Critical Bands

Critical Bands (2007-present) Critique based performances analyzing the complex & frayed histories and formal limits in the subcultures/histories of Performance Art and New Music, that despite historicization developed largely in tandem. CB vary but site specificity, complicity with method, tactics of presentation/documentation/distribution, and notions of collaboration are filtered through thresholds of genuine/satire, expert/novice, and event/reenactment. Warping specialized language/histories, CB embrace the potential failures of presentation/crossover of these actions, utilizing the live form in various sites to elicit interdisciplinary response beyond specialization, reexamined and (re)presented to complicate the status and legacies of these forms

$75,000 Studio Plaque ($75KSP) (2015-present) shifts Morton Subotnick’s prophecy of the music studio emulating the painter’s studio as a mode of operation/instrument as a collaborator in which the studio itself is emphasized. The myth of the studio and fetishization of equipment/process is key to produce/glamorize creativity. Home/busywork recorded to the highest degree: Bruce Nauman gone IDM. $75KSP was installed in 2014 and is on view in the Michael Asher Studio Block at the California Institute of the Arts.

AST (2014-Present) analyzes the artist as brand and the use/misuse/fetishization of readymade objects in performance, composition, and ultimately commodification in attempts at novelty. Attaching a brand to actions not unique or independent of other Critical Bands AST makes use of the complicated nature of aesthetics and accessible/affordable sound generating devices against complex equipment. To further complications AST also works as fabrication shop for artists working to produce complex performance tools/instruments at reasonable rates

Backpack (BP) (2018-Present) The traveling artists/curator archetype merged with gear/process fetishism. BP is the capacity of what can fit into a standard backpack and taken on public transportation/carpooling between cities to arrive on time for load-in at the venue. Brutalized Minimalism. Disturbingly,  the discovery of transportation of DIY electronic instruments is often conflated with weaponry, an instance almost involving police action. BP is wholly contingent on access/support, two factors largely decimated by the Real Estate/privatized turn of Southern California.

BASE/NET (B/N) (2019-present) Algorithmic composition, the archival turn, personalized/financial information, and the utopic anti-capitalist impetus of the hardware free Algorave movement mobilized into a music composed via Credit Card and Script data from personal accounts and sites related to musical production. B/N grounds the spectral states of harvesting/transaction. This data is then grafted into MIDI and routed into budget analog gear, and MIDI simulations of instruments of unattainable value to further complicate the form. B/N then makes these sources public by “leaking/breaching” this data publicly via sample packs replicating the flows of information and freeware. 

Chairkiller (CK) (2016) Total embodiment of online musician forums focused on “gear” and early performances of transgression, exhaustion, and the auto destructive. Endless forums can be found on the fetishization of equipment in which the collectors typically have little to no intention of performing publicly. Wearing protective equipment CK drums along/hambones on an amplified chair linked to an extensive pedalboard to isolated heavy rock drum tracks. CK proceeds until the chair is destroyed in low stakes auto-destructivity, canned transgression, pathetic ability, and insincerity to all in attendance.

Essential Parts (EP) (2020-2021) The reduction of a performer via fields of acoustic research and paradoxical emulation of reductive/minimalist histories into a low tech/low res emulation of the artist. An utterance machine rooted in early automatons, contemporary research, and pop art histories debased further as it is constructed via the lowest budget possible. A performer able to perform outside of the restrictions of breathing or imperfect timing is possible but only via the negation of it still being operated as an instrument.

Galvanic Control Set/SIM (GCS/S) (2017-present) Histories of electronic control, simulation, shock art, and affect manipulation condensed into a site of total control via re-presentation of space, scale, and the manipulation of objects. Films/events of dubious origin are reenacted through a total deconstruction of set/plot while motors/movement are amplified to uncanny levels of wheezing, shrieks, and spasms. Events are reprocessed simultaneously via live feed through a projector and filter further directing the objects of attention.  

Globster (GB) (2016-present) Slick eclecticism, reformulated trends, Post-digital art, and the virtual presence, worked into a nearly commercial form. Salvaging material from damaged equipment, low-resolution audio perceptivity, and poor documentation GB is and only ever will exist as a virtual project further obscuring its perception by shifting recognizability of source. Unlike the beached corpses of indeterminate origin GB deliberately works to conceal its sources popular or obscure.

The Hand of Glory (2016-Present) Minimalist/escape act band of plastic minimalism and transgression by ways of The myth of the hand of glory: the hand of a criminal is acquired and wicks made from its hair are made, when lit the bearer is invisible and its victim immobilized. rror’ are presented in the minimal droning patterns of the HOG and modified Giallo soundtracks play while the performer is bound/escapes. Unbound, the performer processes the hands to create otoacoustic patterns of ghost notes while “set specific” backing tracks of other performers on the bill are “stolen” played, pitched down to sonically obscure the source and match the HOG. forced paralysis/transfixiaiton through the convention of musical spectatorship, the performer is to use this and duration to successfully and enticingly disappear eventually turning the lights on and ending the piece. Transgression through nothingness.

Listening Party (2020-Present) fixed medium, personal discography, and group listening filtered through the lens of free improvisation, acousmatic music, and plunderphonics. Using a series of gates the remaining overstock of Tofighi’s Flat Ledge Label are played to open the gate of an instrument, creating a new combined sound. Formal usage of the CD’s as a generative tool for sale after the show

Millions in Prizes (2019-Present) utilizes the archival turn, obsessive sampling/documentation, and composing with the inherently “uncomposable”. Taking the form of the “sample pack” MIP is an attempt to record every object in the public room of a house afflicted by Virulent Amalgamation. Only objects immediately accessible are recorded per session until fatigue sets in. Taking the contents of a hidden inner site and making it public, the abject samples proliferate and restructure in ways beyond their current function as corporeal and static objects limiting activity in a domestic space. Samples can be obtained here

The Nouroboros Octet (2014-2015) The role of conductor, composer, and improvisation in large ensembles,habit, tropes, and audience reception all placed in misdirection. The groups are given at pre-tuned and prepared instruments and no further instruction. Gambits of self-imposed pressure to fulfill the supposed wishes of said octet and composer are used to test the ideas of improvisation and invention in the players/free improvisation. a web of deducing genuine from forced and composed from improvised. Often shown with the  23-minute silent film “Six Visions (for Occult Self amputation) by Alan S. Tofighi”  to escalate these pretenses.

Post (2019-Present) Histories of the abstraction, generation, and implications of sound, viscerally performed live as Cagean Foley via notated actions performed in backwards order to a projected series of scenes that are relayed and dis/assembled by the audience through inherent pattern building systems. a development of foley from Wagner, Jimmy MacDonald, Bebe & Louis Barron, Pierre Schaefer, and the day job’s of Tod Dockstader, Daphne Oram, and Delia Derbyshire, and Cages development of the “noise table” with the Cunningham Dance Company. Forms ironically outdated as New Music and extended techniques would become dominant

رول Royce روح 91 (2019) compactor for the strains of postinternet art, vaporware, memory driven forms, and the complications of recent trends politicizing anemoia via reifications of memory and trauma. Using the inherent normalcy/defanged tropes of these forms framed as radical, and using various forms of audio quality degradation, editing, and collage, Nostalgia is forged and memory of the lowest order are brought to the forefront to create affect inducing work rife with fetishization to complicate the genres paradoxical relation to subject and ultimately capital. رول Royce روح 91 plays on the multimedia assemblage to draw out meaning of these tropes to assemble a motivation/desire/history/identity that never was. 

Razzle Dazzle (RD) (2015-Present) the infrasonic, conceptual removal,  acoustic weapons, and the role of abstraction through (de)politicized. Originally conceived as a project between Alan S. Tofighi & Nouroboros, RD was formed to break from the structure implied by this collaboration. Reworking the Razzle Dazzle camouflage of WWI into a structuralist video and presented as titanically extreme decibels of inaudible  infra and ultra-sonic waves to leave the audience “deprogrammed”.RD works to subsonically use role of silence and listening environments in music and art’s constant attempt at politicization despite its role as overt or obscured/forged through abstraction. 

The Seeds of Distrust (SOD) (2017, revived c. 2018) a collaboration inherently rooted in a skepticism of all levels. Interactivity, collaboration, notions of improvisation, power, silence, and the parallels of parascience/electroacoustic music are examined. In SOD a plant (organic or synthetic) is connected via electrodes to a Wheatstone bridge and a Dektor Psychological Stress Evaluator and further processed to emulate a human voice for maximum pathos/coercion. SOD is a live manipulation, forcing of the real, and exercise in ethics, authorship, and control in what is undoubtedly a series of performances in which one performer is electrocuted and put to the whims of the energies of the other performer with uneasy results.

Snuffed Receiver (SR) (2020-Present) notions of collaboration, the family, legacy, memory/affect, perception, and commitment to process in composition and object making are placed into a maligned exploitation of a distant and deceased family member via processes related to Electronic Voice Phenomenon. placed in the history of  electronic music composition, effects of gain, delay, reverb, gating, and edits, to “bring out” and give a “body” to the sounds are enacted. Molding the otoacoustic and psychoacoustic into the “para-acoustic” SR is a band of bad taste, bad timing, skepticism, and committing to the process, a reverse haunting in which if the process is true the living “harass” the past and the dead for the exploitation of forging affect and an art object. 

Tofighi Plays T.O.F.I.G.H.I. (TPT) (2018-Present) Computer music, information-based conceptualism, the fetishization/exoticism of intelligence and the role of “mechanized idiocy in neural networks are played against each other. The T.O.F.I.G.H.I. Machine operates an AI equipped automated chessboard/amplified played Alan S. Tofighi in which the moves, computationally and physically inform processing effects with any and all captured pieces thrown into a spring revere tank. Varying levels of automated improvisation in the face of theory are performed. Neither performer plays to the speed of the other but to simulate or “out” human/machine the opponent. Gridded control exerted by the bloated apex/fetishism of posthuman intentions beyond the surface of metaphor.

Toys Not Music (TNM) (2014-Present) Automated drum ensemble/historical overview of noise music’s infiltration high and low forms. TNM is an over the top presentation in the desire for novelty/invention/spectacle in late 20^th century music’s primarily within free improv and noise scenes. A series of timed and choreographed windup toys are placed on an amplified snare drum rigged through various electronics. The sounds produced are not uncommon to those of the intonarumori, the laptop school of computer music, or free improv percussion. TNM works to drum out the thresholds for invention, collaboration, genre, technique, and performance

The Vasquez Rocks Large Ensemble (2016-Present) Reverse Land Art band/event that utilizes reductionist techniques and labor, operations performed in order to enact entropic forces. VRLE consists of an ensemble given cheap “party whistles”/guilt instruments set to traverse various sites, when refuse is found the whistle is sounded and the refuse picked up and disposed of. This continues until a site is effectively cleaned or all the whistles give out from excessive whistling. With increased obsessions in the environment as a marker of outsider identity/plastic shamanism, as well as meeting head on ideas of the nature cult art and music, VRLE works to intervene and clean after the fabulation