electronic music

room: PIPES

On Sunday, I attended the room: PIPES featuring Polly Moller, Pamela Z and Jane Rigler. The Room chambre series, hosted an produced by Pamela Z, take place in the Royce Gallery, an “intimate performance gallery” in the Mission District of San Francisco. The room: PIPES performance featured performances that incorporated flutes.

Before the start of the performance, we were treated to a welcome by “Ellie”, the freight elevator in the building that houses the Royce Gallery. While some music purists might be appalled to have a freight elevator included in a performance, I found it quite charming to incorporate an element of the industrial setting.

Polly Moller presented a new work, Three of Swords. The performance included an arrangement of Tarot cards, a timer and a series of candles to mark sections of the piece. In each selection, a card was drawn, and the music was an improvisation based on that card. The music focused on extended flute techniques; for example, the first draw led to an improvisation with the head of a bass flute using microtones, overblowing, whistles, clicks and other inspiring sounds. The one section of the performance that stood apart from the others was the drawing of the Three of Swords, illustrated to the right, which launched a very detailed but very expressive description of the human heart.

Pamela Z‘s playful and energetic performance did not feature flutes, but instead focus on voice. It began with live looping of tonal and harmonic singing (look up “live looping” here on CatSynth for a primer if you’re not familiar with the technique), and gradually moved to more extended vocal techniques, including clicks, screeches (with electronic processing), whispers, etc. The video in the background displayed an interior of an old industrial or loft space, empty except for a trunk that appeared and disappeared at various times. Sometimes it was open, to reveal drawers and messy clothes.

Jane Rigler opened her set with a virtuosic flute and electronics piece and the welcoming statement “Do not fear the microphone and piccolo.” She then performed her piece A la pintura, inspired by Robert Motherwell’s paintings, which were in turn a response to Spanish poet Rafael Alberti’s poems celebrating painting. Motherwell’s paintings, both as stills and as animations, were projected during the performance, and there were also moments where text was projected, presumably excerpts from Alberti’s poems. Motherwell’s paintings are quite abstract, focusing on textual elements and geometry. To have these images along with strong flute-and-electronics music (a favorite instrumental combination of mine) was a treat.

The performance concluded with a trio improvisation of all three performers. In addition to the flutes and voice, Polly Moller broke out her “tone nut” (doughnut-shaped wind instrument), and Pamela Z played the popular Ocarina iPhone instrument. It’s always interesting to hear how such disparate musicians play off of one another, and this group improvisation could have kept going on for a bit longer…

CatSynth pic: DJ Kikovas, with DJ Vivi Pedraglio

Today we feature recent photos from our friends in Argentina, DJ Kikovas and Vivi Pedraglio.

A self described “lady-beatmaker”, Vivi Pedraglio continues to create her live electronic music (with Kikovas’ assistantance) and perform in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. She has also been using an intriguing instrument, the kaolimba. You can hear more of her music at her website or MySpace.

Pmocatat Ensemble and Ivy Room Experimental/Improv Hootenany

OK, so I have been delinquent in reviewing some of own recent shows. I was hoping to find photos, but so far I have not found any. It does happen once in a while even in this hyper-photographic society. In fairness, I have taken photos at many shows I attend, but then find out they were not good enough to post. So, we will just go ahead and use our visual imagination.

Two weeks ago, on the day I returned from China, I participated in Pmocatat Ensemble. From the official announcement:

The Pmocatat Ensemble records the sounds of their instruments onto various forms of consumer-ready media. (Pmocatat stands for “prerecorded music on cds and tapes and things”.) Then, they improvise using only the recorded media. Several different pieces will explore both the different arrangements of recorded instruments and the sound modulation possibilities of the different recording media.

In my case, my pre-recorded media was digital audio played on an iPhone. I used recordings of my Indian and Chinese folk instruments, and I “played” by using the start, stop, forward, rewind, and scrubbing operations.

Other members included Matt Davignon, James Goode, John Hanes, Suki O’Kane, Sarah Stiles, Rent Romus, C. P. Wilsea and Michael Zelner.

Matt Davignon, who organized the ensemble, had composed some pieces which provided much needed structure and avoid a “mush” of pre-recorded sound. Some portions were solos or duos, with various other members of the ensemble coming in and out according to cues. This allowed for quite a variety of texture and musicianship. I definitely hope the Pmocatat Ensemble continues to the perform.

The following Monday, March 16, I curated a set at the Ivy Room Experimental/Improv Hootenany with Polly Moller and Michael Zbyszynski. I know Polly and Michael from completely different contexts, so it was interesting to hear how that would work together. Michael played baritone sax and Polly performed new words as well as flute and finger cymbals. I played my newly acquired Chinese instruments, the looping Open Sound World patch I often use, and a Korg Kaos Pad.

Musically, it was one of those sets that just worked. I was able to sample and loop Polly’s extended flute techniques into binary and syncopated rhythms, over which the trio could improvise. Periodically, I changed the loops, sometimes purposely to something arhythmic to provide breathing space. Michael’s baritone sax filled out the lower register against the flute and percussion.

We got some good reviews from our friends in the Bay Area New Music community. The following comments are from Suki O’Kane (with whom I played in the Pmocatat ensemble):

Amar had been dovetailing, in true hoot fashion, into Slusser using a small
digitally-controlled, u know, like analog digit as in finger, that totally
appeared to me to be the big red shiny candy button of the outer space ren.
The important part is that he was artful and listening, and then artful
some more. Polly Moller on vocals and flute, text and tones, which had a
brittle energy and a persistent comet trail of danger.

The “big red shiny candy button of the outer space ren” was undoubtedly the Korg mini-Kaos Pad.

And from David Slusser, whom I “had been dovetailing”:

Amar’s curation seemed like a well orchestrated composition; Polly’s contribution on voice and flutes adding much to that.

Not bad for a birthday show :).

Recap: Performance at The Shelter in Shanghai

A brief review in photos of my performance last Friday at The Shelter.

The Shelter is actually in a converted bomb shelter, and to get there one descends a long narrow staircase and enters this cave-like hallway:

Inside the main club space, it is mostly dark, save for a few small lights and these video screens broadcasting live from the DJ booth:

The above photo shows my setup via the video camera. We can take a closer look at on the DJ platform itself.

As described in the previous post, I combined traditional Chinese musical instruments with electronics, blending old and new. In the above image you can see (left to right) a prayer bowl, a small bell, a gong, and temple blocks (to the right of the laptop). Some of my Chinese friends and colleagues were blown away by the idea that one can combine the different elements to make a single type of music.

The performance itself went quite well, and just about everything worked as planned. If there was one thing that was unfortunate, it was that 10:30 is quite “early” in terms of Shanghai nightlife, so there were not that many people in attendance yet. But you always play for the people who are there, and it was a new experience for all of us.

The club did fill up later on during the DJ sets that followed, and I stuck around to hear most of them – it seems this is one of the main places in the city to hear more underground or unusual music, be it live electronics or DJs. That was an adventure in and of itself, but a story for another time.

I did also make an audio recording and a video of the performance, which I have not had a chance to review yet. Look for at least short excerpts of both in the future.

Friday Night Performance at The Shelter in Shanghai

Here are the details on the show I’m playing in Shanghai in Friday night:

PAUSE ::: PLAY

@ The Shelter
5 Yongfu Lu, near Fuxing Xi Lu, Shanghai

Friday, March 6, 2009

Line-up:
Amar Chaudhary, Uprooted Sunshine, V-nutz, Tootekool, Ben Huang, Michael Cai, Ozone…

* Celebrating the release of the Pause:Music Mix CD#2, the Uprooted Sunshine crew bring you a mad mash of the Jamaican sounds of reggae and dance-hall with new original vocals by ChaCha and MC Didje, put together by prime selecta Blaise Deville. There’s a limited number of free CDs, so come early to get yours!

* The man who rocked you on the first Pause:Music Mix CD, Ben Huang, returns after a long stay in Beijing, to bring you his latest eclectic and cutting-edge techno mix.

* Special guest Amar Chaudhary, from San Francisco, on his first performance ever in China. Amar Chaudhary is a veteran sound artist who makes his own instruments and plays a live set that’ll crack your head open. (Starts at 10:30pm sharp!!)
http://www.myspace.com/amarchaudhary

* We’ll also have Tootekool, Ozone, Michael Cai, V-Nutz bringing you everything from rock to alternative hip hop, to breakcore and drum-n-bass. Look out!

* It’s only 30 RMB at the door and the funds go to supporting and developing the local music scene through a variety of projects.

More info can be found here, or at facebook for those so inclined.

So…now I actually have to finish putting together a show. I have managed to put together a modest setup based on gear I brought with me, a few replacements (thanks Behringer for not making your mixer power supplies 220V compatibile), and several Chinese percussion instruments I have acquired during this trip:

The large bowl is very resonant and will be used to introduce the set. The interplay of the various bells and gongs with bell-like sounds on the Evolver will be the main elements, interrupted by more standard electronic sounds from the Evolver and the Kaos pad, as well some down-tempo beat-based sections.

It has been a bit of a challenge to find time to think creatively, while contending with work and some of the lingering effects of the time difference. I went back to the first day in Shanghai and it’s big city energy for inspiration, and some of the photos that I took, even if the music itself doesn’t seem to reflect that sonically.

San Francisco Tape Music Festival

As promised, here is my post on the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. I had an opportunity to attend last Saturday’s program.

First, a word about “tape music.” Of course, it does not actually have to be on tape. Indeed it is now most often rendered as digital media: DVD or audio files. The San Francisco Tape Music Collective (which runs the festival) defines it as “audioArt diffused through a surround-sound speaker environment.” Essentially the “audio art” is music or other sound rendered onto media, and the performance is the live performance of that media in a hall through a speaker system. The way the media is mixed into the speakers and the live space creates a unique performance. And the fact that the material is recorded on media allows composers to create sounds that could never be performed live, even with modern computers – although the gap between what can be done live and what can only be rendered is narrowing over time. In the early days of electronic music, tape was in fact the only way to realize sounds, and thus the only way to perform the music. Modern tape music carries on that tradition.

The idea of going to concert hall and listening to a recording may seem odd, but like any other performance, it is about matching the content and presentation. There are really good tape-music performances, and really bad ones, and I have been to both. The Saturday performance at the festival was definitely a good one. It included classics of electronic music, such as John R Pierce’s Stochatta, one of early experiments in computer music at Bell Laboratories; and Lubiano Berio’s Thema (Ommagio a Joyce). Both pieces were premiered over 50 years ago. John R Pierce may be familiar to longtime readers of CatSynth as one of the co-discovers of the Bohlen Pierce scale.

Most of the other pieces on the program were far more recent, with the most recent being the premier of Cupido’s Suitcase by Cliff Caruthers. A series of three pieces in the first half, Winter Light (for Ingmar Bergman) by George Cremaschi, Pre-fader: Highly reverberant states by Goran Vejvoda and Chart Tempo & World Retrograde by Jon Liedecker/Wobbly explore three different aesthetics within recorded sound art: simple (but very powerful) sound synthesis with two oscillators, complex collages of sounds, and remixing of popular-music elements, respectively.

One piece that also got attention when the program was first announced was a piece by The Fireman, which is actually a due of Paul McCartney and Martin Glover aka Youth. As a piece on the program, I don’t know that is as memorable as the others I have discribed.

The program closed with a rather “hard” piece buzzz by Geraud Bec, which I leave to the reader’s imagination. Works by Maggi Payne, Zhiye Li and Kent Jolly rounded out the program.

Overall, a very even performance, there was no point at which I didn’t want to be there listening. I also think that this series is fairly accessible for those who are not familiar with contemporary or experimental music, nothing is too harsh or too provocative – then again, I don’t know if I am the best judge of that.

Art and music notes from the past week

During one of my long walks this weekend, I stopped in at Crown Point Press and found in the hallway several prints from Changes and Disappearances by the composer John Cage, a hero of ours here at CatSynth. My first impression was that these were graphical scores (i.e., scores where the performers interpret visual images), but they are in fact intended as independent works of visual art. However, many of the same compositional techniques can be found in both Cage’s music and visual art, as described in this essay by Ray Kass:

It occurred to me that his etchings had an extraordinary correspondence to the methods he utilized in composing his music – and that they were visual counterparts of sorts, related in a manner that one might not have expected…But the connection between Cage’s use of “chance” methodology in his various kinds of work (composing, writing, installation & performance art, & now printmaking) made sense in a way that awakened me to the great scope of his work.

I don’t think this was a special exhibition per se, as Cage had a longstanding relationship with Crown Point Press and they have displayed his work on several occasions. The main exhibition was a series of works by Tom Marioni.

Both Marioni and Cage were featured in The Art of Participation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Among the works in the exhibition were Marioni’s Free Beer (sadly, no free beer was being dispensed at the time, even though it was “Superbowl Sunday”), and John Cage’s most famous piece 4′ 33″. The full score was posted on a wall, and it was also displayed on a grand piano in its original form. I can’t say this was presented as a “participatory work”, however. Simply looking at the piano and listening to the museum commotion for the alloted time does not constitute a proper performance of the piece.

There were, however, plenty of other interactive pieces in the exhibition to explore, such as Lygia Clark’s Diálogo: Óculos (Dialogue, Goggles):

Last week, I attended an evening of electronic-music performances at the Climate Theatre, part of the regular Music Box Series. This series usually does not feature electronic music, but this time they darkened the room and presented “electronic soundspaces.”

Christopher Fleeger opened the evening with lively performance featuring a touch screen, percussion controller and laptop. The music mixed synthesized and other familiar electronic sounds with some odd and amusing recordings, such as a rap extolling the virtues of Tallahassee, Florida as a center for faiths of all kinds, and a very memorable piece of “stand-up tragedy” about one man’s experience with “the store” – in the poem, every line ended with “the store” and often included other references.

The second performance was by James Goode and featured a mixture of acoustic sources (percussion, toys, etc.) with sampling and looping, and reminded me a bit of my own performances at the Santa Cruz Looping Festival and other venues (it reminds me that I haven’t written about that). It can sometimes be a challenge to sustain full energy for an entire solo set of this nature, but Goode made this seem easy.

Goode and Fleeger closed with an extended duet improvisation. At least one balloon went flying into the audience.

I also attended the Saturday performance of the 2009 San Francisco Tape Music Festival, which I will discuss in a separate article.

Upcoming Shows: Saturday, Sunday and tonight!

In the midst of everything else going on, I have three upcoming shows, including two this weekend:

Saturday, December 6, 8PM
:plug4: headphone festival
5lowershop, San Francisco.

The headphone festival returns. I will be performing ofter electronic music, with a playful bent. It is a “headphone” event where people live at the venue as well as those listening online will be using headphones. For those who are interested, you can also listen live online on Saturday. visit http://www.deletist.info/plug4.html or http://www.leplacard.org for more info.

____

Sunday, December 7, 7:30PM
Musicians Union Hall, 9th St @ Mission St, San Francisco.

SIMM Series Outsound Year End Blow Out Show

Polly Moller/Amar Chaudhary duo
CJ Borosque/Matt Davignon duo
Conure
Rent Romus, Philip Everett, Pete Martin, John Vaughn
and more guests! solos, duos, trios, and the Outsound SuperSize Ensemble.

The mission of Outsound Presents is to raise public awareness of sound and unique events not otherwise made available by presenting public performance, co-op promotion, and education throughout the year. Donations from this evening will be used to support Outsound’s future programming efforts…

_____

And a bonus show, tonight:

Thursday, December 4, 8PM
Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market Street @ 6th Street, San Francisco
Outsound Presents Ad-hoc experimental freeform improv.

Ad-hoc experimental freeform improv like dude whatever jam, followed by Chris Skebo (trumpet)/Luigi Marino (computer)/Karl Evangelista (guitar)

Election fun, electronic music, and seriousness

Well, we’re getting close, and things are looking good:

(This is a live link, so it will show the final results, and we’ll see how “good” things really went.)

One delightful election story that is rather apropos of this site involves Brian Dewan. He was in the news this past Saturday because of his performances of historical political folk songs (think mildly irritating songs about Jimmy Carter, Nixon or Eisenhower), but Dewan’s true claims to fame are his unqiue electronic musical instruments, including Melody Gins and Dewantrons, and “Folk Synthesizers.” We at CatSynth are delighted to see politics and our own art form crossing paths in such a direct and public way. As for Dewan’s instruments – we want one!.

This reminds me of how electronic music crossed paths for me during the previous elections, when I attended ICMC in New Orleans in 2006; and in 2004 as well, when my fellow electronic musicians and I watched the defeat at a bar in Miami. Things are looking much better this time.

We at CatSynth have also been quite amused by some of the humorous and well-designed sites that have recently appeared, most notably PalinAsPresident.com. This Flash animation depicts Sarah Palin as President (presumably after McCain’s untimely demise) in the form of an interactive game where you click on different objects (it reminds my a lot of Myst series and similar games from the 1990s). Humor abounds, as you uncover stashes from huge shopping trips, make Palin say goofy things like “Where’s Russia” and variations on “Maverick.” It is being updated every day through November 4th, and it’s always fun to come back and see what’s new. Hours, or least minutes of quality entertainment.

One thing that is not so entertaining: a mailer I received, using Barack Obama’s image and words to support Proposition 8. He is officially against it – though he hasn’t been particular vocal about the issue, mostly because of cultural blackmail in certain regions and among certain demographics. Nonetheless, it is really troubling, hopefully it doesn’t sway anyone in this largely Obama-supporting state.

The ad seemed largely targeted at African Americans, given the images and quotes from black clergy. It made me wonder about my own ethnic hertiges and their support for marriage equality. In particular, the Indian side of my heritage. I did find this survey thanks to Prerna. It suggests a 47% vote against proposition 8, which is far higher than I expected. Given my own experience (as well as the stereotypes of Indian Americans), I would have expected far lower, as we (i.e., South Asians) have an embarrassing track record on social and cultural issues. So on that note, I am somewhat optimistic. But both Prerna and I agree, “We can do so much better.”

And that’s true for the country as a whole, we can do so much better. Hopefully, we will chose that option, both nationally and locally…

Preparing for performances next week.

With two performances coming up, next Thursday and Saturday, we at CatSynth are very busy preparing. Actually, it’s more crisis management. Luna’s serene appearance belies the fact that we at CatSynth are dealing with serious equipment failures. First, the Mr Echo pedal has been having its problems. It was mostly an issue with the power jack, which I was able to repair. But after an evening of fantastic practice and experimentation, it stopped working again. This time the power appears to be fine, but now there is no sound.

In the middle of all of this, our MacBook had a serious hard drive failure – or least that what it appears to be. One moment, we’re happily web browsing, the next a spinning pinwheel of death (SWOD), and after a forced reboot it simply will not come up.

I am of course doing my best to continue preparing for the show. I am shifting the focus to other pieces of equipment, and using the old PC laptop. Although now the PC, which is old and slow under the best circumstances, appears to also have some hard-drive issues.

Oh yeah, and I hear the entire world was having some financial difficulties last week.

It’s a good thing Luna is here for comfort and stability, We will also try and visit Weekend Cat Blogging with Salome and Astrid. And the Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos with Sammy and Miles Meezer. And the Carnival of the Cats at My Big Fat Orange Cat.

Meanwhile, I’m on my way to a local music store, and probably the Apple Store as well, for a little help.

UPDATE: As of Monday evening, the pedal is working again. But the MacBook is out for repair.