Watching The Grass Grow
Forget Home and Garden and just give me the Yard. Yard TV broadcasts an unending expanse of green. Sit back and watch the grass grow from the comfort of your living room 24 hours a day. There’s always plenty of sun and never a sunburn; always plenty of rain, but you never get wet. Yard TV. All of the fun, none of the allergens.
In conjunction with Ecstatic Yod, Ecstatic Peace, and Arthur Magazine, the Albany Sonic Arts Collective is proud to present: No More Bush Tour
Sunday Aug 3
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark Street, Albany NY
7:00 pm
Featuring:
This is a great long lineup, hence it’s an early show. See below to study up on press release jargon and artist bios so you can delight your friends with an insider’s knowledge of the event. I’m looking forward to hearing Jack Rose, seeing Tom Carter again, and being pleasantly surprised by someone else on the bill. It’s bound to happen.
“Five years ago, in a time of woe for the underground, the country and the world, the members of the Ecstatic Yod Collective organized a tour called More Hair Less Bush. Including a variety of musicians and writers, the tour brought the flame of hope to cities cast into darkness by the hideous secretions of the Bush Twins.
Now, in 2008, as we prepare to enjoy thelong-promised fruits of regime change, we felt it was time to bring our show on the road again. But this time, rather than offering balm and apologies to the psychically wounded, we would like to celebrate the pre-dawn of a new day — a day when the word “cheney” is once more an empty phrase we use to terrify youngsters. To this end, we have assembled a revolving cast of musicians and writers, all of whom honk the horn of freedom with both hands. We trust it will be a gas. Trinkets will be available at all shows. Tour schedule and bios follow. Support is being provided by Ecstatic Peace Records & Arthur Magazine.”
Eric Hardiman of the Albany Sonic Arts Collective recently appeared on WAMC 90.3 FM. Listen to the archive of the show here. It kicks off with a few seconds of my piece Telephone Temple
[audio:http://hollandhopson.com/music/asac/04_hopson_telephone_temple.mp3]Then Eric and his Roundtable hosts chat about the collective, upcoming events, and attempt to describe experimental music for the average upstate public radio listener. My favorite moment: hearing an excerpt of a piece by Brendan Murray on WAMC.
The Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Brendan Murray (Boston) and Brown Wing Overdrive (Brooklyn)
Saturday July 12, 2008
doors at 7:30 pm: show at 8:00 pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany, NY
$5 suggested donation at the door
From the minds of ASAC:
“Brendan Murray is a self-taught musician living in Somerville, MA. He has actively recorded and performed with electronics since 1999. He regards his music as a balance between spontaneous sound making and compositional rigor, with an emphasis on drones and repetition. He records and processes instruments and tapes until all traces of instrumentality are blurred, leaving only large blocks of pure sound.
He has recorded four full-length CDs, four cdrs and two cassettes for various record labels in the United States and Europe. Murray has also toured extensively throughout the United States as a solo performer and as a member of various improvising ensembles.
Brown Wing Overdrive is an electronic trio from Brooklyn specializing in improvisation. Members include Chuck Bettis (electronics and vocals), Mike IQ Jones (electronics and objects), and Derek Morton (electronics and banjo) Between them, they have deep histories in punk rock and electronic improvisational music. Their music has been described as “amorphous ebb-and-flow ooze rippling over No Neckian pick, blurt, and throttle”. Their debut CD, “We Have Issues: live at Issue Project Room”, is available on Living Myth Records.”
I’m looking forward to more banjo weirdness–see you there.
The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is back online after a hiatus beginning in early 2008. Read about the reopening here. IMSLP (now also known as the Petrucci Music Library) is a wiki for public domain music scores.
IMSLP operates in Canada where a score is in the public domain if it was published more than 50 years ago and the date of death of the last author of the publication also died more than 50 years ago. Consequently, the collection of scores skews toward older pieces. But the site also includes information on how to submit your own Creative Commons licensed scores, so I’ll look forward to watching the contemporary selections grow.
Welcome back, IMSLP!