Music

Improv Hootenanny Revival, Berkeley Arts

The Improv Hootenanny series from the Ivy Room may be gone, but we recently had a “Hootennany Revival” at Berkeley Arts. Lucio Menagon, who started the Ivy Room series, was back in the Bay Area and joined by Suki O’kane and other familiar faces along with new participants. The musical (and visual) artistry is of course the center of the Hootenanny experience, but drinks and lively conversation are also a key part, and there was plenty of these before the formal part of the program began.

The performance opened with a solo set by Henry Plotnik, perhaps the youngest participant I have seen in any of these Bay Area improv events. He made use of the venue’s acoustic grand piano in addition to his electronic keyboard, and effortlessly weaved a set that moved between tonal and inharmonic elements.

[Photo by Michael Zelner.]

Plotnik was followed by a duo featuring veteran improvisers Philip Greenlief and Ross Hammond, on saxophone and guitar, respectively.

[Photo by Michael Zelner.]

Their performance had a sparse but intricate texture, frequency bouncing odd melodic lines or noisy extended techniques between them.

The evening also featured a version of Lucio Menagon’s Strangelet project, with familiar members Suki O’kane on percussion and John Hanes on electronics as well as a relative newcomer to the Bay Area scene Stephanie Lak.

[Photo by Michael Zelner.]

Lak’s contribution contrasted physically and sonically with the other members of the group, who provided the steadily evolving cloud of improvised sounds I remember from previous Strangelet performances. She was completely mobile with a pair of toy megaphones and tiny amplifiers and moved around the stage area freely with bursts of vocal and electronic sounds that floated on top of existing soundscape.

All the sets were accompanied by visuals from the cinePimps (Alfonso Alvarez and Keith Arnold). Using film projectors, they layered abstract film clips along with old B movies on two walls of the space. There were also musical interludes featuring Raub Roy and the TreeJay OctoPlayer. Raub Roy had a collection of hand drums that he excited with balloons expelling air and electric toothbrushes. The effect was something that sounded drum-like but without the usual articulation. You can see part of his performance in this video:

The TreeJay OctoPlayer, a project of Thad Povey and Mark Taylor, featured eight independently controllable platters and styli for vinyl records. During their mini-sets, the performers switched among different records and changed speeds to create a rich and somewhat eerie musical collage. It was also fun to watch the process of working with this towering instrument.

[Photo by Michael Zelner.]

The final set featured Stanosaur with guitar and a wall of large amplifiers. Basically, he played long heavily distorted drones that drove all of the amps to create different beating and phasing effects at rather high volumes. And by “high volumes” I mean ear-splittingly loud! Fortunately, I had my ear protection, and earplugs were made available to the audience. But it was still an intense experience to hear and to feel the effect of this sound, and a fog machine and lasers added a visual element.

[Photo by Michael Zelner.]

In all, it was a fun night of friends and good music, which is something to be valued. I hope we can start another regular improvisation series in the Bay Area with the same degree of casual fellowship and quality musicianship.

DJ CatSynth on The World of Wonder (KUSF in Exile)

I am now an official host for The World of Wonder on San Francisco Community Radio (KUSF in Exile), alternating weeks with Matt Davignon, and my first show is tonight at midnight PDT. You can listen live online here and find an archive via podcast after the fact.

Each week we will be presenting a variety of music that most people don’t hear everyday, a mixture of esoteric, avant-garde, idiosyncratic and many other kinds of music. I do encourage readers of this site to tune in.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF): Art Installations

In addition to the main concerts, this year’s San Francisco Electronic Music Festival featured a concurrent gallery exhibition. It took place at Million Fishes in the Mission District of San Francisco, and featured a variety of works that combined sound and visuals. I had the opportunity to visit the gallery on the Saturday of the festival, just before that night’s concert.

I have experienced Matthew Goodheart’s work with transducer-excited cymbals a few times now, most notably in his solo performance at the Outsound Music Summit. Here, he arranged them around the front room over the gallery to create an immersive installation called …silence through things secret….

The installation dominated the main room both visually and aurally, with the late-afternoon sun reflecting off the cymbals, and a variety of sounds echoing around the room. Computer-generated sounds were created from analysis of the resonances of each cymbal and recordings of each instrument played in a variety of manners. The sounds were then used to excite the cymbals via small transducers.

[Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Because the sound from the cymbals is acoustic, the only notion one has of electronics at work is the fact that they are standing on their own without anyone there to play them. But there is nonetheless something otherwordly about the visuals and sounds of the unattended cymbals. Goodheart’s piece was part of a larger project he has developed in conjunction withe Center foew New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley.

Giant Leap, the result of collaboration by Floor van de Velde and Elaine Buckholtz, paid tribute to the late Neil Armstrong and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. The audio-and-visual work combined an anaglyph image of the moon with a sound score realized using modified rotary telephones.

The moon landing and the sounds associated with that achievement are still quite fresh, but the use of rotary telephones reminds us just how long ago this achievement took place. I consider rotary phones a particularly endangered technology in that it bears so little resemblance to contemporary phones in both form and function.

Dan Good presented two small kinetic sound sculptures. Artificial Lung combined standard speaker drivers in a novel way. They were pressed against one another a driven with a 1Hz sine wave. While the signal is far below the range of human hearing, the pressure on the speakers was visible and created the illusion of a breathing organism.

[Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

In, Good’s sculpture Petri Dish, small glass spheres are pulled up and down in a glass bowl and tubes. The sound of the glass is subtle, but the visual is quite striking, especially when it is moving (the photograph does not really capture this aspect.)

Both of Good’s sculptures draw upon simple shapes, lines and processes to create something conceptually compact and understandable. As such, they play to the strengths of modernism – something refreshing to see in a contemporary setting,

SFEMF has featured installations before, usually as fixtures in the lobby during concerts. I thought separating it out into a gallery presentation worked well and allowed the pieces the chance to be seen outside the shadow of the live performances and milling crowds. I hope they do this again next year.

Getting Ready for Ghost House

“Obake Yashiki” (Ghost House) officially opens tonight at Arc Studios and Gallery in San Francisco. The project is a collaboration with artists Priscilla Otani and Judi Shintani, and combines sound, Japanese lanterns and “deconstructed kimonos”. Here is a view of the installation:

And the project statement:

An atmospheric space in-between worlds is glimpsed in this installation. Fragments of sound from crickets, chanting monks and Japanese instruments envelope Japanese lanterns, womanly silhouettes and floating deteriorating kimonos. Obake Yashiki or Ghost House, is a dwelling place of spirits that continue to haunt us. They cannot find their peaceful resting place due to tragic occurrences during their lifetimes. The exhibition calls attention to women around the world whose lives have been taken due to earthly disasters and violent human interaction. We honor the spirits who are trapped between life and death in hopes they may find peace and resolution.

A lot of work went into making this installation happen, including hanging the kimonos and approximately 100 lanterns! But three of the lanterns were also outfitted with tiny speakers and MP3 players to create the immersive soundscape in the space:

The assemblage works quite well, and the sounds emanating from the lantern clusters adds to the overall eerie quality of the piece. Of course, portable electronic devices need to be recharged, so we have the odd visual today of Japanese lanterns being recharged via USB cables (i.e., like an iPhone) ahead of tonight’s reception:

Hopefully everything is charged up later this afternoon and ready to go.

If you are in San Francisco this evening, feel free to drop by our free reception. It is at Arc Studios and Gallery, 1246 Folsom St, and goes from 6PM to 9PM. We are also planning an interesting closing program in October.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF): September 9 Concert

The final concert of the 2012 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) took place on Saturday, September 9 at the Brava Theater. If there a common thread among the different performances on this evening, it was the use (and celebration) of analog electronics.

The concert opened with a solo piece by Chuck Johnson called Passivity and Void. The performance featured analog electronics with steel guitar as a sound source, and explored the tension between retaining and relinquishing control over timbre and musical processes. This is particularly true of feedback and random voltages that Johnson used. The result was beautiful low-frequency drones with complex textures layered on top.

[Chuck Johnson. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

I also found myself focused on his suitcase-based analog setup, similar at least in appearance to what I have been using of late.

The next set featured James Fei using a large speaker, in particular an Altec 604, as a musical instrument in its own right.

[James Fei and Altec 604. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The large speaker, which is a model that has existed since the 1940s, is visually impressive. And the dramatic movements of its driver in response to the low and mixed frequency analog sound sources was a central aspect of the performance. Through his mixture of subtle long tones and more pointed elements, Fei seemed to imbue the speaker with a personality, expressing itself with motion and sound. It was fun to watch. As a purely sonic experience, the elements were simple, though not as minimalist as the piece’s title Sine of Merit would suggest.

The final set of the concert and of the festival featured a collaboration of Peter Conheim of Negativeland and Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) appropriately called Negativewobblyland. They were joined for this performance by Don Joyce.

[Negativewobblyland. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Their performance, titled Booper Variations No. 18 and featured sounds and techniques based on Boopers, which were “analog feedback instruments created entirely from salvaged radio and amplifier parts.” Although the modern reinterpretation used samples and delays as forms of feedback, the music was based on the principles of the original Boopers. The result of sampling and feedback was a complex and varied array of electronic sounds and felt like a swiftly moving history of electronic music in a single set. The energy of the trio carried the music forward for the entire duration.

Overall, this year’s SFEMF included several strong nights of music, and each of the nights was quite well attended. Additionally, there was a concurrent gallery exhibition, which I will review in the final installment of the series.

Surplus 1980 10″/CD release. Please support us!

I am excited to be part of not one but two upcoming recording releases. In addition to Reconnaissance Fly, I will be appearing on the next release of Moe! Staiano’s Surplus 1980 project. This is also my first recording that will be released on vinyl :).

Surplus 1980 is a post-punk band of a rotating line up of some fine musicians, many extending from great bands to be heard on this project including members from the Ex, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and Faun Fables, among others, including Mute Socialite…Musicians, besides Moe! Staiano (drums, percussion, guitar, bass, piano, vocals), on this release will include guitarist Bill Wolter and Melne Murphy, Bassists Alee Karim and Vicky Grossi (also doubling on violin), percussionist Jordan Glenn, keyboardist Amar Chaudhary, alto clarinetist Aaron Novik, and on oboe, Kyle Bruckmann. Possible vocal guest from G.W. Sok, formerly of the Ex (and currently with the French band Cannibales & Vahinés).

You can find out more at our Kickstarter page, and please consider supporting us so we can make this release happen!

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) – September 8 Concert

We continue our review of the recent 2012 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) with a look at the third concert. It took place on Saturday, September 8 at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, and for the most part focused on music from unusual sources, such as natural materials, found objects and electrical circuits built in real time.

The concert opened with a solo performance by Cheryl Leonard with video by Genevieve Swifte. Leonard’s instruments are created from items she has collected from the Arctic and Antarctic, including shells, stones, kelp flute, and bones, as well as prepared viola and field recordings of wind and water. The music she produces from these sources is richly textured moving between long notes and short sequences of percussive hits, with minimal treatment of the amplified acoustic elements. Each of the two pieces, Sila and Polarnatt featured different elements in the instrumentation to reflect their respective themes.

‘
[Cheryl Leonard. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The video, which featured the formation of ice crystals on the surface of the ocean. It was quite subtle with little movement, except for an occasional bird flying through field of vision – as such, it served as support for the music and for Leonard’s live performance on stage, and a contrast to the more dynamic movement in the percussive sections.

This was followed by Loud Objects, a New York based group that creates noise by building circuits from minimal components live on stage. The performers Tristan Perich and Lesley Flanagan stood alongside an overhead projector with a clear piece of plexiglass as the performance began. It continued in silence as a few wires and integrated circuits were soldered into place on top of the surface until the first tentative and unstable sounds emerged.

[Live circuit building from Loud Objects. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Once the sound generation elements were live, the group lived up to its name. It was quite loud and intense, with various modulations of simple synthesized sounds. Much of the fun of this set was watching the construction of the circuit alongside the sounds being generated, and I found myself captivated and curious about what the shadowy integrated circuits were doing while I was listening. I would be curious to see how other performances by this group are similar or different to what they created this night.

After the intermission, renowned electronic musician and interdisciplinary artist Richard Lerman performed a version of his project Border Soundings. Lerm, an has been making audio and video recordings from the fences at the U.S.-Mexico border for many years. This version combined video taken at several locations with live performance on amplified musical instruments created from objects found near the border. Among these were a branch with things, a brush and dustpan and a tomatillo husk with onions.

[Richard Lerman. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

In this piece, the visuals were front and center, primarily the video scenes but also the live performance with the found objects. The amplified sounds from the objects were very literal, with the metal, wood, paper and other materials readily apparent. The electronic processing did not detract from the acoustic expectations. The border scenes in the videos ranged from serene, as along the linear form of the fence near Naco AZ, to forlorn in some locations, to the surreal emptiness of the Border Field State Park, with the border fence flowing into the ocean and the beach devoid of any activity (access to the beach on the US side is now restricted) – by contrast, looking through the fence to the beach on Mexican side reveals vibrant activity and daily life. The music through all of the scenes remains percussive and abstract.

The final set featured a solo performance by Dieter Moebius. Moebius is best known for his early with with the duo Cluster and the band Harmonia, but now performs solo work as well as collaborations with other noted musicians. His performance was different from the others on the concert that evening in that he focused on more conventional electronic sources, such as pre-made rhythmic loops and noise hits.

[Dieter Moebius. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Although Moebius’ performance did not use the same novel instrumentation or techniques of the other artists in the concert, it was nonetheless quite virtuosic – I particularly liked his third piece which employed more noise-based timbres and complex rhythms. His set did continue on for quite a while, however, far longer than I expected – and I suspect longer than the organizers or other members of the audience expected, as people started to file out of the auditorium as he launched into his fifth piece approaching a full hour. He even seemed poised to continue with another piece after the audience gave a warm and enthusiastic applause.

Despite the way the last set panned out, it was still a strong concert with much innovative music and technology. I am glad I had the opportunity to hear it.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF): Celebrating John Cage

Today we review the opening concert of the Thirteenth Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF). The concert was a tribute to John Cage on his centennial (one of many) and took place at SFMOMA. It specifically featured four of his conceptual pieces with chance processes or novel instrumentation.

The main included a performance of Cage’s Score Without Parts on SFMOMA’s rooftop terrace, conducted by Gino Robair with texts by Tom Djll. The performance was in conjunction with the opening of the museum’s intriguing minimalist design exhibition Field Conditions. There were even hors d’oeuvres served on tiles from one of the pieces in the exhibit. Unfortunately, because of another commitment I only arrived at the tail end of the performance, so I did not hear enough to reasonably review it.

[sfSoundGroup. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The main concert opened with members of sfSoundGroup performing Cartridge Music. This is the same piece that concluded the Music of Changes: Variation VIII concert a few weeks earlier, and featured the same personnel: Matthew Goodheart, Kyle Bruckmann, Matt Ingalls, and Tom Dambly. However, I felt that this was a stronger performance. Some of this may have been the staging and the sound support, but it also seemed that the cues for various elements were crisper and tighter, and the selection of sounds to use with the contact mics (i.e,, “catridges”) was more focused and suited to the structure of the piece. As in all music, practice and review from earlier performances helps.

This was followed by a performance of Cage’s most famous work, 4’33”. Normally, the piece is for a single pianist, but this particular performance featured a laptop ensemble. After all, it is a festival of electronic music.

[4’33” performed with laptops. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The performers (mostly members of SFEMF’s steering committee) sat in silence, as required by the score of the piece, with a few motions here and there. The audience mostly listened respectfully as well, I only noticed a few deliberate comments at soft volume. Thus, it was a successfully executed performance of the piece. I hope none of the laptops crashed.

The score for Fontana Mix, which is itself a work of art with curving lines and randomly distributed points, is actually a tool for generating other pieces. Aria is one such piece that Cage himself generated. For this performance, Fontana Mix with electronic sounds and Aria for voice were layered on top of one another, with Daniel Steffey and Christina Stanley performing the layers on electronics and voice, respectively.

[Daniel Steffey and Christina Stanley. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

My least favorite performance of a Cage composition was a boring and long version of Fontana Mix, so I had a little bit of trepidation. But this realization by Steffey and Stanley was vibrant and dynamic. Stanley’s vocals moved between numerous styles of singing (e.g., classical, popular, cabaret) and languages, punctuated by percussive strikes on found objects. Steffey’s foundation of electronic timbres was strong as well, with a lot of variation that left room for the vocals. Using these elements, they were able to realize genuine musical phrases and structure with a sense of narrative from the abstract scores.

The final performance of the evening was a realization of Variations II by Guillermo Galindo that featured a mariachi band. A mariachi band performing John Cage is certainly unusual, but in truth no different from any other interpretation of his scores with open instrumentation. For this performance, a four-piece group Mariachi Nueva Generación with traditional costumes and instrumentation, including violin, trumpet, the distinctive large guitarrón mexicano, and guitar.

[Mariachi Nueva Generación. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.a]

Like Fontana Mix, Variations II is based on graphical elements that are combined to form instances of the composition. Specifically in this case, the interpreter combines lines and dots that represent musical elements that can then be notated for the performers. The result in this instance was a very sparse texture. The musicians would often play a single or pair of disjoint notes surrounded by periods of silence. There were only a few moments where multiple members of the ensemble played at the same time. The texture is a familiar one from realizations of Cage’s indeterminate pieces, but the overall experience with the band was a novel one.

The musical performance was preceded by a video with documentation and commentary produced by Jen Cohen. The video had some fun moments, with befuddled Mills professors reacting to the idea of a mariachi band performing Cage, and allusions to the graphical elements of the Variations II score. It didn’t feel like it was necessary to the experience of the performance. Nonetheless, Galindo considered it an “inseparable part of the piece and one doesn’t exist without the other.”

Overall, it was a strong opening concert for the festival, and it was quite well attended.

Happy 100th Birthday John Cage!

Wednesday, September 5, marked the 100th birthday of John Cage, one of our musical heroes. And we would like to celebrate with my favorite photo of him featuring him with a very Luna-like black cat.

John Cage’s centennial has been celebrated widely this year in concerts, exhibitions and articles. Locally, we have had numerous concerts, including a series by sfSound that included a concert of Cage’s most experimental music. I was privileged to play in Music for Amplified Toy Pianos at that concert. On the other end of the spectrum, I heard a concert of chamber music, for voice, piano and prepared piano. And last night I attended a concert of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival celebrating Cage, and event that included a performance of his most famous work 4’33”. These three concerts show the large range of his music and influence, in unconventional instrumentation, chance processes, and electronics. But his influence also extends beyond his music – he was a major influence in Fluxus (though how closely associated he was the actual movement is unclear to me), and his scores often turn up in museums as works of visual or conceptual art. And of course we have referenced him many times in articles on this site, including a mention of his 99th birthday one year ago.

There is even a John Cage Prepared Piano App for iPhone and iPad, authorized by the John Cage Trust with well-mastered samples from his prepared-piano music.

I have been having a lot of fun with it and hope to use it in a tribute of my own sometime soon.

Weekend Cat Blogging #376: South Berkeley Cat

I encountered this cat in south Berkeley yesterday, as I was unloading my equipment for the Reconnaissance Fly show at the nearby Starry Plough bar.

This cat was quite friendly and greeted me with a tiny voice. I of course had to set the equipment aside for a moment to play. A passerby saw us and said “Too friendly!”, to which I replied “there is no such thing.”

Despite my invitation, the cat did not join us at the Starry Plough for the performance later that evening. But the show did go quite well.

Weekend Cat Blogging #376 is hosted by Vincent at Judi’s Mind Over Matter. We’re wondering where Jules is – he looks a lot like the cat we are featuring this weekend.

The Carnival of the Cats will be up this Sunday at Meowsings of an Opinionated Pussycat. Our friends Nikita, Elvira and Keeril are preparing for a big move, and we wish them well!

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.