“When seemingly unrelated material is combined, the magic happens between those layers.”
(Jakub Ciupinski)
About the Album
Released 2022 on Metropolis Ensemble
Jakub Ciupinski’s Flame Keepers is a digital sonic art installation in which seven different melodies loop in an endless transformation.
Flame Keepers is part of Metropolis Ensemble’s fully online programming during the pandemic in 2020-2021, this project featured a new composer taking control of the system, uploading their unique musical themes and watching them morph through time.
“My vision, which I am kind of excited with, is if this project was ever being terminated in terms of no more composers, I would just like to let it play… I imagine that after years of running this project, when you let it go, it's almost like a fertile soil that we lay out over the years. And it will be this wild garden that will just play on its own.”
Recent Reviews
“We wanted to create something that is born out of pandemic that it's not just the transposition of concert experience in real life, but something that feels coherent to virtual space.”
Jakub Ciupinski
Long-time collaborator, Jakub Ciupinski, has worked on many Metropolis projects over the years, including the premieres of Brownstone, TerraGenesis, Glitch, Concerto for Guitar, Flashbacks, Morning Tale, and Street Prayer.
WATCH: Demo of the Flame Keepers interactive (2020).
Project In-Depth
This track is a one-week example of the Flame Keepers process, featuring Jakub’s own contributions to the project as the first commissioned contributor. Every seven hours, Jakub had the option to replace any stream with a new one, and once he did, the system locked out changes for another seven hours and the software took over. And if he didn’t chose a stream in that brief window of unlocked time, the system selected one at random.
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Jakub Ciupinski: Flame Keepers (2022); for electronics
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Andrew Cyr, Artistic Director
Jakub Ciupinski, live electronics
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Commissioned, created, and launched by Metropolis Ensemble in response to COVID-19, Flame Keepers runs uninterrupted in real time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Developed by Avneesh Sarwate, Ryan Rose, and Daniel McKemie.
Jakub Ciupinski
Composer
Jakub Ciupinski is Polish composer living in New York City. Although his music is often associated with electronics and interactive performances, he has written numerous pieces for traditional acoustic forces, varying in scope from solo miniatures to an hour long Oratorio for symphony orchestra and double choir. At the age of 18, he signed a contract with Sony Music Poland and since then has been recording electronica-infused world music under the stage name Jakub Żak. Ciupinski is a co-founder of Blind Ear Music, New York based group of composers and instrumentalists performing improvised, real-time compositions, using wirelessly connected laptops as musical score displays. He has also designed his own instrument for performing electronic music using hand gestures. More »