Benjamin Thigpen

2017 Montréal © Frédéric Chais

Benjamin Thigpen, nomad, born in the United States, with degrees inEnglish Literature, Comparative Literature and “Esthetics, Technologies and Artistic Creations”, immigrated to Paris at the age of 31. Since then, he has composed at GRM (Paris), at Musiques et Recherches (Belgium), at SCRIME (Bordeaux), at EMS (Stockholm), at the Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden), at STEIM (Amsterdam), at Djerassi (California), at l’Espace Totem (Montreal), in his bedroom and in the train. After 6 years at Ircam (Paris) and 7 at the Conservatory of Cuneo (Italy), he currently teaches computer music and (psycho)acoustics at Arts2 (Mons, Belgium), while also working as a free-lance programmer and musician.
He makes music for loudspeakers:electroacoustic works(composed on electromagnetic support); pieces for live computer performance;interactive music for computer and acoustic instrument(s); computer improvisation. His music is concerned with issues of energy, density, complexity, movement, simultaneity and violence, and he often works extensively with space as a primary compositional parameter. He thinks that music does not exist in time but rather creates it and considers that music is not the art of sound but the art of the transcendence of sound.

dissolution / 2018, 22’
Commissioned by INA GRM

dissolution I 6’01
dissolution II 7’18
dissolution III a 2’48
dissolution III b 5’42

When a shape moves, it doesn’t produce a shape but a shadow.
When a sound moves, it doesn’t produce a sound but an echo.
When nothing moves, it doesn’t produce nothing but something.
(Lei Zi, Vth century B.C.)

All the sounds of dissolution have been produced in April 2010 on a Buchla 200 analog synthesizer at the EMS Stockholm. The music has been composed between 2013 and 2018 at the Visby International Center for Composers (Visby, Sweden) and at the GRM studios.