Carl Testa and Kobe Van Cauwenberghe on Echo

Echo Mirror House Music

Anthony Braxton’s ‘Echo Echo Mirror House Music’ - by Kobe Van Cauw…
Transatlantic Echo Echo Mirror House performance led by Kobe Van Cauwenberghe and
Carl Testa on February 1, 2021.

I first experienced Anthony Braxton’s Echo Echo Mirror House Music (EEMHM) in concert
at Wesleyan University in Spring 2009 (https://ctw-
wu.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CTW_WU/1nfr5mf/alma9914160593903768).
Braxton had 20-30 musicians onstage each with an iPod and the sound was probably the
densest sound I’d heard up to that point. (This was prior to me listening to all the notes of an
organ played at once in 2011).

My first experience performing in EEMHM came in Fall 2010 with a septet performance in
Strasbourg, France
(https://festivalmusica.fr/documentation/editions/2010/manifestation/110/anthony-braxton-
septet). For this performance I had come up with some ideas as to how to relate to the change
state cues from Anthony and in the score by changing parameters of my effects pedals, but was
still overall completely lost as far as “finding myself ” in the music due to the density of
musical information coming from every direction. I had to let the experience wash over me
and just focus on the experience of it rather than trying to make something happen.

This experience had an almost subliminal effect on me and my music-making. I found myself
drawn to trying to make sense of the density and that experience, and my own compositional
interests shifted slightly to researching dense, layered sound environments like those found in
my 2015 duo CD with guitarist Christopher Riggs, Sⁿ.

In 2015, I started to work on solving the problem of replacing the use of iPods in EEMHM
with a central computer system using SuperCollider (https://supercollider.github.io/) that
would enable musicians to join and leave the collage on demand from any web-connected
device. The system was fully functional by 2016 and I was able to demo it for Braxton. He
gave me crucial feedback on certain elements that would be required for it to fully replace the
iPods such as the ability to drill down and select a specific piece and not just random pieces.

In 2017, I had the opportunity to bring the EEMHM to the Experimental Media and
Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) as part of their Spatial Audio Workshop. For this workshop
I was able to prototype a spatial system of EEMHM where compositions in the collage could
be placed in a specific physical place in a concert hall via EMPAC’s Wavefield Synthesis
System. The musicians or audience could physically walk through the collage and hear
different pieces jumping into their head as they traversed from one side of the concert hall to
the next.

EEMHM with Wave Field Synthesis at EMPAC (Video 4)

from Tri-Centric Foundation

06:24

In 2019, I finally had the opportunity to present a version of the new EEMHM system in
performance with pianist Cory Smythe for a performance at Roulette in NYC
(https://roulette.org/event/the-music-of-anthony-braxton-syntactical-ghost-trance-echo-echo-
mirror-house/). For that performance, 8 speakers surrounded the audience and the collage
varied over the course of the performance from 2 - 60 layers of recorded sound collaged with
Braxton solo piano music and graphic scores used for controlling live processing.
The telematic performance in Antwerp of EEMHM is the latest iteration of the development
of the new EEMHM system that combines the updated web-based controller system with the
higher-level control processes used in the 2019 performance. This system involves the creation
of a remote server located in Amsterdam that runs the EEMHM software and receives control
signals from the web-based controller. The audio is then transmitted to Antwerp into the
performance space using audio networking software SonoBus (https://sonobus.net/). There
are numerous options for continued development. These include increasing the spatialization
of the collage via Ambisonics and/or Wavefield Synthesis. Opening the collage up to involve
audience members or virtual audience members so that they can directly influence the
spectrum of the collage. Increasing the categorization of sounds in the EEMHM system is
another area for growth where instead of only grouping compositions by composition type
(solo, opera, Ghost Trance Music) one could group compositions and performances by
Braxton’s Language Music parameters and use Machine Learning to group similar sounds
together so that orchestration with recorded sound in performance becomes an
improvisational resource. Braxton has laid the foundations for such a rich musical resource
that I believe we’ll continue to find fresh insights into the Echo Echo Mirror House music for
years to come.
Carl Testa
February 4, 2021

My interest in EEMHM was triggered by reading Carl’s insightful overview of the EEMHM
system in Sound American's Anthony Braxton Issue
(http://archive.soundamerican.org/sa_archive/sa16/sa16-echo-echo-mirror-house-
music.html). I was especially intrigued by how EEMHM fits into Braxton's overall musical
philosophy as well as its unexplored possibilities; how, instead of iPods, a web-based interface
could be used to control the overall sound collage, allowing people from all over the world to
potentially join in. I had already been exploring quite a bit of Braxton’s music as part of an
ongoing research project (http://www.kobevancauwenberghe.com/ghost-trance-project),
mostly focussing on Ghost Trance Music and some of the older compositions. When I
received the opportunity to present something for the Articulate Research Days at the
Antwerp Conservatory last fall, I thought this could be a great occasion to try out one of the
EEMHM compositions in a multinational version using Carl’s web-based controller.
Carl and I started with a few test sessions in October 2020 to check if the software worked,
and if the EEMHM sound collage and my live-playing could travel back and forth between
New Haven and Brussels without too much trouble. We used JackTrip and SonoBus software
to have high quality sound with minimal latency, with Carl controlling the collage and me
playing guitar. It immediately worked really well. Unfortunately the planned public
performance in November in Antwerp was canceled due to a second wave of Covid-19
infections in Belgium, but since the system was functioning between Carl and myself, we
decided to continue more online test sessions, with musicians joining in from our homes in
Brussels, Antwerp and New Haven. This proved to be a little more complicated, but we did
manage to play a first version of Composition 381 (https://soundcloud.com/kobevc/anthony-
braxton-echo-echo-mirror-house-music-composition-381-excerpt/s-NMxfwW6rREL) where
five players were virtually connected, playing music together. Then, on February 1, we got a
second chance to do an actual public performance via live-stream at the conservatory in
Antwerp. For this version, we were five musicians playing live in Antwerp with Carl giving
conducting cues from his home in New Haven, and all of us connected to the EEMHM web-
based controller, sending sound via a server in Amsterdam.
Carl's skillful approach with the technology and his patience in helping me and the other
musicians getting familiar with both the technical set up and the multilayered graphic scores
and different cueing strategies of Braxton's EEMHM, was incredibly helpful. The current
health crisis also had an impact on how we worked: it certainly made evident the visionary
aspects and potential of the EEMHM system as a way to continue exploring new ways of
playing together. But pandemic and technical innovation aside, it is the profound poetic
implications of the EEMHM system that still fascinates me the most. How Braxton associates
EEMHM with "Sound Mass Logics", as one of the ways to realize his holistic vision of sonic
unification, connecting his entire oeuvre and philosophy in the same event-space and to be
able to hear in one instant the depth and richness of his compositional output. This concept
of having past-present and future in the same time-space, of dealing with time in a non-linear
way, to me seems unprecedented in a musical situation. It is present on every level of the
EEMHM system, in the multilayered graphic scores, the cueing strategies, the interaction
with the sound collage, but it also gave me a deeper understanding of older systems like Ghost
Trance Music and where it fits into Braxton’s holistic philosophy.

Although often elusive and hard to grasp at first, something that made it easier for me to get a
better sense of Braxton's ideas and terminology was to look for similar concepts in SciFi
literature. There's a striking parallel between the concept of EEMHM and the way the
creatures of the planet Tralfamador in Kurt Vonnegut's Sci-Fi classic "Slaughterhouse Five"
experience time in a non-linear way. They are "unbound by the normal limitations of time
and space", and so for them the universe, for example, does not look like a lot of bright little
dots. "[They] can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are
filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti." When they read books they read them all at once.
"What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
I would think the Tralfamadorians would very much dig EEMHM too.
A next step in exploring the possibilities of the EEMHM system could be to develop a
surround sound version of EEMHM. In the version we performed we only used stereo, but
Carl already has done a multi-speaker set up in the past. It would be interesting to see how
"ambisonics" technology could push the EEMHM system to an even more immersive level
and have this translated to a binaural headphone mix for everyone to tune in wherever they
are. I can see how this can develop towards both a physical and virtual sound-installation that
can function like a live-event with musicians interacting with the scores and the collage in the
physical or virtual space, or as a standalone installation where the audience can walk in and
out and control the collage with their cell-phones while walking through it.

Kobe Van Cauwenberghe

February 4, 2021

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