John Bischoff
John Bischoff (born 1949) is an American composer and performer from San Francisco who works with live computer music. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers, often described as the first computer network band, and later of The Hub. His solo pieces are built on real-time synthesis, and he taught for many years at Mills College in Oakland. Bischoff studied at the California Institute of the Arts and at Mills College, where he took his MFA in 1973; his teachers included Robert Moran, James Tenney and Robert Ashley.
Field Transfer
Recorded in the Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College in Oakland, California, with minimal edits and no overdubs.. Field Transfer projects the sounds from an analog circuit into juxtaposition with facets of raw digital audio. As a performer interacts with the circuit—which consists of two square-wave oscillators activated by pressure sensors and shorting disks—instances of pulsed and modulated sound are triggered in the laptop in a manner that couples the analog and digital sources together.…
Audio Combine
restocked: The music comprising John Bischoff’s new CD ‘Audio Combine’, just released on New World Records, is beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable. Philip Perkins’s engineering and production values are superb.The five tracks on the disc are diverse, representing Bischoff compositions from 2004 to mid-2011. The third track ‘Local Color’ evokes traditional chinese zhong bells, but also especially calls into question the ‘who’ of music performance [in asmuch as some of the bells are compu…
Aperture
Bischoff qualifies his work as the realization of a reflective intention, where he determines sonic structure not only through the predetermined elements which go into a piece, but also through the active process of listening to the music as it happens and responding accordingly. Aperture opens the possibility for multiple readings through a series of diverse techniques ranging from additive synthesis to FM synthesis to sampled-based processes. Each of the pieces within the album was recorded in…
