Area C visits Media Lab

Today we were visited by Erik Carlson, who performs as “Area C.”

Erik is a Providence musician who works with various pedals and other electronic hardware to make his music.

He showed us the equipment he works with, how he sets it up, and what each piece of hardware does. He performed for us, let us control his equipment, and even let us play!

We are hopefully going to have access to some similar equipment soon, and we can’t wait to make more of our own music with it!

More about Erik:

Erik Carlson is a composer, media artist and architect based in Providence. His work examines sound as an evocative presence, often acting as a marker, in the physical and mental spaces we inhabit. Since 2002 he has been recording and performing under the name AREA C, whose compositions work with timbre, texture and live loops, exploring cyclical relationships and the details of their decay over time. Improvisation plays an important part in both recordings and live performances, encompassing extended explorations of minimal rhythm and melody, drawing on remnants of other times and places, outdated and untested technologies, signals sent out but never received

In 2009, Carlson received the MacColl-Johnson Fellowship in music composition and he is currently working on new commissions for the NASA RI Space Grant Consortium and the LEF Foundation. In 2010 he composed the score for the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Witness: Katrina,” which premiered on the National Geographic Channel. His permanent sound installation (“Low Rez/Hi Fi,” a collaboration with architect Meejin Yoon) can be viewed at 1110 Vermont Avenue in Washington DC.

AREA C’s sixth full-length CD, titled “Map of Circular Thought,” was released in January 2011 on Preservation Records (Australia). Previous releases include “The Planetarium Project” on Sedimental (a double CD of four live collaborative performances at the Cormack Planetarium in Providence, RI), and full-length albums on Students of Decay, Sloow Tapes, and Last Visible Dog.

Learn more at: http://www.areacmusic.com/