Dr. Chris Warren, a professor at San Diego University, arrives equipped with his six-string guitar, pedalboard, and synthesizer. These instruments merge electronic textures, offering what he describes as “a travelogue through sound.”
Much of the galactic echo and immersive flow is ach
ieved through Warren’s self-built modular synthesizer. It breaks down and reshapes live sounds, transforming tones into various waveforms such as sine, triangle, or square. “It takes something acoustic and makes it electronic,” Warren explained.
He doesn’t do it alone; he and his wife of 12 years, Ariana Warren, played beside him. Playing the bass flute, also connected to the modular, “This one, it’s made out of a synthetic material, so it’s a lot lighter than a metal one,” Ariana demonstrated. Both plan the set, but for both with improv, they know what to do with the next move. “So one of the cool things about being married is that we spend a lot of time playing together, so we can pretty much read each other’s minds. What is about to happen…”
Warren leads the Echo Thief. It captures sound prints from unique places and recreates them digitally. His library includes sounds from concert halls in UCSD, the bubble dome in Casa Grande, Arizona, and also from North America. Some of his sounds have been used in video games that you might know for a realistic soundscape.
For about 37 years, he has been performing experiments with electronic sounds. For 15 years, he and Ariana played together. And he continues to evolve his equipment and the improvisational genre. “This is my 34th pedal board. I believe in always switching it up.” He explained.
“Outer space is ungrounded and ephemeral,” he explained why he chose space as his performance. For improv, he believes it to be something ungrounded, and space is the thing that makes us most unravel from reality. And this was accomplished really well. Envisioning other areas and corners of space, no longer tied down to Earth. If you want the experience, it is recommended.
