We stumbled upon a brilliant sound engineer named Ken Lacouture who gave each member of the ensemble his or her own mic and with all 8 voices fully wired into his board, he set about manipulating the sound of our vocals with his computer on the fly.
We first performed at the Boston Center for the Arts, as part of a festival, I think and we decided that this rather insane combination of 8 musicians improvising while a sound engineer improvised electronic manipulation of their vocals deserved a suitably audacious name. We called these concerts: NOTE No Bounds, a take on the name of the company, which was New Opera Theatre Ensemble, or N.O.T.E.
Ken never failed to amaze me. In the same way a brilliant accompanist (on piano) can intuit where a singer is going, Ken gradually learned to anticipate the direction and improvised compositional drive of us as an ensemble. Only a true musician could have achieved what Ken did. Possibly the highlight of our couple years together was our trip to the South by Southwest Music festival, where we performed our odd little set in an odd little bar for people who had never heard of us but didn't really give a damn. They were just hungry to hear something new.
And we were hungry to create something new. And Ken was the perfect guy to help us do just that. I often wonder what became of him. If anyone knows, give me a shout! :)
