“Benoît and the Mandelbrots” see the laptop as their primary instrument, mainly dedicated to live coding.
They use the programming language as an at-first-sight, non-intuitive, but simultaneously graphic interface between man and machine to improvise sound and music.
Sonic conceptions and structures are expressed live as source code and interpreted by the computer. The laptop musicians are connected over a network, enabling them to communicate, synchronize and share data. With the flexibility of live coding, the sounds are generated specifically to fit the room’s characteristics and the performance’s audience.
As every performance setting is unique and improvisation is the group’s central paradigm, they don’t perform ‘works’ in a classic sense but consider their whole oeuvre and underlying concept as their work, which expands with every performance. As a result, the musical results vary from electronica and ambient to experimental, noise, drones and avant-garde, depending on the event, audience, venue and course of the collective improvisation.
The ensemble was formed in winter 2009 by students of the IMWI (Institute for Musicology and Music Informatics) at
the Karlsruhe University of Music. Since then they have played over 90 concerts in different locations and events
notably at the ICLC in Madrid, iWeek New Media Art Festival in Liepāja, BEAM Festival in Uxbridge, SuperCollider
Symposium in London, Network Music Festival in Birmingham, Laptops Meet Musicians Festival in Venice,
next_generation 4.0 at ZKM Karlsruhe and LINKS Biennale für Neue Musik in Heidelberg.
Benoît and the Mandelbrots are Juan A. Romero, Holger Ballweg, Patrick Borgeat, and Matthias Schneiderbanger
