ARCHIVE
Modulisme: Tom Djll 20260525 (Audio)
https://modular-station.com/modulisme/session/142/
Tom Djll transforms the trumpet into a volatile electronic organism, feeding breath, brass, and feedback through modular synths, spectral processors, unstable filters, and semi-sentient machines.
Rooted equally in AACM freedom, harsh electronics, and electroacoustic improvisation, these pieces move between ecstatic jazz invocation and collapsing circuitry, where melodies dissolve into swarms of metallic resonance, ghost frequencies, and fractured pulses.
Nothing here feels programmed or controlled: the music mutates in real time, listening to itself, destabilizing itself, constantly threatening to break apart.
At once deeply physical and radically synthetic, the album sounds like Louis Armstrong dreaming inside a failing cybernetic laboratory.
Tom Djll moves through improvised music, electronic experimentation, and electroacoustic composition with the restless curiosity of a sonic explorer dismantling systems in real time.
He first studied electronic music with Stephen Scott at Colorado College, working on the legendary EMS Synthi 100.
In 1978–79 he attended the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, studying with major AACM figures including Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, and Karl Berger.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Djll immersed himself in the unstable circuitry of the Serge Modular Music System. During this same period he also worked with Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening practice, an influence that continues to resonate beneath even his most abrasive sonic environments.
Djll has increasingly returned to analog electronics, modular synthesis, and unstable electroacoustic interfaces, building dense environments where trumpet, circuitry, feedback, and noise mutate into volatile hybrid forms.
Inspired in part by the late instrument designer Rob Hordijk, his recent work explores chaotic sonic ecosystems balancing improvisation, machine behavior, and acoustic resonance.
His collaborators include Gino Robair, Tim Perkis, Suki O’Kane, Karl Evangelista, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Axel Dörner, and the trio EUPHOTIC with Cheryl Leonard and Bryan Day.
"Modulisme," formerly "Early ElectroMIX," is a platform that aims to support original composing for analog modular systems but not only… A radio program airing music made using modular systems… Each program lasts one hour and is especially dedicated to one composer and features some exclusive music made for us.