Object #2: Systems (2004)

Systems is the name of an ongoing artistic collaboration that has existed since 2002 between the musician/composer Briggan Krauss and visual artist Raha Raissnia. This collaboration has taken on many different shapes and incarnations over the years from prepared multimedia art installations in gallery settings to various forms of live interdisciplinary performances for acoustic and electronic sounds along with painting, drawing and hand-painted film which have taken place in New York City venues from dive bars, creative music spaces, to Anthology Film Archives and The Kitchen.


The music on this album is a series of pieces for created for and with original drawings by Raha that were made for an installation project in NYC during the spring and summer of 2004. Each of these compositions is the end result of a separate dialog with work by Raha. We would start a new piece by exchanging a small work of ours with each other. We would then send back a new work that was made in response to or in a reaction to the previous piece. After a certain number of exchanges (each time adding, editing, subtracting or even starting over) we would seem to agree that we had each arrived at some sort of a finished piece. Each of the nine compositions on this album has it’s corresponding drawing, painting or collage.

The limited edition CDs for this series were accompanied by handmade woodblock prints by Raha Raissnia.

All compositions are composed and performed by Briggan Krauss. The non-software sounds used here are various acoustic and electronic instruments as well as recordings of found objects and of public spaces. Some of the hardware and software used for making this music included analog tape machine, analog and digital effects units, ProTools, Reaktor, Max/MSP and SuperCollider, all running on Apple computers.