against each other at the exclusion of signal processing. The slow accretion and changes in the sound developed in parallel to a video projection of slow exposure.

For its publication on tape as Bypass Ideal (Hideous Replica, 2015), the Modified Boombox and prepared pump organ parts were placed in isolation on each side of a cassette tape to evade the original simultaneous listening, offering instead a retrospective listening.

The video projection used in performances is now available to stream online, including a soundtrack of both parts joined together. Bypass Ideal proposes an “idealized experience of parts,” while the video is a document that approximates what Bypass was like in live settings.

February 15, 2014 – WHPK Presents Pictures and Sounds; Film Studies Center, University of Chicago; Chicago, IL
February 11, 2013 – Noisefext X, Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center; St. Louis, MO

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