((audience))  -  March 2013 News and Updates

Listen, My Heart to the Whispers of the World… Report, Listening Party and Travelling Show

Listen, My Heart to the Whispers of the World with which It Makes Love to You took place on Feb 2^nd, 2013 at DT Cinemas, DLF Center, as part of Khoj’s “An Evening of Sound” event.

As one of the artists from the show, Shuddhabrata Sengupta from RAQS Media Collective, summed it up:
I knew that this show would be cool: I didn’t realize until I was there in the dark theater that it would be amazing.

Eight soundscapes of India were presented in all six auditoriums of the DT Cinema, on loop so that visitors could freely come and go between. About 300 visitors attended the show, including a mix of local and international audience.

Listen, My Heart… was a tremendous “proof of concept” for ((audience)) cinema for the ear. We are deeply grateful to Khoj and DT Cinemas for making this Delhi premiere such a success. You can read brief descriptions of all of the works on Khoj’s page for the event, which includes our Curatorial Statement. (A version of the Curatorial Statement is also available on our blog.)

And now, we would like to share this program with the world! A “travelling version” of Listen My Heart… is available: An hour-long program for presentation in one cinema hall, including Iain Armstrong, diFfuSed beats, Michael Northam, RAQS Media Collective and Hildegard Westerkamp! And we will be having a small “Listening Party” on March 17th here in New York:

Listen, My Heart to the Whispers of the World with which It Makes Love to You:
A Cinema for the Ear
A private listening reception
Sunday, March 17th, 2013
Wooster Street, SoHo, NYC

This is a listening party in a private loft, and seating is limited. Please email alexis@au.dience.org or send us a message via our Facebook page if you would like to attend.

New Proposal Packets!

Supply / Demand

E.S.P. TV in collaboration with ((audience)) and Harvestworks Digital Media Lab Center presents Supply / Demand, a three-part series of panel discussions which gather practitioners from art and industry to discuss the metamorphosis of Audio Visual Media in general and the opportunities of on-demand distribution.

The series kicks off this Thursday with Supply/Demand part 1: Radio to Internet. This first event in the Supply/Demand aims to disentagle our current “media convergence” by focusing on how radio has been transformed by the internet. This panel begins with a journey back in time to the utopian moment at the turn of the millennium, when a number of radio pirates, community broadcasters, hackers and activists were making their first internet radio broadcasts. What were artists working with “hybrid-radio” anticipating for the future at that time? And what opportunities do they see on the horizon for audio art and transmission art in the age of media convergence?

Panelists:
John Anderson, author of Radio’s Digital Dilemma, the first critical and comprehensive analysis of the U.S. digital radio transition; professor of Television and Radio at Brooklyn College.
Jonathan Jay, microradio pioneer from Seattle’s legendary Studio-X internet radio station
Tom Roe, Artistic Director free103point9.
Moderated by Alexis Bhagat of ((audience))

Part II Public Access: Dead or Alive coming up on Wednesday, April 17, 2013!

All panels will be video broadcast by Harvestworks and audio broadcast by free103point9 (link to free103point.org) on WGXC 90.7-FM.

Coming Up: New Website & Sound Off!

Support ((audience))!

Thank you!

Please comment here or drop us a line if you would like more information about ((audience02)).

STRAY birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.

And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh. -  Rabindranath Tagore ¹

The history of art and architecture is intimately tied to a history of windows. The earliest windows were simply holes in the wall or ceiling, which permitted light, smoke, and air to pass between inside and outside. In the Classical Age, windows became screens; the translucent alabaster windows of the Mediterranean and paper windows of the East illuminated a new private realm indoors. While the lattice-work Shanasheels of medieval Mesopotamia permitted women to peek out onto the street without being seen themselves, it was the invention of transparent plate glass that transformed the window into a vantage point.

In the 14^th century, Leon Battista Alberti codified his theory of perspective, suggesting that painters could transfer a scene to the canvas by imagining it framed within a grid  as if through a paneled window;² this “window” became the standard for perspectival composition. In the 20^th century, René Magritte’s The Human Condition (1933) used the device of Alberti’s window to confuse the boundaries between inside and outside, painted and real, visible and invisible:

“In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.”³

Magritte’s “painting of a painting” represents the window not only as a vantage point, but as a point of transition, bringing Alberti’s window to its logical conclusion.

By contrast, in Open Window, Collioure (1914) by Henri Matisse, vantage is abandoned altogether: there is nothing to see at allbut the blackness of night. The viewer can only imagine the sights and sounds outside. Like the window in Tagore’s poem, it becomes a place for listening—to songs, rustles, noises, silence.

PUT out the lamp when thou wishest.

I shall know thy darkness and shall love it.

Listen my heart… reaches back to the roots of the modern cinema in the music hall. In 1894, when the Manhattan Opera House built by Oscar Hammerstein failed, it was reopened as Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, under the direction of John Koster and Adam Bial, a pair of German brewers who had run a racy vaudeville tavern. In 1896, a few months after the Lumière Brothers presented their first public screening of the cinématographe at Le Salon Indien in Paris, Koster and Bial installed an Edison Vitascope motion picture projector in their hall. Short films were projected between vaudeville acts, and used as scenery for plays or musical numbers in the manner of the old “magic lanterns.”

A decade later, the Nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: the first theater that exclusively presented motion pictures. It played short films for a “nickel” (five cents) and was soon replicated throughout the United States. The cinema hall was born. Early cinemas had a simple layout, with central corridors and seats facing a frontal screen, and the films they played were silent and short. Cinema architecture—what little there was—aimed to bring as many people as possible in to see the screen.The development of sound films or “talkies” in the 1920s transformed this place for seeing into a place for experiencing. Massive theaters featuring elaborate modern designs, luxurious interiors, giant screens and theater boxes—epitomized by the 6200 seat Roxy Theater in Manhattan—were built in cities around the world. Major motion picture studios financed and built these early movie palaces, such as the Metro Cinema, built by MGM in Bombay, which opened in 1933 and became the famous “Red Carpet Cinema” of Bollywood.

In traditional European opera houses and music halls, rooms were resonant: architecture magnified the voices of singers, instruments, and the audience. The cinema hall required new acoustics: architecture would now cancel sounds, so that audiences could cleanly hear the recorded soundtrack. The adoption of standards for film-sound recording and playback in the 1930s and developments in sound recording and transmission during World War II spurred further acoustic distillation. Beginning with Disney’s Fantasia, released at the outbreak of the war in 1940, which required its own custom sound system developed specifically for the movie, cinema sound would develop both new dynamic range and depth of immersion. The development of Dolby Stereo in the 1970s introduced a degree of control for directors and sound designers from the studio to playback in the cinema hall. Dolby Stereo’s four-channels of Left, Right, Center (dialogue) and Rear (effects, ambiance) would be quickly adopted around the world following the box-office success of George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977. In the 1990s, Dolby Digital enabled encoding of 5.1 surround sound, or Left, Left Surround, Right, Right Surround, Center (dialogue) and Low Frequency Effects (bass). This arrangement provided full spatialization and even broader dynamic range. 1942: A Love Story (1994) was the first Bollywood production with Dolby Digital sound, which soon became the world standard.

As the French theorist of film sound, Michel Chion, has written:

Whoever goes to a modern theater… will find… stable sound, extremely well defined in high frequencies, powerful in volume, with superb dynamic contrasts, and also, despite its strength and the probably large theater space, a sound that does not sound very reverberant at all. One finds… a great “dry” strength.⁴

Modern cinemas have become exquisite places to not only watch, but to also listen. They have become the perfect concert halls for this century of electronic instruments and synthesis, digital sound recording and telepresence.

Sound recording, or phonography, has advanced tremendously since its twin invention by Thomas Edison and Charles Cros in 1877. In 1969, Alvin Lucier produced I am sitting a room, a recording equal in significance to Magritte’s The Human Condition, a “recording of recording,” exposing the nature of recording itself and transcending sound as representation. While tremendous technical advances have been made in recording and signal processing, recording has opened up a theoretical abyss: we do not yet know what recordings are and have not digested how recording has transformed music and memory.

Prior to the invention of recording, the repetition of music depended upon the embodied memory of the musician or upon the reduction of all sound into scales of tones and notation of tones. Recording altered the status of sound, turning ephemeral impressions into a thing—an artistic material released from both disappearance and from the requirements of tonality. Recording made possible the emergence of a sound art.

‘Sound art’ is a term for a variety of art practices that focus on sound, hearing and listening. The English term originates in 1983, but ‘sound art’ as such blossomed in fits and starts throughout the 20th century, in text-sound and sound poetry, in sound sculpture and klangkunst, in the German experimental neue hörspiel (new radioplays), and in the public art works of Max Neuhaus. From the intermedia revolution of the 1960s until the new media revolution of the 1990s, these traditions developed as separate branches with distinct histories and concerns. In the 1990s, computer processing power increased to the point where artists and musicians could digitally edit recordings at equal or higher quality to tape. The “bedroom musicians” of the digital recording revolution created new genres of music with densely layered, multi-track recordings. After 1995, inexpensive digital recorders, made for recording sounds outside the studio, appeared on the market. Thousands of enthusiastic phonographers set upon the world, with an instrument much smaller and lighter than previous devices, capturing sounds free of the hiss of tape and the noise of the recording apparatus. During this explosion of new sonic work, it became convenient to speak of any work which was not strictly musical in its concern as ‘sound art.’

A collection of seminal sound themed art exhibitions at the turn of the millennium drew the branches of this tradition together as sound art, beginning with Sound as Media at the ICC Tokyo and Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery in London, both in 2000. These were quickly followed by Sonic Process at the MACBA and Centre Pompidou in 2002; the sound-focused 2002 Whitney Biennial; and Sounding Spaces at the ICC Tokyo in 2003. From Sound Art at ART Cologne in 2004 to Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art at ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2012, foundations and genealogies for a new art have been laid.

Listen, my heart…, a collection of soundscapes presented as cinema for the ear, integrates two important trajectories of this new art: acoustic ecology and cinema pour l’oreille. For this exhibition, we sought works which represent the unique soundscapes—urban, rural and media-based—of the Indian subcontinent, and which also demonstrate high-quality spatialization (diffusion) and play with the conventional experience of movie-going.

“Soundscape” is a double-term, like landscape, that means both the world of sound around us and a composition that represents that audible world. It is both the subject, and the compositional form, of acoustic ecology. Acoustic ecology is the study of the relationship between living beings and their environment mediated through sound. Acoustic ecology emerged in Canada from the work of R. Murray Schafer and his collaborators at the World Soundscape Project.

The concept of soundscape composition may have emerged in 1930 when German film-maker Walter Ruttman produced a recording called Weekend, a collage of words, musical fragments and ambient recordings which tells the story of a weekend trip to the countryside. This “movie without images” produced a “narrative based on the mental images projected by the sounds alone”⁵ and was, in other words, the first cinema for the ear. Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov followed the next year with Enthusiasm, the most ambitious field-recordingwork of its time. In the 1990s, cinema pour l’oreille emerged as a Francophone tradition rooted in the work of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de recherches musicales; the pioneering tape-compositions of Luc Ferrari; the acousmatic music of Francis Dhomont and Robert Normandeau; and the audio work of Michel Chion. Prioritizing multi-channel audiodiffusion and Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of reduced listening, cinema pour l’oreille has, with the notable exception of Ferrari, avoided or rejected representation. The attitude of reduced listening focuses on sound itself independent of the source or meaning of the recording.

THE mystery of creation is like the darkness of night–it is great.

Delusions of knowledge are like the fog of the morning.

As Brandon LaBelle wrote in Background Noise, the soundscapes of Hildegard Westerkamp bridge the “Schafer-Schaeffer Divide” between representation and independence, “harnessing the real while getting closer to its submerged sonority”:

Westerkamp and other soundscape composers may operate along the lines of Chion’s reduced listening though in a way that disavows the aim of such reduction, for soundscape composition returns to the source with renewed and vigorous attention. It pulls us away and then pushes us back in. Westerkamp’s work seems to suggest that such reality may only be heard through entering into a shift in listening consciousness whereby dreamlike states open the way toward active listening and ultimate participation. Her musical transformations function to transform consciousness—to drop it just below the line of awareness so as to awaken the ear to “original contours and meanings.”⁶

The cinema screen is a window for shared dreams. Our soundscape program begins high in the Himalayas, at the sacred shrine of Muktinath, with its one hundred springs of water.⁷ From Himalayan peaks, the water of the Yamuna flows to the plains. Listeners can slowly follow the waters in Iain Armstrong’s recording, or hop on a train in Ujjwal Utkarsh’s Yatra, jumping off at the RAQS‘ New Delhi Junction. If they are stuck in Delhi traffic, Michael Northam‘s AGGREGATES will transform the noise. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Sonic City transports listeners to an abstracted city of sound. And diFfuSed Beats folds the sounds of Delhi into the streets of Zurich over a rhythmic beat in search of the ur-sound of an ur-city without border guards or police. Finally, Kamal Swaroop provides a whole new experience of movie-going, a chance for the audience to remember the pictures of his masterpiece Om Dar-Ba-Dar, or to imagine a new film in their mind.

THE noise of the moment scoffs at the music of the Eternal.

Since then, we’ve been reflecting about DVDs and fixed-media in general: in many ways , DVDs are an obsolete format. Increasingly, consumers expect media to be delivered on-demand, from “the cloud” without a physical media like discs. Yet, there are few options for delivering multi-channel audio at this time for independent publishers. The DVD currently remains the simplest way to share multi-channel works.

And so, we have decided to publish a few more discs this year.  Each will be be published in a small edition*. In order to make these publications truly worthwhile, we hope to publish extensive Liner Notes including biographies and critical responses.

We are not seeking artist submissions at this time, as we will use this publishing effort as an opportunity to share some some of the amazing ((audience)) Festival submission archive with the world.

We are at this time seeking writers.  If you may be interested in writing, please send a letter of interest via email to curators @ au . dience . org with subject line “WRITER – LINER NOTES.” CVs are welcome but not required. Below, please find a list of some of the artists who have submitted works to ((audience)) in the past. Please let us know if you are interested in any particular artists, or if there are other issues in sound art or acousmatic music that you are interested in writing about. Please also include a link to recent essays or your blog, or attach a recent piece of writing (from the past two years.)

We have not confirmed the budget or fees for this project at this time, but hope to secure support for a $200 honorarium per essay. We will confirm the budget by February, and the first DVD of 2013 will be published in March.

PLEASE SHARE.

SOME ARTISTS IN THE ((AUDIENCE)) FESTIVAL SUBMISSION ARCHIVE

Jamie Allen
Cesar Alvarez
Natasha Barrett
Brian Belet
Daniel Blinkhorn
Simona Brinkmann
Oliver Carman
Alejandro Casales
Eric Chasalow
Buddhaditya Chattopadhay
Virginia Colwell
Patrick Courtney
Melanie Crean
Paul Devens
Demdike Stare
Anna Friz
Clay Gold
Josh Goldman
Ido Govrin
Bjorn Eric Haugen
John Hudak
idiorema
Bryan Jacobs
Zahra Jewanjee
Martin Kay
Suk-Jun Kim
Felix Kubin and Boris D Hegenbart-Matsui
Orestes Karamanlis
Peter Kutin
Meriol Lehmann
Loud Objects
Stephanie Loveless
Adrian Moore
Emmanuel Madan
Cedric Maridet
Abinadi Meza
Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi
Dafna Naphthali
Oliver Nijs
Sean Niesen
Michael Northam
Philippe Otondo
Rebekkah Palov
Sam Pellman
Jane Phillbrick
Kálmán Pongrácz
Raime
Martins Rokis
Tara Rogers
Diana Salazar
Uli Schuster
Debashis Sinha
Tom Williams
Pamela Z

Sound Off is an intimate performance series of sound art and experimental music that connects audiences with composers, musicians, artists, and one another. It takes place in a simple loft: no stage, no curtain, and little distance between performer and audience.

For more information on ((audience)) and this series, visit our website.

Bora Yoon will present ( (( PHONATION )) ), a multimedia solo performance with live video projections by R. Luke DuBois.

Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition, ( (( PHONATION )) ) is an immersive audiovisual environment that utilizes a viola, cell phones, Tibetan singing bowls, water, turntables, metronomes, radios, custom instruments, and other objects as well as the Body Electric, a custom sensor technology developed by DuBois and Harvestworks Digital Media Center. This device enhances interactivity between the physical, musical, and visual realm using groundbreaking gaming infrared technology, allowing Yoon to create sounds through gesture and electronics.

Bora Yoon is an internationally renowned musician who has performed at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Nam June Paik Museum (Seoul), Singapore Arts Festival, Festival of World Cultures (Poland), Patravadi Theatre (Bangkok), Walker Art Center, Bang on a Can Marathon, TED (Cannes Festival), and museums and galleries across the globe. She has been awarded grants by the New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, Billboard, BMI, and the Arion Foundation; published by SubRosa, Innova, Swirl Records, and the Journal of Popular Noise; presented by TED Conferences, and electronics giant Samsung; commissioned by the SYMPHO, Young People’s Chorus of NYC, and the Sayaka Ladies Chorale of Tokyo.

Luke Du Bois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his projects reveal the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; the Sydney Film Festival; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and PROSPECT.2 New Orleans. His work and writing has appeared in print and online in the New York Times, National Geographic, and Esquire Magazine. An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data developed by San Francisco-based software company Cycling’74. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.

Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.

Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.

Recently, her primary focus has been her SOLO project but she is also involved in many various collaborations. Among musicians, she has worked with Phil Minton, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Tomomi Adachi, Matana Roberts, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jerome Noetinger, C. Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, Gianni Gebbia, Dylan Nyoukis plus many more. Some more current projects have included: duos with Phil Minton, Luca Marini (kamama), Frederic Blondy, Robert van Heumen (abattoir), Katt Hernandez (Isabel), Nate Wooley (heave and shudder), Wouter Jaspers, and Id M Theft Able.

Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada and the USA. In 2011, in addition to her performances, she was awarded the prestigious Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, an award that was established to support individual artists living, and working in Maryland. She has now recently relocated to Berlin, Germany from Baltimore and tours actively.

Tamara Yadao is a multimedia performance artist who uses audiovisual technology to address notions of representation. She abstracts recorded expressions of the body to investigate formal relationships between movement and electronic media. Pieces are purposed for the single channel, multi-channel performance installation and live performance. Among others, her work has been screened/performed at the Brooklyn Museum, Dixon Place, the Kitchen, Knitting Factory NY and Symphony Space.

More info:

Audrey Chen – http://us.myspace.com/audreychen

Bora Yoon + Luke DuBois ((phonation)): http://borayoon.com/?p=335#more-335

Tamara Yadao: http://www.tamarayadao.com/

Location:
16 Beaver Street ( 4th Floor ) NYC
(Between New and Broad Street)

Sound Off is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and with generous sponsorship from Narragansett Beer. This evening’s performance is also made possible with funds from the NY State Council on the Arts / Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.

((audience)) seeks sound art works that directly represent the unique soundscapes — urban, rural and media-based — of the Indian subcontinent. We are particularly interested in audio compositions that emphasize spatial experimentation and/or treat cinema as a unique format for storytelling and the organization of time.

Selected 5.1 surround sound art works will be presented in a completely dark cinema environment without visual accompaniment as part of the Khoj International Artists’ Association’s 25th Anniversary celebration. Selected stereo works will be presented in a related side program over the radio at a date to be announced.

Deadline: Sunday, September 2nd.

5.1 surround sound compositions do not need to be finished works and may be submitted as proposals, but you must send in a submission form before Sunday, September 2nd.

More info:
http://www.au.dience.org/submit/submit/

Members of the Columbia University Computer Music Center and friends play at the April 2011 Sound Off at 16 Beaver Street, Lower Manhattan.

Sound Off is an intimate performance series of sound art and experimental music that connects audiences with composers, musicians, artists, and one another. It takes place in a simple loft: no stage, no curtain, and little distance between performer and audience. Each event takes the form of an informal reception, with snacks, beer and wine at 7pm, followed by an opening act at 8pm, and the headline performer at 9pm.

2012 SCHEDULE

June 26 / 7-10pm
CHARLES COHEN

July 31 / 7-10pm
TODD REYNOLDS

August 28 / 7-10pm
BLEVIN BLECTUM

September 25 / 7-10pm
LESLEY FLANIGAN

October 30 / 7-10pm
BORA YOON

November 27 / 7-10pm
AUDREY CHEN

Location:
16 Beaver Street
Between New and Broad Streets
4th Floor
NYC

$5 suggested donation

For more information on ((audience)) and this series, visit our website.

This project is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

JUNE 28, 2012
Control Voltage Faire: 3-8pm
Source of Uncertainty I (Concert): 8pm – Midnight

Location: @Seaport, 210 Front Street, NYC

Since most modular synthesizers are constructed at the cottage industry level and distributed online, it is difficult for users to interact with these instruments. Control Voltage Faire will be the first opportunity on the East Coast for amateur enthusiasts, professionals and the general public to experience analog synthesizer modules produced by DIY manufacturers and crafters. Like a small-scale NAMM show with the independent spirit of the Maker Faire, the Control Voltage Fair will zone in on the origins and future of modular synthesis.

Presenters at the Control Voltage Faire include: Control, 4ms, Harvestman, Knas (debuting their new “Polygamist” synth), Main Drag Modular, Make Noise, Malekko, MeMe Antenna and Pittsburgh Modular. More to be announced!

The evening will feature Buchla 200e Recital, presenting three composers exploring this powerful instrument: Alessandro Cortini, Carlos Giffoni, and Mark Verbos. To end the event, a late show featuring Xeno & Oaklander and Loud Objects will perform on all-analog instruments. The concert will take place in Lower Manhattan’s @SEAPORT!, located at 210 Front Street.

SOURCE OF UNCERTAINTY is a collaborative initiative of Harvestworks and ((audience)) to celebrate the Buchla200e, the DIY modular synthesizer music community, and the roots of Harvestworks as the Public Access Synthesizer Studio. Source of Uncertainty will center around two concerts, on June 28th and July 7th, presented in collaboration with River-to-River Festival. Portions of Source of Uncertainty will be produced for broadcast in partnership with the radio station of the Clocktower Gallery in New York City operating at ARTonAIR.org.

PERFORMER BIOS:
Alessandro Cortini (Los Angeles) is an Italian musician well known for his synthesizer work with Nine Inch Nails, Modwheelmod, and solo project SONOIO. His focus on synthesizers and involvement in NIN led to the development of a custom-built modular system by the Electro-Acoustic Research group. It is no wonder that Alessandro eventually acquired the 200e. Marveling at its flexibility, he now uses it as a main source of composition, as well as a tool for education.

Carlos Giffoni (NYC) is an influential character in modern experimental music. Carlos’ activities have included curating DIY Brooklyn music events, producing the No Fun Fest from 2004-2008, running the label No Fun Productions and creating a fairly large and intense catalog of music under his own name and with other collaborators from all over the world. As a musician, Carlos is known for his heady improvised synth sets, including the noisy acid dance music project No Fun Acid. Several of Carlos’ recording feature the 200(e), and this event will be his first performance with it in concert.

Mark Verbos (NYC) is a music producer, mixer, and analog synthesizer technician. Heavily involved in electronic dance music, Mark’s releases have spanned the genres of techno, rock, acid, house, pop, and electro. Mark has been involved with Buchla synthesizers since a young age, repairing modules under the technician and designer, Grant Richter. Since then he has become the go-to expert for Buchla repair and modifications. Although Mark performs on multiple Buchla machines, this performance will feature solely the 200(e). (Mr. Verbos will also lead a demonstration of his instrument at Harvestworks on July 7, 2012.)

Xeno and Oaklander (NYC) are a minimal electronics girl/boy duo, and they are based in Brooklyn, NY. They began writing music and soundtracks in 2004, recording songs live in their studio and playing analogue synthesizers and instruments exclusively. They have toured Europe and the West Coast extensively, and they have played on the East Coast in music venues, lofts and festivals. They have also performed at SF Moma, PS1 Warm Up, Miami Art Basel, the Zürich Kunsthalle and the New Museum in New York.

Loud Objects (NYC) are made up of Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta, and Katie Shima. Welding soldering irons against overhead projector, Loud Objects wires up live musical circuits and gerrymander lo-fi electronic noise. The first few minutes are characterized by bleak silence as the Loud Objects swiftly assemble an initial circuit; thereafter a lush and percussive poetry overwhelms the arena as the trio hacks microchips into a swarm of 1-bit noise.

((audience)) is pleased to announced ((audience02)).

Our Shorts Program broadly surveys recent surround sound work, from an eclectic work that samples from jazz, poetry and popular music (“Symphony of Popular Misconceptions”) to an imagined soundtrack for a short horror film (“Airtight Orange Plastic Coffin”). The two works in the Long Program are like feature films, providing a context for the audience to settle in and dream together. And, since ((audience)) is concerned with the cinema both as a technical platform as well as a narrative platform, this year we have added a Stereo Program with three works from the radiophonic tradition.

Shorts Program (50 minutes)
Eric Chasalow: “Symphony of Popular Misconceptions” (2009, 11:30 min)
Clay Gold: “Airtight Orange Plastic Coffin” (2009, 9:12 min)
Adrian Moore: “3Pieces: Piano” / “3Pieces: Horn” (2006-2007, 20:38 min)
JG Thirlwell: “Anabiosis” (2005-2011, 8:43 min)

Long Program (120 minutes + Intermission)
Barry Schrader: “The Monkey King,” (2007, 36:57 min)
Phillip Stearns: “Macular Degeneration” (2010, 82:43 min)

Stereo Program (66 minutes)
Anna Friz: “The Clanedestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny” (2000/2002, 26:13 min)
Felix Kubin: “Raum für Telemagnetische Medien” (2004, 19:40 min)
Gregory Whitehead: “Potato God Scarecrow” (2011, 20:00 min)
Please join us at Harvestworks on THURSDAY, MAY 31 for a free preview screening of ((audience2)), including our complete shorts program, and the entirety of Phillip Stearns’ “Macular Degeneration.”

INFO:
THURSDAY, May 31 / 7-9:45pm
@ HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Art Center
596 Broadway, Suite 602
B, D, F, M to Broadway / Lafayette
6 to Bleecker
N.R to Prince

GEN-CON

Saturday, March 17 / 8pm at Harvestworks

Location:
HARVESTWORKS
596 Broadway, #602
New York, NY

In honor of Conrad Schnitzler’s 75th Birthday, Ken Montgomery will perform 5.5.85, an 8-channel “CON-cert” composed by Conrad Schnitzler.

Conrad Schnitzler made numerous contributions to electronic music and sound art. He studied sculpture with Joseph Beuys before leaving Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (and leaving all of his sculptures in a grassy field!) to focusing on experiments with synthesizer and tape. In 1968, Schnitzler established the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Kreuzberg, Berlin. He soon began working with Krautrock pioneers Tangerine Dream and Kluster.

In 1971, he began his solo musical career. His early recordings, Schwarz, Rot, and Blau were first published by Rene Block Gallery as multiples with handmade covers. In 1978, he released the album Con on the Egg Records label, and consequently released many albums of both synthesizer and tape-loop music. In 1986, Schnitzler founded the Generations Unlimited label and was involved in the founding of the seminal Generator Sound Art Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side in 1989.

Once a week he mailed a new 8-channel “Musik in the Dark” CONcert to New York, for Ken Montgomery to perform. He had a lull in activity in the 1990s after he moved to Dallgow, a small village outside of Berlin. Schnitzler “discovered the 88-keys” and began producing works for keyboard and player piano. Schnitzler released records on the Plate Lunch Music Label in the late 1990s, and continued recording until his untimely death in August 2011.

Ken Montgomery is a New York-based visual artist and “sound/composer” whose involvement in the cassette-culture and mail-art movements of the late seventies led to the creation, in 1989, of the first and arguably still the most important sound art gallery in New York City: Generator. Located first in the East Village and later in Chelsea, Generator’s wide scope and novel approach toward audio art made it a vector-point for some of the most interesting and important artists from around the world. Ken was also the founder of *A.T.M.O.T.W.* — Art is Throwing Money Out The Window — and *Generator Sound Art Inc*, and he co-founded the seminal experimental labels Generations Unlimited and *Pogus Productions*. As a composer in the early eighties Ken was creating multi-channel sound works often performed in total darkness. More recently Ken has been focusing on visual art, collage, bookmaking, and international correspondence art. As *The Minister of Lamination* (a.k.a. Egnekn) he is the world’s foremost practitioner of sonic Lamination Art. Montgomery has collaborated with a wide variety of artists including Schnitzler, Andrea Beeman, David Lee Myers (Arcane Device), Zoe Beloff, Michael Zodorozny, and Ishtvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin).

As a sound artist Ken Montgomery finds novel ways to work with sound. He has created an audio-only CD-ROM (Inner Eye / Outer Ear), a record label for experimental music (Generations Unlimited), the first sound art gallery in NYC (Generator), and a Ministry devoted to conducting one-on-one listening rituals (The Ministry of Lamination). Since 1985 he has been performing multi-channel sound concerts in intimate settings, often in total darkness. Montgomery began creating soundtracks for non-existent films in 1979 and distributed them on cassettes through what became known as the International Cassette Network. In composition and performance Montgomery has employed an ice crusher, an aquarium, a refrigerator, a hand massager and a laminator, to name a few.