Biblio Spectaculum

Biblio Spectaculum postcard

I’m happy to have a piece included in the Biblio Spectaculum exhibit at Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs, NY. The show is a national exhibition of artist books and text-based visual works juried by Scott McCarney. My piece “A Work of Art for Every Entry in Index—Subjects—Library of Congress” uses an algorithm to generate an endless stream of descriptions of possible art objects.

The gallery is open by appointment only, or check out this nice collection of images from the show.

ASAC Presents Holland Hopson, D Rice, Blacklight Lighthouse

I’m excited to share an Albany Sonic Arts Collective bill tonight with Blacklight Lighthouse and D Rice.

Friday October 23
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St
Albany, New York 12210

Here’s the Facebook event. Looking forward to visiting with friends upstate!

Bridging Circuits and Cities

Tomorrow night I’m performing a new work on Circuit Bridges concert 37.

Thursday October 22, 8pm
Gallery MC
549 W 52nd St, Fl 8th
New York, New York 10019

This concert is part of the Vox Novus Festival celebrating 15 years of work. Vox Novus and Circuit Bridges have teamed up with BAMA in a composer exchange (kind of like hostages, only composers are somewhat more demanding—requiring better food, more liquor—and not as susceptible to audio torture). The exchange began a few weeks ago with the Birmingham Art Music Alliance welcoming a contingent of NY-based composers for the Birmingham New Music Festival. This weekend Monroe Golden, Mark Lackey, Brian Moon, William Price and I are being hosted by Circuit Bridges.

I’ll be performing Alap Catfish Impala,  a new piece for banjo voice and live electronics. It’s a mashup (or maybe a medley?) of clawhammer blues and just-tuned modal improvisations.

Check out the wonderfully eclectic program.

ASAC Presents Suzanne Thorpe & Phillip Greenlief, Fossils from the Sun, Holland Hopson

The Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Suzanne Thorpe and Phillip Greenlief, Fossils from the Sun, and Holland Hopson.

Saturday, April 7
8:00 pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany NY
$5 suggested donation

West Coast saxophonist Phillip Greenlief visits New York, and mixes it up with East Coast electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Together they explore what it sounds like when warm winds of the west meet cool breezes of the northeast, and the spaces in between, with electronics, singalongs, and improvisations.
Fossils from the Sun is Ray Hare’s way of moving our eardrums with guitar and/or voice and/or electronics.
ASAC will be unveiling new chairs for “enhanced listening comfort” (TM). To celebrate, I’ll perform 4 short pieces for amplified and processed folding chair.

“The Observers” Screening at Migrating Forms, Anthology Film Archives

Jackie Goss’s film “The Observers” is being given its New York premiere at Anthology Film Archives as part of the Migrating Forms festival. The screening will be Sunday, May 22 at 2pm.

Jackie describes the “The Observers”:

The land and sky of Mt. Washington, New Hampshire form a frame for a meteorologist as she goes about the solitary and steadfast work of measuring and recording the weather.   Inspired by the Nathaniel Hawthorne story  “The Great Carbuncle,” this film features the extreme and varying beauty of the windiest mountain in the world.

Shot on 16mm film over the course of a year, “The Observers” is based on the actual work of the crew of the Mount Washington Weather Observatory — one of the oldest weather stations in North America where staff members have taken hourly readings of the wind speed, visibility, barometric pressure, and temperature since May 1932.  In 1934, the staff measured a wind gust of 231 mph, which remains a world record for a surface station.

I’ve been privileged to be part of the production of “The Observers” along with Jesse Cain, Dani Leventhal, and Katya Gorker. I posted here, here, here and here about our experiences shooting at the top of beautiful Mt. Washington, NH. Since then I’ve composed music for the film, assisted Jackie with recording foley and worked on sound design. This has been a great project!

“The Observers” screened on the closing night of the Crossroads Festival in San Francisco, and will be shown again in early June at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. I’ll post details when I get them.

Handmade Electronic Music – Updated

Nic Collins’s wonderful book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking is getting an update. Routledge is publishing a new edition with, according to Nic, “lots of new circuits and illustrations, more examples of artists’ designs, and a DVD with 87 1-minute video clips by hackers from all over the globe, as well as a series of step-by-step video tutorials.” I can’t wait to see it. After the jump are a number of events surrounding the release.

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Where I’d Like to Be Tonight (and Tomorrow and…)

La MaMa e.t.c and Interpretations are presenting three recent Robert Ashley operas: Dust (1998), Celestial Excursions (2003) and Made Out of Concrete (2007/2009) beginning tonight and running through January 25. It may confound traditional opera-goers to call these operas, but there’s really no other suitable name. So go and be confounded.

Performers include Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, Joan Jonas and “Blue” Gene Tyranny.