Flame Keepers: Magic Between the Layers

The Project

Flame Keepers is a digital sonic art installation in which seven different melodies loop in an endless transformation. Each week, a new composer takes control of the system, uploading their unique musical themes and watching them morph through time. There are barriers that ensure the installation will always live and breathe with freedom: Every seven hours, the composer-in-charge has the option to replace any stream with a new one, and once they do, the system locks the human out for another seven hours and the software takes over. And if the composer doesn’t choose a stream in that brief window of unlocked time, the system chooses one at random. You’ll never hear the same thing twice when you listen.

At its core, Flame Keepers is an exploration of time, of the intersection of music and technology in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, of how to create an installation that lives entirely online. But it’s also a new way of uniting composers in collaboration. Over the past year, in-person collaboration has been almost entirely impossible due to safety concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Metropolis Ensemble wants to reimagine collaboration in the virtual space, providing artists with new ways to make music together, even while we’re apart.

Jakub Ciupinski: Flashbacks world premiere at Le Poisson Rouge in November 2009.

The Inspiration

“When the pandemic hit, everyone was feeling desperate,” said Metropolis Ensemble Artistic Director Andrew Cyr. “It was a question of what can we do, and what do we do?”

He’d founded Metropolis Ensemble as a space for new initiatives that would benefit composers, and now seemed like the time to transform that mission into new territories. He wanted to find a vehicle to benefit others in this time where everything felt like it had disappeared. And even though venue doors across New York were closed, he thought that with the Metropolis community of artists, they could find a new way to keep the music going.

“Everything is a stage,” he said. The question wasn’t if we could make music meant to live online, but how we would, and how we’d do it in a way that was engaging and innovative. So, Cyr began to reach out to Metropolis collaborators to brainstorm ideas for a digital installation. They wanted to come up with an idea that extended beyond live streams, something that was intended from the start to live on a screen.

After a few weeks of conversation, longtime collaborator and composer Jakub Ciupinski came to Cyr with an idea that would end up becoming Flame Keepers.

Jakub’s early experiments in technology (custom-hacked theremins and electro-acoustic works) were supported and presented by Metropolis Ensemble.

The Vision

“We wanted to create something that is born out of pandemic,” said Ciupinski. “Something that it's not just the transposition of concert experience in real life, but something that feels coherent to virtual space.”

Ciupinski has been working with Metropolis Ensemble since 2009 on a multitude of different projects, but some of his favorites have been when they’ve created multidisciplinary installations that live in museums and brownstones across New York. They’ve transformed buildings into sonic art exhibits; now, they’re transforming our computers, too. But what excites Ciupinski most in composing is what happens when disparate musical ideas coalesce into one.

“What I'm interested in is bringing separate layers of seemingly unrelated material that when it's combined, the magic happens between those layers.” he said. “I was always experimenting with having different instruments playing completely different rhythms. And locking them in pocket was one of the techniques I absolutely loved for all my life.”

Metropolis Ensemble's first experiment in site-specific works began with Ciupinski in 2010 (at the home of Metropolis board member Jennifer Salomon) and went on to places like The Phillips Collection, AIHS, and Angel Orensanz Center.

With Flame Keepers, this concept is extended into something bigger and more collaborative: Different artistic visions from different composers layer on top of each other, and the software takes control of how each of their lines merge, fueling the constant evolution of the music. For Ciupinski, there’s something enticing about these extra layers of indeterminacy.

“When you have a bunch of people creating together, it's like two black holes crashing with each other,” he said. “I still want people to design their own pieces, and have those lucky accidents or maybe dissonances over that transition period. I thought it's interesting to have that two day period where something magical could happen.”

Back in March 2020, Ciupinski had created a mock-up of this idea, showing the fluid waveforms of the music we’d hear in Flame Keepers. Cyr was immediately struck by this idea. So, they began to develop it, together, with the engineers Daniel McKembie initially, then Ryan Ross and Avneesh Sarwate to fully realize the installation.

*Screenshots of the internal code-work by Rose and Sarwate.*

The Development

Flame Keepers was in development from March 2020 to December 2020, and first launched in February 2021. Ross and Sarwate were in charge of finishing the creation of the software, which was started by Daniel McKemie, so that it could be used for the Flame Keepers idea and worked on mobile and desktop interfaces.

Ross and Sarwate have known each other since graduate school, working together on a variety of digital audio installations. Flame Keepers was similar to a project they’d worked on in the past, so when Cyr reached out to them, they knew they’d want to be involved. They began working on the project in midsummer of 2020.

“It was a lot of quick prototyping iterations trying to focus on the main interface, which is the seven lines and the moving waveforms, and making sure that that fit with what Jakub and Andrew were really looking for,” said Sarwate. “A surprising amount of work went into just making it run on all browsers and mobile.”

To make Flame Keepers, Ross and Sarwate needed to keep track of a few different elements: They needed to store the music composers are adding to the system in a library, and they needed a way to make that information able to persist over time. One of Ross’s favorite discoveries throughout the process was figuring out how to allow the collaborators to edit on the fly.

“There's a tool called air table that is basically like a Google Doc spreadsheet, and we connected the Flame Keepers site to this air table,” said Ross. “And what that did was allow us to sort of wire up different components of the website, the fonts, how fast the wave forms move, some of the colors. Jakub and Andrew could make changes that would be reflected in the site immediately by just tweaking some values in the spreadsheet, essentially.”

Ciupinski's 2020 House Music episode remixed elements of Metropolis Ensemble's studio album on Nonesuch / New Amsterdam (music by William Brittelle) for hacked theremins.

Both Ross and Avneesh live in different cities and have nine-to-five jobs, so creating Flame Keepers was a nights and weekends gig. But virtual work is common for computer programmers, so they were able to enter into a flow. The biggest challenge ended up being able to get the system to work on mobile devices, which required a rewrite of the system.

As a whole, the making of Flame Keepers is a story of collaboration, between composers and technology as well as between all of the voices who made the system what it is today. Watching it grow and change through time is an added benefit.

“What was really interesting was the tooling we built to allow Andrew and Jacob to tweak it themselves,” said Sarwate. “When someone else is rendering your vision first, you get to render it yourself.”

“I'm really excited just to see how the composition evolves, especially with the bit of randomness that enters into it,” said Ross.

An original work commissioned by Anne Akiko-Meyers for solo violin and electronics took on a life of its own.

The Present

So far, five composers have added streams into the Flame Keepers database: Ciupinski, Molly Joyce, Jenny Beck, Elizabeth Baker, and Mike LaDouceur. The program has been running smoothly between the artists, presenting different iterations of their intertwining visions each time you visit the site. Every week, like clockwork, you can check out a different composer’s ideas as they twist and turn through the computer program. It’s as if it’ll never end—and maybe it won’t.

Jakub Ciupinski - IMG_3254.png — *Ciupinski on a composing retreat in Greenland.*

The Future

“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,” said Ciupinski. He’s excited by the possibility of the software endlessly running through the thousands and thousands of streams that have been uploaded by composers. It could truly never end, there could be different iterations and combinations of these musical ideas forever.

“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,” he said. “And it will be this wild garden that will just play on its own.”

Vanessa Ague is a violinist and writer studying Arts & Culture Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She runs the experimental music blog, The Road to Sound, and her writing has appeared in Bandcamp Daily, The Wire, Pitchfork, The Brooklyn Rail, and Tone Glow. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Yale University.

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