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Kristin Miltner (K*M*T*V, miba) makes music primarily with computers. A great deal of it involves her incredible voice, and she is a great keyboard player as well. So one could say Miltner’s music is completely digital (the fingers are digits) and yet very rich in an organic-ness that looks outward through the 0s and 1s to the vastness of natural coincidence. She most often performs live with versions of her custom software. She has designed this to scan sound files and live input, with varying degrees of random elements and varying durations). The software then allows her to instantly restructure the sounds into sequenced arrays of units (instantly meaning now, real time) of varying lengths (again, according the chance or purpose). This scanning idea is like imagining a giant octopus in a long thin hallway, up on the third floor of a long thin building with continuous windows on each side of the hallway. One can touch both sides of the hallway with one’s fingertips (if one is an octopus). The hallway, on its other axis (the length of the hallway), is infinite. So the Octopus runs up and down the hallway opening and closing windows, letting a little bit of water in here and there, but never stops moving back and forth and some windows stay open for longer than others. But there’s a rhythm to it; it’s an efficient octopus. The ocean is the sound source, the hallway and octopus are the scanners and the windows are what determine what gets in, the octopus’s rhythm is the sequencing mechanism. Furthermore, these units (the sequenced, scanned bits) can then be continuously manipulated and even rescanned and processed in various ways to create the exceedingly complex textual world of Kristin’s music.

(thank you Jorge Boehringer, for such an awesome description of my music)

Her duo with electronic musician and composer Mark Bartscher is called miba and their recently released album “The Corplate Porblem” features sampling and sequencing software built by the composers, as well as voice, various toys, birds, bells, and cats. www.paxrecordings.com: miba

Past performances: San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Mission Creek Music Festival. Video Work has been shown at the Rencontres International Film and Video Festival, Berlin. Coming up: Prague Quadrennial Scenofest: http://www.scenofest.org/index.html a festival for sound design in Theatre.