27 March 2026
EMuSE Studio (ESM70), Eastman School of Music
'BEASTs from the East'—as its title partially suggests—is a concert presenting spatial works curated from the esteemed Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) alongside pieces by Thai artists and new works by current Eastman students. The program concludes with a special performance of a work by legendary Thai artists Jiradej and Prinda Setabundhu.
This edition is primarily curated and organized by Nattakon Lertwattanaruk (TEAMS Vice President and current Eastman student), in collaboration with Scott Wilson (Co-Director of BEAST), Matthew Lam (current Eastman doctoral student), and Sippapas Thienwiwat (TEAMS President).
The "TEAMS Team" would like to acknowledge Dr. Mikel Kuehn and EMuSE for hosting this edition of TinyTEAMS, as well as OSSIA New Music for providing additional resources and promotion.
– Nattakon Lertwattanarukhighlow (2025) – CRSRCRSRRR (Thanapat Ogaslert)
610: Scent if reminiscing (2026) – Ko Muramatsu - TagTEAMS 2026 feature
Cryptologic Spectrum (2025) – Gianni Bencich-Grigore
Sorting It Out (2026) – Tucker Johnson
Crash Landing (2026) – Nattakon Lertwattanaruk - TagTEAMS 2026 commission
khûu / คู่ (2025) – Sippapas Thienwiwat
Playper (2024) – Matthew Lam - TagTEAMS 2026 feature
Chroma Quay (2024) – Marty Fisk
Crazy is a State of Mind (2025) – Jiradej & Prinda Setabundhu
Nattakon Lertwattanaruk, keyboard
An explosive opener to get everyone dancing. – Nattakon Lertwattanaruk
Scent if reminiscing is part of my ambisonic set-pieces project, in which each work is composed with a fixed duration based on a Fibonacci number series, starting with one second and expanding exponentially. The idea emerged from a sociological reflection on contemporary social media platforms, as research suggests that the prevalence of 10-30 second short-form content may diminish our perceptual patience for appreciating longer-form works. As a composer dealing with the art of time, I have a deep interest in this flux of time perception and seek to respond to this trend—not solely from a critical standpoint, but with curiosity towards the emerging insights.
With a fixed duration of 610 seconds, Scent if reminiscing takes all of its musical materials from recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op.13 (“Pathétique”). The first four measures of the sonata present a rich spectrum of chords with inversions and varied registral weighting. Through a combination of different approaches and manipulations on resynthesized sound processed by FFT-driven partial tracking techniques, this piece unfolds an enriched and time-stretched harmonic field derived from this source material. The resynthesis is applied to a modern piano recording in the first half of the work and to a fortepiano recording in the second half, gradually morphing its timbre profile and historical standpoint from the current to the past.
The title Scent if reminiscing reflects both these conceptually and sonically shifting hearing points, as well as my personal attachment to the model piece. Pathétique was the first Beethoven piece I performed on the piano 20-some years ago, and its traces linger not as a quotation, but as an evolving memory in retrospect. – Ko Muramatsu
An exploration of cryptology as aesthetic framework.
The title is borrowed from the United States National Security Agency’s (NSA) internal periodical publication of the same name between the late 1960s and early 1980s.
All materials in this piece were generated using custom machine learning algorithms in Max/MSP and Python.
Composed at the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) studios. – Gianni Bencich-Grigore
Like much of my music, Sorting It Out (2026) concerns itself with improvisation. In this case, the bulk of the work's raw material comes from a collection of improvised recordings I created with saxophonist Floris Van Der Veken from 2023 to 2025, and many of the technical tools I used to compose the work originally served as part of digital instruments. I also take inspirations and models for many of its sonorities and pitch structures from saxophonists like Roscoe Mitchell, Ornette Coleman, and Joe Henderson. Sorting It Out is dedicated to Kendric McCallister and Floris Van Der Veken. – Tucker Johnson
A surreal account of a human crew that crash-lands on a planet where all life forms and culture seem to have evolved from a vague recollection of early Crash Bandicoot games. – Nattakon Lertwattanaruk
“khûu / คู่” (2025) investigates the dynamic interplay within a system of two cascading feedback voices, realized through fixed media electronics. In audio engineering, feedback arises when a signal loops from the output back to the input, undergoing repeated amplification, generating oscillations varying from the rhythm domain to the pitch domain depending on the configuration. The composition draws musical gestures from the nature of feedback systems, where the evolution and decay of these feedback loops are shaped over time through modulation and modification. While feedback in live contexts is often unpredictable—sometimes yielding unexpected and serendipitous outcomes—“khûu / คู่” captures and recontextualizes these moments. By recording and restructuring these gestures within a fixed timeline, the piece establishes a deliberately controlled feedback environment. Within this sonic framework, a diverse range of sonorities emerges—from granular clicks and chirping streams to resonant formant textures and dense, immersive drone walls. – Sippapas Thienwiwat
Playper, as its title suggests, is a play on paper. The majority of the sounds in this piece are very familiar to our everyday lives: they are samples or processed samples related to paper, such as writing, wrinkling, tearing, printer noises, etc. These sounds are panned through a three-dimensional plane, creating surrealistic effects (for instance, you could not write on a sheet of paper three-dimensionally!). This piece is also inspired by the composer’s composition process: a frustrated composer who writes his idea on paper but immediately thinks that the idea is uninteresting, crosses out his drafts and tears the paper. – Matthew Lam
Beginning from recordings of a range of metallic objects, Chroma Quay explores the use of FFT-based spectral compression to distort material, and to imprint the timbral and tonal qualities of sounds onto one another. – Marty Fisk
Stephen King once remarked that people often asked him where he got ideas for his stories. He told them—perhaps he saw a man wearing a strange hat, perhaps it was a dream (of course), or perhaps a bit of graffiti on a restroom wall at a remote rest area at 1 AM. No matter what he said, people always looked at him weirdly, like he wasn’t normal— like he was, kind of, a crazy man. You may think, poor Stephen. But have you looked at yourself lately? I’m sorry to say this, but any person spending “relaxing time” at experimental music concerts cannot be called, by any human standard, “normal.” This fact alone makes me feel like you and I are very close—almost like I know you personally without knowing you at all. I know you’re normal because I, too, like to relax amidst all things experimental. I even know that sometimes—not often, but certainly more than a few times—an unseemly thought has crept into your head that you might be crazy. But then you realized that no, you’re OK. Despite your parents or your spouse insisting that it’s not normal to obsess over these disgusting noises disguised as art, you know that this is “your” noise, and nothing is more normal than that. Take my performer today as an example. He’s perpetually self-doubting and lets his environment convince him that he is not normal. In a way, this piece is my attempt to offer him a bit of “music therapy,” if I may. I know that after he lets the last chord ring out, he will understand that he is normal. And you, too! Despite acting nonchalant, I know that, deep down, you still have this doubt. So let’s be at peace, because you know better than that. You know you’re not crazy—despite everything. Give me three rounds of this together now! “I am not crazy! I am not crazy! I am not crazy!” – Jiradej Setabundhu
Nattakon Lertwattanaruk (b. 2006) is a composer and performer originally from Bangkok, Thailand. His works often engage with different ways of surfacing, abstracting, and re-remembering artifacts from his own experiences with popular and/or musical culture.
He is a recipient of the Distinguished Prizes (2022 and 2024) at the Young Thai Artist Award (SCG Foundation), and the Belle S. Gitelman Award (Eastman School of Music), and has collaborated with ensembles including Tacet(i), Orkest De Ereprijs, Klangforum Wien, the Thai Youth Orchestra, Kul-Gänte, OSSIA New Music, and Duo Dubois. His work has been presented at numerous international events, such as the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Young Composers Meeting (The Netherlands), OutHEAR New Music Week (Greece), International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), SEAMUS Conference (USA), TagTEAMS (Thailand), IntAct Festival (Thailand), Thailand International Composition Festival, China-ASEAN Music Festival, among others. Nattakon is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Matthew Lam is an active composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music and an enthusiast of contemporary music style. His music experiments on a wide array of sounds and timbre with contemporary instrumental techniques and electronics, and integrates electroacoustic elements into acoustic music. His recent interests include saturation in music and ambisonics. Winning multiple awards, his works were featured in numerous events, including ACO Earshot (USA), June in Buffalo (USA), International Rostrum of Composers (Netherlands), MUSLAB (Ecuador), Espacios Sonoros (Argentina), Paysages | Composés (France), and International Review of Composers (Serbia). Groups such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Toledo Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, and [Switch~ Ensemble] are among the many who have presented Lam’s music. He is currently pursuing his doctoral studies at Eastman School of Music and serves as a teaching assistant at Electroacoustic Music Studios at Eastman.
Ko Muramatsu is a Japanese composer based in Rochester, New York. His work ranges from instrumental to electroacoustic music, with a focus on social and cultural reflection, and extends to works in theatrical and interdisciplinary art forms.
Based in Rochester, New York, Tucker Johnson composes works for soloists, ensembles, electronic media, and installations. Experiences through reading, hiking, and amateur botanizing can be found intertwined in his work, alongside a passion for open-source software and teaching.
Gianni Bencich-Grigore is a composer, performer, and researcher based in the United Kingdom.
His work explores the intersections of microsound, critical theory, and mysticism. His creative practice examines how sound can become a space for discovering the new, disrupting the apparent, and encountering the unknown.
Gianni is currently associated with the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) and the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Electronic Music, where he is developing work around AI synthesis, spatialised listening, and the aesthetics of the Real.
His music has been presented in festivals and venues across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including major international festivals like Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Festival Cervantino (Mexico), and BEAST FEaST (UK).
Marty Fisk is an electroacoustic composer, performer and visual artist, originally from Gloucester (UK). He is currently undertaking a PhD with BEAST at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Annie Mahtani and Christopher Haworth. His research interests focus on exploring the dynamics between performer, audience, and sound: realised through fixed and live multichannel works, novel sound interfacing technologies, and excessive use of distortion.
CRSRCRSRRR is an experimental project by Thanapat Ogaslert, an artist and educator based in Bangkok, Thailand. By directly interacting with real-time information, the live coding performances by CRSRRR always unfolds insights of our surroundings, ranging from electrical signals and numbers to our human senses.
CRSRCRSRRR is one of the core member of the Thai Live-coding community that aim to explore the art of algorithms through live computer programming. The results are works that exceed the limitation of physical bounds and often bring the audience to unheard heights of sonic and visual experience.
In 2024, CRSRCRSRRR was one of the TEDxSpeakers advocating the use of deep sensing, sonic memories, and sound and visual synthesis.
Currently, he is an adjunct lecturer at Mahidol University, as well as conducting community workshops around Thailand and nearby regions such as Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Singapore to name a few.
Based in Bangkok, Sippapas Thienwiwat (b. 2006) is a Bangkok-based composer and audiovisual artist working with a wide range of sonic practices. As SKYKYS, he explores audiovisual landscapes of dance music through livecoding, deconstructing and pushing beyond the norm of arrangements and danceability. His works as a composer-performer investigates electronic sound production and the transformation of its properties through electroacoustic composition. As an artist-scholar, his electroacoustic works have been presented in the USA, England, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand. Recent collaborations include BEAST (UK), CEMI (TX, USA), EMuSE (NY, USA), Sonic Officer (HK), Triphens Ensemble (TH), and TACETi Ensemble (TH). Sippapas currently serves as the President and Diffusion Artist of the Thai ElectroAcoustic Music Society (TEAMS).
Jiradej Setabundhu studied music with Bruce Gaston and worked as a guitarist and composer with Fong Nam Ensemble. He later continued his study with Donald Crockett, M. William Karlins, Marta Ptaszynska, Amnon Wolman, Michael Pisaro, and Stephen Syverud. His compositions include works for acoustic, electronic, and interactive multimedia that investigate the challenging relationship between human and technology.
Prinda Setabundhu’s education spans a wide range covering traditional Thai music, dance, Philosophy, and studio art. She helped designing a new interdisciplinary curriculum at Washington University in St. Louis, integrating 3-D applications with traditional practice. Her work shows a continuing search for an integration of various disciplines and strives to bridge the space that separates art inside and outside the gallery establishment.