Project: Commissioned by ZKM, I Kill by Proxy is an hour-long composition for piano, percussion, and computer created with custom algorithmic composition software and computer-processed/synthesised sound. The computer part combines real-time sound processing techniques with playback of carefully edited, processed, and mixed sound files. The sources for these sound files are twofold: 1) snippets of recordings of the instrumental parts of the piece, ordered and processed by the same algorithms that helped generate those parts; and 2) Physical Modelling Syntheses of metal plates, using techniques developed by Stefan Bilbao.

Mixing fully-composed and improvised musical structures, the considerable duration of this work calls for a division into several sections, the major parts of which are a solo percussion piece, a solo piano piece, a computer (electroacoustic) solo, and a piano-percussion duo. Transitions between the pieces are improvised, forming links between the major sections to create a continuous work without breaks. Notwithstanding this design, it is foreseen that the individual sections could be performed separately, in a different context and programme

As with all my compositional work since c. 2000, I Kill by Proxy is composed with my "slippery chicken" algorithmic composition software. This object-oriented Common Lisp (CLOS) program was developed mainly at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany, with the generous support of two Guest Artist stipends in the summers of 2000 and 2001. The overall goal of "slippery chicken" is the generation of instrumental and computer music structures from the same musical data, creating a synthesis of these two often structurally incompatible sound worlds. It is continuously in development: work at Camargo was amongst other things focussed on pitch-selection algorithms in general, but applied here to the generation of music for vibraphone.

Work on I Kill by Proxy began in Cassis. Preparatory (conceptual), software development, and compositional work took place here. This involved work of an artistic and technical nature that did not require music technology and computing resources beyond that of a laptop computer. Compositional, musical, and technical work will continue at ZKM and will include: finalisation of musical scores; tests and experiments in the performance environment, especially the control and effective use of the 52-speaker "Klangdom"; creation, testing, and fine-tuning of the performance software; work and rehearsals with the musicians (Sarah Nicolls from London and Laszlo Hudacsek, Karlsruhe); concert preparation. The first performance is foreseen at ZKM's "piano plus" festival in November 2006