“The question for me has been what are the most important aesthetic tendencies to emerge out of the recent landscape of digital musics and media?” – Ben Neill
http://vagueterrain.net/journal15/ben-neill/01
Check out Ben Neill‘s recent article in the new .microsound edition of the online journal Vague Terrain. In it, Neill discusses the importance of improvisation in the various approaches to creating live interactive digital music and art.
Wondering why in the world you missed some of the incredible performances at the MMiX Festival 2 weeks ago? Well, I’ll help you redeem yourself because there are several opportunities to see some of those composers and musicians who participated in MMiX at some deeply cool gigs this week:
***First off, composer, violinist and loop-meister, Todd Reynolds, performs with his string quartet and The Meredith Monk Ensemble TONIGHT at BAM’s Next Wave Festival. To quote Todd’s own description of this special performance:
“Songs of Ascension is Meredith Monk’s seminal work for her own vocal ensemble and string quartet. It’s the first time Meredith has used string quartet as part of a larger work, and of course, as Meredith is one of my most-revered interdisciplinary and musical heroes, I am honored to be a part. Early on, Meredith asked me to collaborate with her on this project and to put together the perfect string quartet team with great-spirited, flexible, excellent players, willing to seek virtuosity in the clear and simple, willing to memorize an hour’s worth of music and treat physical space as if it were the greatest musical score…”
Performance starts at 7:30pm and you can find out more about it at the BAM website or visit Todd Reynolds’ own blog, right here.
***Tomorrow night, Thursday, head downtown to The Stone for MMiX Festival curator, Patrick Grant, who will perform at 8:00pm. After rocking it out ensemble-style at MMiX, Patrick takes it down a notch for this appearance. Here’s the plan, according to Patrick’s Facebook event:
“PATRICK GRANT: IN BOCCA AL LOOPER – Armed with a keyboard, guitar and a laptop, I’ll be performing a solo set of music that grooves to the looping and layering of angular interlocking riffs, mash ups of both urban and world beats, and pop timbres used in the service of avant tonality. A sonic soup for the mind, body AND spirit. I hope you can make it. More info at http://www.patrickgrant.com.”
The Stone is located at the corner of Ave. C and East 2nd St., NYC (F train to 2nd Ave.), $10 at the door. The Stone is curated in the 2nd half of October by Kathleen Supové and its artistic director is John Zorn. If you stick around for the 10:00pm show, you can also catch Bora Yoon performing in HUMAYUN KHAN & GUESTS: Humayun Khan (Indian classical vocal improvisation, Afghan sufi) Said Tinat, Shahin Shahida (guitar), Bora Yoon (vocals, tanpura), Haroon Alam (tabla, percussion) Douglas J. Cuomo (guitar, electronica).
***Finally, get the weekend started right with Joshua Fried/Radio Wonderland performing at free103point9‘s annual fall festival of radio art and experimentation at St. Mark’s Ontological Theater:
“Radio Wonderland: Joshua Fried turns the very bits and bytes of commercial culture into the driving backbeat to our dance of independence. In this developing solo, Fried abstracts live FM radio with laptop, electrified shoes hit with sticks, and a computer-hacked steering wheel (from a Buick 6).”
That’s Friday at 8:00pm, $7-$10 on a sliding scale. Shake a leg in the aisles people!
So that’s it, what a wealth of performances to expand your mind and entertain your senses! Don’t say I never tipped you off to any of the cool stuff.
More MMiXers to come…
– Jocelyn
Just a few more photos of MMiX closing performances by Chronotronic Wonder Transducer and Ben Neill with Bill Jones. Special thanks to Tyler Isaacson, who snapped this set of pics, and to Anna Li and Amanda Katz for lending a helping hand – my students are the BEST!:
– Jocelyn
OK. The thing is done. Long exhales, a good long nap and heart-felt thanks to everyone. Your support, artistry and friendship (not to mention your cables and power strips) have meant the world to us. 🙂
More pics to follow in the days ahead:
There’ll be plenty of content (video too) coming out as we get it together after a well deserved rest.
In the meantime, there’s many a point to ponder. We all learned so much about HOW music is being made in its current state that now the question shifts to WHAT is being made, let alone WHY.
Ben Neill made a great point, as far as “interactive” music goes, that being: It connects best with an audience when there is some level, structured as it may be, of improvisation. That made a lot of sense to hear that put so clearly. Without it, where is the risk, where is the edge-of-our-seat excitement which has always made for great music/performance no matter the decade, epoch or technology (?). With that in mind, nothing worthwhile is truly new. It’s simply this year’s extension of what humans have been doing since time immemorial.
Which means, for us here: more to come.
Thank you everybody!
-The MMiX Team
Last night at the MMiX Festival, the lights were low, but the energy was high. The creators of Ableton LIVE and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP/Jitter, Gerhard Behles and David Z, were in the house and showed us the future of music software with Todd Reynolds‘ and Luke DuBois‘ Max for LIVE workshop. And in a nod to the past, Steven Litt allowed us to appreciate our old vinyl records in a new way by hooking up his CrudBox to 8 vintage turntables. The performances by Patrick Grant Group, Kathleen Supove and Elliott Sharp/Janene Higgins merged technology with humor, theater, science, incredible visual art and highly skilled musicianship.
TONIGHT: Put on your dancing shoes for the last night of the MMiX Festival – first up at 6:30, the artists of Chronotronic Wonder Transducer present their group performance; Ben Neill and Bill Jones merge mutantrumpet with video artistry; and DJ Rekha brings her deep bhangra beats to MMiX. Come on up and get down at our closing night party…your Monday morning will thank us for it!
We haven’t dumped all of our video chips yet ( and when we do, I expect we’ll discover moving evidence of actual “dancing”!), but here are the snapshots from last night’s MMiX performances at Theaterlab (again, many thanks to Erick Gonzales for playing shutterbug):
TONIGHT at MMiX Festival: Patrick Grant Group, Kathleen Supove, Elliot Sharp/Janene Higgins, plus more from Chronotronic Wonder Transducer and free Cycling ’74 Max for LIVE workshop with Luke DuBois and Todd Reynolds at 6:30pm. Be there, or be…um…ah yeah I’m out.
Below are some pictures from last’s night MMiX Festival opening performances with Bora Yoon, Luke DuBois and Todd Reynolds, and installations by Joe Mariglio and Mike Clemow. One down, three to go – don’t miss out!:
All Photos by Erick Gonzales and yours truly.
Don’t forget: Dubspot hosts a free Ableton workshop today at 6:30pm; Chronotronic Wonder Transducer has two NEW installations in Studio C; and we’ll have performances by Dan Trueman and His Mini-Laptop Orchestra, Jon Margulies/Hobotech and Joshua Fried/Radio Wonderland. Plus, you can sign up for free software giveaways.
We wanna see you there!
– JOCELYN
“You are going to hear something that you have never heard and whether you like it or not, it’s going to inspire you somehow.” – Composer and conductor Butch Morris on Elliott Sharp
That’s a quote from the film, Elliott Sharp: Doing the Don’t, directed and produced by Bert Shapiro. The film explores the career of performer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Elliott Sharp, tracing his journey from “National Science Foundation award-winning ‘science geek’ to an internationally acclaimed musician and composer.”
In the film, we follow Sharp from the premiere of his opera “Em/Pyre” at the 2007 Venice Biennale to a rock club in Beijing; from the recording of an album with his blues band Terraplane to a performance of Sharp’s Orchestra Carbon in New York; from solo guitar, bass clarinet or saxophone performances to an overview of all the hand-made instruments Sharp’s created to expand his unique musical language. Here’s the trailer for the film, which was released last year:
It is hard to imagine the NY experimental music scene without Elliott Sharp – he’s been at it for 30 years. Though you may experience his music in film scores, as part of installations, at concert halls or large rock palaces, you’re just as likely to find him in more intimate, offbeat venues. This is what happened to me several years ago, when I wandered into a tiny jazz club near my apartment, expecting to see the usual Juilliard trio on rehearsal night. Instead, to my amazement, I found Sharp playing achingly beautiful delta blues with acclaimed vocalist, Queen Esther. He’s released over 200 recordings spanning the musical spectrum and currently leads four ensemble projects: Carbon, Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. He’s applied fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. Truly a scientist and a pioneering musical artist.
This Saturday night, October 10th, Elliott Sharp comes to the MMiX Festival in a special appearance with visual artist, Janene Higgins, whose videos began as a direct offshoot of her graphic design, incorporating collage, text, and image-layering into a time-based artform. Her videos and installations have been performed and exhibited at numerous festivals and galleries worldwide, including The New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center; The Kitchen; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center; documenta; Art Institute of Chicago; Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires and many more.
Come to Theaterlab to experience these two boundary-smashing artists up close – you’ll get inspired…and you’ll like it.
– Jocelyn
Ben Neill‘s Tripycal is one of those albums that looms large in my personal soundscape. Back in my publishing days, I used to wrestle with 300 page manuscripts and marathon voice recording sessions. My head was so often jammed with words and speech, that I’d escape to my office and put on Neill’s record, with it’s ambient, dub-oriented jazz that seemed to knock the text-based stress right out. And on weekend chill-out nights, I’d sometimes hear those sophisticated bass lines and spacey horn notes floating through The Cooler, that old metal dungeon of a nightclub on far West 14th street.
Ben Neill
More than 10 years later, I have the pleasure of seeing innovative trumpeter and composer, Ben Neill perform this week at the MMiX Festival on Sunday night. Neill invented the mutantrumpet, a trumpet that’s been tricked out with extra valves, knobs, switches and electronics so that he can use the it to control audio and video components in live performance. He first introduced the instrument in the ’80s, working with synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog to create the electronic interface, and he further developed its computer capabilities during a residency in Amsterdam during the ’90s. The result is several albums’ worth of uniquely trippy, adventurous music flavored with jazz improvisation and dance-floor grooves, plus a career that includes many collaborators such as Mimi Goese, DJ Spooky, DJ Olive, John Cale, Page Hamilton from Helmet and the late artist David Wojnarowicz.
A few years ago, Ben Neill began working with photographer and visual artist Bill Jones, with whom he created Palladio, an interactive, playable movie based on the novel by Jonathan Dee. In their performances together, both VJ and trumpeter control music and video as a single hybrid form – a truly interactive, live duet of images and sound.
Ben Neill’s latest album is Night Science, available on Thirsty Ear Recordings. Ben Neill and Bill Jones will perform at the MMiX Festival on Sunday, October 11th at Theaterlab.
– Jocelyn
The MMiXdown 