About:

Kris Kaiser fell back into the world of music only a few years ago. Currently she co-runs modular synth company Noise Engineering with her husband Stephen, but her musical background goes back to an early age. She was born into a musical family: her grandmother was conservatory trained in piano and her grandfather was a professional jazz pianist. Her father grew up playing piano and drums and she inherited that love of percussion…despite her parents refusing to get her the drum kit she wanted. They supplanted that with drum pads (Yamaha DD-5. Quality stuff.). Shortly after that came the keyboard and she was hooked.

A long series of events led her to choose biology over music and she fell into a bioacoustics hole for many years. All through school, she made no music, but rather traipsed through neotropical swamps listening to the love songs of frogs and broadcasting traffic noises in pristine forests: part of her dissertation and research as a biology professor examined the effects of anthropogenic noise on frogs.

In 2017, she left academia behind to join Stephen in Noise Engineering full time. She is largely in charge of the hardware and dabbles in everything else. She makes music reasonably often, but rarely performs or releases it. The majority of what she creates is highly percussive: the pulsatile and rhythmic nature of the frog choruses she spent so many years listening to remain an influence in most of the music she makes.

Notes on this piece:

At the beginning of June, we were fortunate to see an ensemble called red fish blue fish perform Michael Gordon’s (of Bang on a Can All-Stars) Timber. The entire piece was performed on six 2x4s and it was the most incredible and inspiring thing I’d seen in I don’t know how long. And while I watched, I constructed this piece. I don't ever have a hope of being a percussionist capable of playing at that level, but I had a great time putting this together.

Links:

https://www.noiseengineering.us/