James Orsher
Music for Robert Barry
James Orsher is a composer, performer and curator. Many of his works derive their content and material from found sources or chance procedures. He particularly enjoys cooking, borders and intersections, the process of getting to know a place, and short text scores. He studied at CalArts with Michael Pisaro, Stephen "Lucky" Mosko and Sara Roberts, and Amherst College with Lewis Spratlan. He currently purses doctoral studies with Clarence Barlow at UCSB.
The intention of this project is to find new or different ways to categorize sounds heard, known or imagined. I hope to do this by beginning with simple divisions and using basic procedures of addition, subtraction, intersection, etc. Over the weeks leading up to SoundWalk07, I will write and collect sentences for this purpose. Selections will be given out to the audience at various locations during the event. Perhaps the setting will create a new interpretation for the work, as a generally more acute focus on sound could yield a more immediate, rather than reflective, experience. Or maybe, the thought of this potential situation will have already shifted the thread of my text.
Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko
Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko could hardly come from more different areas of the country, yet where they are "coming from" as artists could scarcely be more similar. And yet their common area of interest is exactly what unites places as seemingly disparate as Fullerton, CA and Detroit, MI. Growing up, Jeff and Gordon watched the same movies and TV shows, listened to the same music, acted out the same cultural rituals - and it is this shared vocabulary of mass culture that the two artists have playfully re-interpreted through the grammar of contemporary artistic practice, using the one to re-frame the other. Astonishingly, this is their first collaboration. www.jefffoye.com www.enjoythesign.com
feed-back (f
d'b
k') noun - the process of sending an audio signal from its
output back to its input to generate a new sound. But what if the "loop" is
the performing and re-performing of social convention? What if it's the
audience that feeds back on itself, distorting not so much sound, but the boundaries of performative and pedestrian, private and public? cf. the SoundWalk2007 roving sound performance "We Can't Keep Having This Conversation."
Jim McAuley
Jim McAuley is an improvising guitarist and composer. Well-established in LA's creative music scene, he's played and recorded with such masters as John Carter, Horace Tapscott and Leroy Jenkins as well as contemporaries like Nels Cline, Rod Poole (in the Acoustic Guitar Trio) and drummers Sonship Theus and Alex Cline. He studied composition with Frederic Rwezski, David Behrman and others while earning an MFA at CalArts. His solo CD--"Gongfarmer 18"--appeared on several "best of" lists for 2005 and was praised as "an exquisite album of solo acoustic guitar" by All Music Guide.
McAuley's SoundWalk performance will feature spontaneous improvisations played on a wide assortment of acoustic guitars: classical, steel string, 12-string and dobro._He will also be playing the Megalyra, a 15-string, 6-foot long instrument described by its inventor (micro-tonalist Ivor Darreg) as a "Mondrian totem pole." The LA Times once characterized a McAuley performance as "genuinely evocative and refreshingly cliche-bashing work." (Josef Woodard)
Paris Transatlantic Magazine InterviewJohn Kannenberg
John Kannenberg (b.1969) creates quietly reflective works that blur the boundaries between intention and accident while exploring the confluence of sonic and visual art. Since April 2002, John has served as the creator, designer and curator of Stasisfield.com, an experimental music label and interdisciplinary digital art space presenting works by a diverse collection of artists from around the globe.
more info: www.johnkannenberg.com
The three video pieces on display for Soundwalk 2007 are short-form videos that explore variations of light, motion and sound. While linear in their presentation, these works are constructed to be viewed as video paintings rather than narratives, hence the abstract nature of their content. As a result, the viewer need not experience the entire duration of each piece in a linear fashion in order to derive the pieces' ultimate meaning.
Josh Goldman
Josh Goldman is a composer / improviser / guitarist / educator who resides in the United States. He composes / improvises / performs music, using acoustic and electronic sources, for various ensembles and settings. Much of his music combines sound and visual elements (film / video / various installation spaces). His compositions and performances have been heard and awarded internationally. Mr. Goldman holds degrees from New England Conservatory of Music (BM in music performance) and Brooklyn College, CUNY (MM in music composition).
Language is a stereophonic sound structure composed for seven vocalists (none of whom are using their vocal cords).
website
Kate and Lee Harding
In their piece, "The Grammy-phone for B. Horowitz 1928-1992", Lee and Kate Harding use the recorded voice of their maternal grandmother, "Grammy" (1928 - 1992), to produce uncanny conversations. The recording used is the outgoing answering machine message recorded by Grammy in the early nineties. The sibling collaborators are interested in new conversations that can occur through the rebuilding of a voice unused for over ten years.
This is Lee and Kate's first formal art collaboration, though they co-conspired in a myriad of 'performances' growing up in the Midwest.
Kate Harding's primary art practice uses the materials and methods of garments and garment construction to make pieces that explore "the view" and its many implications. A graduate of Otis College of Art and Design (BFA'03) and Fashion Institute of Technology (AAS '01), Harding has exhibited work throughout Southern California, New York and the Midwest.
Currently residing in San Diego, Lee is a musician whose band, Echo Revolution, performs throughout southern California. His music has been licensed by MTV, as well as, praised in Billboard and VH1's Song of the Year Contest.
www.echorevolution.com
www.myspace.com/echorevolution
Kevin Paul
Kevin Paul is a multimedia artist and performer. He is co-founder and co-director of Ecotone Physical Theatre (www.ecotonephysicaltheatre.com), an improvisational performance ensemble. He has performed in many new music ensembles. His soundscapes have recently been heard at Soundwalk 2006 in Long Beach CA, the High Mayhem Emerging Arts Festival in Santa Fe, the ARTS Lab Garage in Albuquerque and on radio at WDET-FM and KUNM-FM. He subscribes to the notion of artist as shaman, in the sense that artmaking requires us to take an imaginary voyage and to bring back something, if not curative, then at least entertaining.
'Istanbul Reload' is a soundscape based on recordings I made in Turkey in April 2007. It consists of remixed and processed sounds of the street, itinerant musicians, gypsy bars, Sufi ceremonies, calls to prayer, sounds of nature. I am interested in the notion of sound split from its source (schizophonia). I am interested in how one soundscape can be superimposed upon another to create a sense of dislocation and relocation.
Lewis Keller
Lewis Keller plays percussion, guitar and electronics and is a composer and sound artist based in Los Angeles. He finds sounds in electromagnetic radiation, contact miked objects, field recordings, hacked and repurposed consumer items, and found objects in addition to more traditional instruments. He builds instruments acoustic, electronic, found and virtual. Lewis plays in solo, duo and group situations as well as creating interactive and static sound installations. He has performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, REDCAT Theater, Machine Project Gallery and Dangerous Curve among many others. He has recorded for New Albion Records as well as several independent labels. Lewis holds a B.A. in music from Colorado College and an M.F.A. in composition from California Institute of the Arts.
more info: www.lewiskeller.com
Lindsay Foster
Lindsay Foster is a Los Angeles based artist, currently attending CalArts for her MFA in Photography & Media. She is originally from Seattle WA, grew up in Zionsville, Indiana, received her BA in Comparative Sociology from University of Puget Sound, and went on to study photography and education at the Maine Photographic Workshops. She currently teaches during the summer at the Maine Photographic Workshops and part-time at Venice Arts.
I am interested in exploring the space between-the ambiguities of interacting, connecting and communicating. I pull inspiration from daily life and am interested in our collective sociality-the space where "I" ends and "other" begins. I attempt to shift the notion of "I" as individual to a relational "I"-viable through relationships with others. Consequently emphasis is placed on understanding multiple subjectivities and practicing reciprocity. The desire to overhaul alienation and complacency through consciousness and civic engagement is a central theme in my work.
Luis Garcia and Matt Bridges
Luis Garcia and Matt Bridges' previous collaborations include sound installations and interactive electronic compositions. After obtaining their undergraduate degrees at the same university, Luis moved to London where he received a masters degree in Creative Music Technology, and Matt studied audio engineering at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences and is now pursuing his masters degree in Anthropology in California.
The previous sound installations of Luis Garcia and Matt Bridges have been systems that create their own dialogue through selectively random procedures. The purpose is to create a situation in which specifically chosen sounds are given the ability to associate freely, thus attempting to recreate a natural environment. Viewers are able to enter the environment and observe the constantly changing and unpredictable dialogue between the various sounds. Their new sound installation, 'Blind to the Beggar' focuses on the interplay of senses and their manipulation through sound. Isolating the aural sense allows the artists to change the perspective through which many people view everyday situations and circumstances.
Website: http://homepage.mac.com/iam.luisg
Madelyn Byrne, Ellen Weller, Randy Hoffman
Madelyn Byrne is a composer and improviser of acoustic and electroacoustic music. Her music has been heard recently at the ICMC and Imagine 2.
Ellen Weller is a multiwinds/pianist/ethnomusicologist/improviser/composer. Ellen divides her musical activities between improvisation, jazz, klezmer and classical music.
Percussionist Randy Hoffman is best known for his work with composer Harry Partch and singer-songwriter Cindy Lee Berryhill. He has appeared at Lincoln Center, UCLA, The Bottom Line, and the Academy of Art in Berlin.
Sonic Excursion is an active sound art installation. The theme will be travel, and sound samples from walking, traffic, airports, and trains will be used. The audience will be invited to participate by telling their own travel stories. Their words will be processed along with the aforementioned field recordings. Accompanying this process will be three musicians improvising; Ellen Weller on woodwinds, Randy Hoffman on percussion and Madelyn Byrne on synthesizer and computer.
Mannlicher Carcano
Mannlicher Carcano is an improvisational audio collage group that formed in Winnipeg in the mid-80's. In addition to their weekly telephone-linked live radio program/webcast The Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour (www.cfru.ca - since 1998) MC have issued numerous self-released recordings, appeared on experimental music and radio art compilations, produced soundtracks for experimental film, and created installations for gallery and museum spaces. For Soundwalk, MC will be performing the LA segment of the weekly radio show live for and with the public.
Mannlicher Carcano is a seriously playful experiment in anarchistic collaborative creativity. MC's sound has affinities with post-punk DIY experimentalism, avant-garde classical, experimental turntablist, and plunderphonic traditions. The group uses traditional and invented instruments (spring-strung bass, Ventor, cast aluminum cello), trickle-down electronics, portable record players playing warped Montovani at the wrong speed, stuck religious tirades or anything else on vinyl, children's toys, radios, live phone calls, tape loops, field recordings of environmental soundscapes and contact miked appliances (plus frequent visual components) in their ongoing quest to come to terms with the contemporary urban acoustic ecology.
Markle and Strauss
*/Digital Ouija/* A Sound Installation/Sˇance
This piece has grown out of a continued fascination with horns, Spirit Theater, and the disembodied voice. We will attempt to contact the spirit of Kid Mexico using a digital Ouija board, some slightly bizarre sound equipment and processed fragments of recorded oral histories of early residents of Signal Hill. This work conflates the vernacular of the nineteenth century spiritualist with the traditional aesthetic concerns of the freewheeling carnival sideshow mountebank.
Since the early nineties, Markle and Strauss have collaborated on a small number of mixed media artworks and generally had some laughs. Leslie Markle, artist, writer, and teacher has been exhibited in and around Southern California and has worked on numerous public art projects. His work is in the public collection of the city of Long Beach. Eric Strauss, conceptual artist, bricoleur and mentor, has been lurking silently on the periphery of the Long Beach art scene for many years. His work may be interpreted as both a quest for union with the infinite and as an exposition of the universal joke.
Midnight Gardeners
Midnight Gardeners formed in February of 2007. Members include David Krepinevich (guitar noise, samples, FX) and Monica Chavez (violin, vocals, noise makers, FX, percussion). David Krepinevich is involved in experimental group Coaxial (Long Beach,CA). Violinist, vocalist, noisemaker Monica Chavez is a member of the Starving Weirdos (out of northern California). Midnight Gardeners' music is described as outsider music and experimental, laying a foundation of rhythmic drones and beautiful noise. Using live instruments along with samples, the Gardeners create a nontraditional experience. Rather than focusing on typical song structure they convey moods that build into and out of each other from minimal to 100 trains passing by.
Our work is mostly improvised.
Miha Ciglar
Miha Ciglar is a composer and sound artist from Slovenia. His work is based on different concepts of local and temporal sound-event arrangement, the aesthetics and expressional power of basic electronic motion as well as new musical interface design.
I.B.R. Variation IV
a composition for computer, monitor, mixing board and human body
The basic idea is to break the virtual linearity and predictability of the musical tension-resolution interplay and to introduce additional factors (visual and tangible) upon which the temporal organization of compositional elements could be based on. The performer is electrically connected to the instrument, so he becomes a crucial part of the electronic circuit and all his actions reflect themselves in unique sound events. The induced sound respectively and its electronic abstraction is in direct contact with the performers body, which enables a different corporal perception and interpretation of the caused sound, since now the performer does not only have the audible but also a haptic reference - i.e., pain caused by the electric current - for the choice of his following actions.
MLuM
In addition to being a featured artist on National Public Radio programs throughout the U.S.A., MLuM, a Long Beach California based conceptual mock-pop and histriophonic art ensemble, comprised of multi-national artists, has presented works in subterranean and experimental music concerts and sound art events throughout Southern California and Europe. With an intercultural and inter-media aesthetic and praxis that can be described as "Weltradau" ("World Noise"), MLuM takes and makes the "best" out of the "worst" (and vice versa) that various music(s), images, performance practices and sounds have to offer. Organic and inorganic processes, gong-chime cultures, ethnoise and sound mauls (as opposed to mere sound bites) are among its inspirations and references. MLuM includes (in alphabetical order): Chung Shih Hoh (Singapore); Snezana Petrovic & Vid Petrovic (Yugoslavia); Michael Raco-Rands, co-founder (U.S.A.) Marco Schindelmann, co-founder (E.U. [Germany] & U.S.A.) and Scott Vance, guest artist (U.S.A).
Veil is an histriophonic installation whose narrative loop encompasses the laying of the edenic fig leaf upon the pubic area, the subsequent rise and development of civilization and aesthetics, and Salome's dance of the seven veils.
www.mlum.comNicole C. Russell and Kate Henningsen
Nicole Russell received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Southern California. She works in a variety of mediums including installation, photo, fiction, sound and video. Kate Henningsen studied performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has temporarily come out of quasi-retirement to participate in SoundWalk2007. Both artists live and work in Los Angeles.
In To Say The Least, the artists will be disseminating a series of 5-10 text messages over the course of the evening at timed intervals to willing individuals, creating numerous compositions of clustered cell phone beeps and rings. The text messages will consist of idioms and brief phrases that draw attention to the dichotomy of connection and disconnection brought on by our use of technology. The coupling of sound and text allows the audience to consider how we move through the world and interact with each other. To participate, please send your cell phone number and carrier to tosaytheleast@gmail.com.
Nina Waisman
Nina Waisman's work ranges from interactive sound-and-sculpture installations to blind-embossed prints of remixed weaponry. She has shown work at UCSD, Art Center College of Design, Cal State Long Beach, and in galleries and alternative spaces in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, San Francisco, Long Beach, and soon Berlin.
More info: www.ninawaisman.net
About the work in Soundwalk:
People today walk the city paced by ipod playlists of favorite tunes, piped-in music and advertisements. What new forms of rhythmic splicing will be effected as our electronics and environments gain intelligence? Your footstep sounds might be replaced by a gait meant to adjust your mood or style. You might download tracks to help you learn the productive movement rhythms of successful figures in your field. Or you might walk in the steps of your idol - coming closer bodily to someone you wish you could be. Your body gives way, partially disappears, as you move to the appropriated sound... Perhaps a new kind of social attunement will emerge. What might we absorb of "others" through this increasingly direct alignment with their physical rhythms?
Noah Thomas
Noah Thomas, a sculptor and sound artist, lives and work in Long Beach, CA, where he got his M.F.A. in Sculpture in 2003, at California State University, Long Beach. Trained as a classical pianist, Thomas has exhibited his plywood sculptures and multi-media installations in Southern California at the Irvine Fine arts Center, Armory North-West, Raid Projects, and the Office, among others, and he has built large scale public and privately commissioned works for the City of Long Beach, and TABC, a division of Toyota. His work has garnered reviews in the LA Times and the OC Weekly. Thomas also performs experimental ambient music, and has participated in several area events including the Soundwalk, and So Cal Sonic.
Strata, my new series of sculptures, stems from an interest in creating a formal contrast between organic and geometric figures. The organic forms are carved from plywood and are set on trestle-like bases. They resemble models of dramatic landscapes, like huge Japanese Viewing Stones, the layers of veneer referencing topographical lines, or geological striations. The supports are a suggestive of the timber structures used in freeway overpass construction. Although there is a clear allusion to landscape or geologic forms in Strata, I started out thinking more about exploring materials and techniques, with the imagery emerging along the way. The pieces are foremost about setting up a simple formal dichotomy.
Phil Curtis
Phil Curtis is a composer, sound designer, and performer whose work has been featured in numerous venues for new and experimental music. Phil also frequently creates sound design and music for film, TV, theater, dance, and the web. Performances of his music have been given by Amsterdam's Nieuw Ensemble, the New Century Players, and The New York New Music Ensemble, and he has performed on laptop electronics with Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, Anthony Davis, Vinny Golia, Earl Howard, Wadada Leo Smith and the New York City Opera. His music has been described as "...predictably acerbic" by the Los Angeles Times, and Alan Rich, writing for the LA Weekly, has observed that it has "genuine wit...not at all perfunctory."
Phil will be creating a sound installation consisting of 4+ hours of continually changing sound generated in realtime, during which the public is invited to take control of the sound via various physical controllers. Live instrumentalists will periodically play duets with the electronic system while it is being collectively directed by audience members and the composer.
Phillip Stearns
Phillip Stearns' most recent work is centered about the notion of the circuit as a site for composition, performance, installation, sculpture and interaction. His installation and sound based works address electronic technologies and their role in shaping our notions of community, space, isolation and interconnectedness. His practice utilizes a range of media from custom designed, handmade or hacked electronics to text and minimal performance.
"Neural": An electronic ear which listens to itself listening. It is a reactive electronic sculptural piece which utilizes a simple analog artificial neural network to listen to its environment and respond by gently filling the space with its own sounds. Each neuron is fashioned from electronic components into small sculptural elements arranged in a crystalline lattice with each element connected to it neighbors by fine wires.
"For Andre Cormier": It is a performance piece that involves the disciplined action of scrubbing using a soft bristled cleaning tool. The action of scrubbing is not meant as an act of cleaning or removing, but one of separating and uncovering. The initial inspiration was from my experience of the US premier of "Scrubbing" by Andre Cormier.
phog masheeen
Raised by petty bureaucrats in the swamps of Orange County, phog masheeen has most recently performed at Electro-music 2007 in Philadelphia and is currently working on remixes of Velva6000 of Chicago. Phog masheeen's upcoming calendar includes appearances at noisepollination in LA and the NorCal Noisefest in Sacramento.
Operating out of the great city of Costa Mesa, phog masheeen manipulates sound in the digital and analog domains (working with aerophones, idiophones and electrophones in performances and installations). In past contributions to the Soundwalk, phog masheeen has recontextualized plastic containers as resonators and has revealed public service announcements as the caricature of social engineering that they are while providing a sonically appropriate timepiece for downtown Long Beach.
