Synthesizer meetups can be a great place to talk about what equipment people are using, but modules will only get you so far! Tonight, we will host a discussion with two Baltimore area Eurorack artists about their aesthetic approaches. If you’ve ever been just on the edge of a music scene and wondered why there were so many fanatics about it, you know that pushing a bit deeper and asking the right questions might tell you what is so special about that music. The Red Room regularly hosts a community meetup to discuss modular synthesizers, examining different topics and bringing together musicians who are often working alone.
Jess Keyes and Tom Boram will reveal the mysteries of their craft, not the technicalities, but the philosophies that drive their creativity. We will talk to them about performance, composition, and collaboration. The night will end with a performance by Jess Keyes, while Tom Boram will be playing the following night in a multichannel modular performance.
Jess Keyes is a performer and composer in many genres. She has constructed her Eurorack instrument for generative patche, saxophone-electronics interaction, and vocal processing. Her current work involves homemade glove controllers and other interactive sensors. She runs the Mid-Atlantic Wilderness, a series that brings together musical improvisers who’ve never met and leads a 12-piece brass band called Bedlam Brass. In 2024, she won a Rubys Artist Award for her project “Patien(t/ce)” exploring her experience with chronic illness and disability through compositions for voice and synthesizer. You can hear her saxophone playing on Smoke Bellow’s 2024 album “Structurally Sound”.
Tom Boram, aka Borax, is renowned for his synthesizer work, though he plays harpsichord and many other instruments. He has spent the past two decades refining his modular synthesizer work into an expressive performance instrument, capable of a wide range of immediate and dynamic gestures, akin to how acoustic instruments behave. Tom Boram curates shows at the Red Room and helps run the High Zero Festival of experimental, improvised music. His modular rig is distinguished by its unlabelled white panels, clearly a synthesizer system that he has mastered as a virtuoso!
