Composers » A » Charles Amirkhanian (1945)

Born January 19, 1945, in Fresno, California, composer, percussionist, sound poet and radio producer Charles Amirkhanian is a leading U.S. practitioner of electroacoustic music, sound poetry and text-sound composition. He is widely known for his live and taped works utilizing speech (or sound poetry) elements in rhythmic patterns resembling percussion music. In his recent works, produced with the Synclavier and Kurzweil digital synthesizers, Amirkhanian incorporates sampled acoustic environmental sounds (which he calls "representational sounds") and traditional musical pitched sounds ("abstract sounds") to develop dreamscapes that act as disjunct narratives, evoking a world of memory-triggers which induce a trance-like listening state. His music has been recorded on Starkland Records, Cantaloupe, Centaur, 1750 Arch Records, Other Minds, CRI, Wergo (Germany), & Empreintes Digital (Canada), among others. Amirkhanian co-founded Other Minds, a new music organization in San Francisco, in 1992, where he serves as Executive & Artistic Director.

[eContact! 10.2, 2008]

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