An exhibition and benefit concert featuring 1-Bit Symphony, a long-form electronic composition in five movements that explores the polyphonic potential of audio reduced to binary form.

Benefit Concert: Tuesday, October 27, 6:30 PM. $100

As part of the show, a pre-premiere of “Dual Synthesis” for harpsichord and 1-bit electronics will take place in a private benefit concert on October 27. Buy Tickets: www.bangonacan.org/give

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition and benefit concert for the American composer Tristan Perich. Featuring recent drawings and a video installation, the exhibition will also include a preview of “1-Bit Symphony”, his second handmade album on Cantaloupe Music (forthcoming Spring 2010).

A departure from traditional recordings, “1-Bit Symphony” literally ‘performs’ its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit-programmed by the artist and packaged into a standard CD jewel case-plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself. The layered tones in its score are synthesized by binary pulses of electricity, emphasizing the physical quality of sound.

“I’m interested in the foundations of computation and data,” says Perich. By reducing sound into primary units of digital measure, Perich’s musical compositions offer critique to overly produced and recorded media. Rather than use data to produce a representation of analogue phenomena, raw electrical pulses in these works create pitch and rhythm when played through a speaker-creating music that is, at its essence, electronic.

Deliberately compact, Perich organizes melodic signal into minimal constructions. Fundamental to this craft are chains of information that can be read as on/off switches, which reference early theoretical study of computation in the 1930s by mathematicians Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. “For me, a one or a zero is just that, and is represented in a microchip by the presence or absence of electrical charge”, says Perich. “This patterned electricity is connected directly to a speaker or electron gun in a television, turning it on and off, thus creating sound or light.”

Perich’s visual compositions also explore texture, noise and order using recursive logic. Woven from geometric structures, his drawings contain layers of choreographed linear repetition. Executed with a pen connected to a machine, line in these images gives way to densely packed surfaces and planes.

About Tristan Perich Tristan Perich (b. 1982) is a New York-based composer and artist. Trained in mathematics and piano, Perich works in acoustic and electronic music. Best known for his constructions that explore the physicality of sound and the polyphonic potential of 1-bit audio, his work celebrates the virtuosity of electricity. Also working visually, Perich’s frameworks include programmed video and hand-built mechanical drawing systems that explore recursive line and patterned surface formation.

Recognized this September at Ars Electronica in Austria, Perich is also the recipient of a 2010 commission from Rhizome for an audio installation that explores microtonal pitch with 1,500 speakers. His works for soloist, ensemble and orchestra have been performed nationally and abroad by ensembles including Bang on a Can (2008 People’s Commissioning Fund), counter)induction, Calder Quartet, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, Due East, Y Trio, Hunter-Gatherer and Ensemble Pamplemousse at venues from the Whitney Museum, P.S.1, Chelsea Art Museum, Mass MoCA, Merkin Hall, the Stone, Joe’s Pub and Issue Project Room to Los Angeles’ Zipper Hall.

Perich holds a B.A. from Columbia University and M.P.S. from N.Y.U. Tisch.