TUESDAY OCTOBER 20, 2009
APT
419 WEST 13TH ST. NY, NY
10 PM

NO COVER

CHECK OUT

POIRIER
http://www.poiriersound.com/

CX KIDTRONIC
http://www.myspace.com/cxkidtronik

ZUZUKA PODEROSA
http://www.myspace.com/zuzukapoderosa

PURE FIRE
http://www.myspace.com/purefirenyc

SEE YOU THERE,
THE PURE FIRE DJS
REAGANOMICS, CRITERION, $MALL ¢HANGE, PETER GUNN, N-RON HUBBARD

The piece is a large platform based installation, with 9 simultaneous projections and sounds that emit from below. The images appear on  hand-held screens the spectator carries as he or she wanders from video zone to video zone. The work is very large, in a very large space (1500 sq meters), and the videos are spread over the floor  throughout the platform, allowing the spectator to effectively capture the images with their hands. The sense is, perhaps, of listening to nature while questioning the ephemeral character of the media and the precarious nature of the lives of the species being featured in the work.

At night, I go to see music…saturday I was led around as if on a derive or a dream by the photographer matthew niederhauser to some of the best music I have heard from a band in a long time. Call me a fanboy, but I found new inspiration for feeling in the bauhaus-blonderedhead-deadkennedys-Hebei province-twist sounds of rebuilding the rights of statues.

here’s an NPR blog about them as well.
Maybe it was the cheap chinese beer and the exuberance of a diverse crowd of expats, drifters, punks and beijing scenesters that really fired me up, but even the day after, their sound still rings true. I am not sure, but maybe it is because there is so much to rebel against here—in preparation of the October 1st 60th anniversary of Mao, the internet and the streets have becaome a cat and mouse game, as facebook, twitter and youtube are all offline, not to mention street closings and soldiers goose-stepping about in rehearsals for the upcoming parades—or maybe it is just good music from crisscrossing paths. It felt a little Jarmusch night-on-earth (and yes, I realize that is rather 90’s, but that is also the feeling here, sort of Berlin post and pre-peristroyka), but I can’t negate the sound and energy was amazing, filled with hopeful hopelessness. And that sums up some of what I feel here so far…

Yesterday, a good friend and director Katharine asked me about Tarkovsky. I immediately thought of Stalker, my favorite film of his.

When I was in school, all I wanted to do was make sound like Stalker. So many memorable sequences–from the train tracks in the zone, to the dream sequences, to the house and the trembling “train” or abilities of the young child at the end–have pervaded my thoughts each time I begin work on sound for film. But the Stalker taught me so much more than just to design and mix with a goal of “sculpting in time”, the title of his aptly named autobiography.

Tarkovsky taught me about persistence. Little is known of the difficulties of producing poetry, whether in motion or on paper. What is known is that it is frequently looked upon as an art of choice: choice of words, choice of phrasing, choice of styles, imagery etc.. In a sense, poetry is the process of editing. It is a profound use of negative space. Getting rid of the “wrong choice”, opting for what is best or best for right now.

I have never felt that I am a poet. But I do think that sound-editing and design, when done well, is approaches to poetry’s original impulses, the aural nerves that overwhelm the mind so tightly aligned with the desires for language and communication.

And it is this persistence, to communicate, that makes Chris Marker’s documentary on Tarkovsky so One Day in The Life of Andrei Arsenovich so compelling. Told from Tarkovsky’s deathbed, in part, where he lay with cancer, we see the varying struggles Andrei Arsenevich Tarkovsky went through to have a visions realized. The struggle to make choices. And the desire to make good work.

One often sited sequence, from his last film, The Sacrifice (it’s name appropriate for this discussion), shows the director in his most critical form. That of a believer. A fighter.

It is the moment of failure. Or at least the appearance of failure. The dolly and tracking shots for a complex final sequence in which a house on the tundra burns to the ground, fails. One camera , and then the second, are unable to get the shot. The house lay in ruins.

Tarkovsky had to rebuild a house to get the sequence. And he did so (though largely framework) after making his choice. And Marker’s film illustrates not only the beauty of the process of doing this work, but the strength and struggle to decide to go on, despite failure. The strength not only to believe in an idea, but to rely on colleagues and comrades to realize this vision. Film, as opposed to some other forms of art making, is almost always collective. And it is its collective perseverance that I continue to find so driving, even after all this time.

I stayed outside of Alghero, in a tiny town named Fertilia. There, I was first greeted by its stark minimal appearance.

After a scorching and beautiful day at the beach, the next I traveled by bus to nearby Alghero. There, I and a friend stumbled upon a french tourist boat heading to Neptune’s Grotto.

After a rather bumpy and exhilerating boatride, we docked rather precariously and scuttled into the 70 million year old cave.

Once inside, I was stunned, both by its pristine enormity as well as its peaceful self-awareness that it projected. Whenever I feel humbled by nature, it brings me a sense of such intense grounding in both the particular and the general that I can only laugh outloud. Which I did.

And the laughter resonated off of growing walls in a most remarkable way.

Last night, in the backstage room at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, I was talking with Raz Mensai (Badawi), and he mentioned a project he will do in Oporto, Portugal’s catacombs.

It triggered a memory of a film I once saw, where Hermeto Pascoal played a cave as an instrument. Little did I know, it was a grotto.

Hermeto Pascoal Grotto song

Hope to see you soon…

AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ]

Presents A New Group Exhibition:

Tone and Temperament

Curated by Sophie Landres
June 18 – July 18, 2009 / Opening: Thursday, June 18, 6-8pm

AC [Institute Direct Chapel] is pleased to present Tone and Temperament, a group-exhibition that considers the temporal and expandable material of sound. Curated by Sophie Landres and in collaboration with the eight participating artists, this exhibition concentrates on sound as a condition for personal, social, political and metaphysical experience. In addition to the permanent fixtures in the gallery, performances will be scheduled to occur throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Tone and Temperament was conceived as an opportunity to explore literal and conceptual ideas of harmony versus discordance and innocence versus criminality that subsist within the framework of conflicting social norms and art historical precedents. The exhibition was regarded as a conduit for inconclusive experiments in redistricting discursive boundaries and expanding aesthetic properties. Despite sound’s reflexive predilection for interference, the participants created pieces either in response to the exhibition site or with the ambition that their work could co-exist within spatial proximity, without jeopardizing individual content. Though many of the pieces violate prevailing notions of harmony and composition, the refusal to abide is a victimless crime, motivated by a congenial faith in plurality. Allowing sound to flow without bleeding or hemorrhaging, we hope to maintain numerous elements in a constellate connection, free to generate their own alliance of possible meanings.

Chris Bors complicates the act of listening by juxtaposing pop-psychology relaxation techniques with a pop-cultural response to trauma. Jennie C. Jones stretches notes and manipulates tones to reconfigure musical history and exhume emotional content. In a sculpture that references both the harmony of the spheres and the politics of knowledge, Zach Layton uses looping phase structures to create an internally conflicting “chamber music” of the self. Audio recordings and corresponding images by Terry Nauheim describe imagined and site-specific geographies and measure the physical form of sounds against their content, examining how memory and objects are equally subject to decay. Exploring the theory of electronic voice phenomena Daniel Perlin utilizes Thomas Edison’s lost schemata to build a telephone that can speak with the dead. Through the visualization and sonification of Arctic data and electromagnetic lightening transmissions, Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore express the fragility and interconnectedness of the global ecosystem. Mike Skinner enlists the viewer’s body in acts of compositional terrorism, working with mirrors and parabolic reverberating sine waves to demonstrate how the occupation of space can be an oppositional force.

_________________________

Please join us for the opening of the Listening Studio, a video installation permanently installed in the Center for Hearing and Communication in Manhattan, New York.

The Studio is a collaboration between POD DESIGN+MEDIA and Perlin Studios in conjunction with the Center for Hearing and Communication, New York.

14 May Thursday
6:00-6:30 Press Preview
6:30-8:30 Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres

The Listening Studio is an audio and video installation used as an audio test within a custom designed laboratory space. The Studio is permanently installed in the Center for Hearing and Communication in lower Manhattan, New York.

The installation/test consists of immersive video and audio environments. These environments contain a series of conversations that switch backgrounds and ambient audio in real time. These environments challenge the spectator/patient to listen closely and try to understand the conversations.

The test, run by a trained laboratory technician, is intended first as therapy for those who have hearing aids or cochlear implants, so that they may test their hearing in varying situations. They may choose to have their hearing adjusted based upon their results.

The test is open to the public as well, and will be available for anyone to experience as a spectator/patient. The room contains a 5.1 surround-sound system, 16 HD videos on a flat screen monitor and a custom musical keyboard which serves as the testing interface.

The Listening Studio is located in the Center for Hearing and Communication on 50 Broadway, 6th floor, in lower Manhattan, New York.

As the Listening Studio contained within a medical practice within an office building, If you wish to take the test after the opening event, it is by appointment only. Please call +1 917-305-7700 or email appointments@chchearing.org to schedule a visit.

RSVP required. Please RSVP on Facebook or to appointments@chchearing.org

CENTER FOR HEARING AND COMMUNICATION
50 BROADWAY 6TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10004
http://www.chchearing.org

despite appearances, this ship of fools is still sailing. and I still blog. to the ether with this!

I don’t like violence much, but do like Peter Lamborn Wilson’s (aka Hakim Bey) Pirate Utopias

—-

lots to report, but first let me try to catch up…
what I have been up to:

0. Completing the listening lab at the LHH, with Pod architecture. More on that in the next post. But stay tuned for the opening invite in May.

1. Possible. this is the name of my band. my myspace is myspace.com/possiblebandname
this record should be finished in May, after a year of travel, collecting new sounds and putting them together. Possible has teamed up with
Tunde Oyewole on upright bass, Alex Posell and Ismail Lawal on drums here in Perlin Studios in Brooklyn to complete the recordings. 14 golden new songs headed your way on the forthcoming debut album Anything Is…

2. New Crew, new Party: Pure Capital: dj n-ron and reganomics: new mixtape coming up: global capital. stay tuned

3. I twitter therefore etc…

4. This month: DJ N-RON at Que Bajo?!?, 30th of April…APT (419 west 13th, manhattan). Alongside Gecko, Uproot Andy and the masses…

yes, that’s it for the second…
except for this song
which might be by changorama. or not. but it is certainly La Cumbia del Reggaeton.

bad subject heading for a even more curt blog entry, but my aplogies for lack of detail…

this weekend I will be performing live video with dj/Rupture’s band NETTLE at Brandeis, in BOSTON, MASS.

Nettle will be joined by Grey Filastine, as well as others, in a series of workshops and events at Brandeis

Organized by the one and only Wayne and Wax.

For some moments sometimes it looks a little like this. But without the flash.

Photo: Marco Microbi > www.photophunk.de

On Monday, March 23rd, I will be back in New York, presenting 3 new works at Pecha Kucha New York.

PKNY 6 - MONDAY MARCH 23RD, 2009

At Le Poisson Rouge

Doors 6:30 - Speakers 8:30

$5 in advance $10 at the door

Live music by the Sam Barsh Band

Followed by DJ Jon Santos of Common Space

Brought to you by PKNY in partnership with Performa

In Case you haven’t attended before, Pecha Kucha is a format where presenters are have 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide.

So each presenter gets 6 mintues to talk about his/her work, ideas and projects.Pecha Kucha originated in Japan, and is held regularly in 13 cities around the world.

I have presented once before, in Mexico City, and it was a lot of fun and a great way to learn and see.

Ok, hope to see you all there and everywhere.