Best of ReSiDeNt: The First Two Months

I’m excited to be playing again with the LEMURbots. This time it’s at Issue Project Room on Thursday, April 10 @ 8pm. I’ll be sharing the bill with Taylor Kuffner and Ben Neill. Here’s the rundown:

LEMUR storms Issue Project Room on Thursday, April 10th, with a night of special collaborations. Best of ReSiDeNt: The First Two Months showcases performances by January/February LEMUR ReSiDeNtS Taylor Kuffner debuting the GamelaTron robotic gamelan and Holland Hopson playing his customized MIDI banjo in an Appalachia-meets-robots performance. Then, Ben Neill presents the NYC premiere of new works for Mutantrumpet and LEMUR robots.

Thursday, April 10 @ 8 pm, $10
Issue Project Room @ The Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street @ 3rd Avenue
Brooklyn

Old Alabama

Here’s a video from my recent performance at LEMUR. It’s the first outing for this brand new piece, complete with all the hesitations, misfires, fuzziness and fun of a premiere.

I’ll be playing with the LEMURbots again in early April–details to be announced.Thanks to Nicole Peyrafitte for grabbing this video on-the-fly. Check out Nicole’s new blog, Collectages. (Yum…spätzle.)

Monkey vs. Robot

This month’s residency at LEMURplex is coming to an end which means the performance is coming up soon! Details are below. It’s been great getting to work with the robotic instruments. I’m looking forward to performing some new pieces for clawhammer banjo and robots, and hearing the other artists’ work, too. Lucky for us we get an extra day this month to work the wrinkles out, or at least to iron our monkey suits.

Friday February 29th, 8pm – 11pm
ReSiDeNt @ LEMUR: New Works, New Instruments, New Artists
461 3rd Avenue (between 9th and 10th streets)
Brooklyn NY
$5 at the door

  • Holland Hopson will bring Old-Time Appalachia to LEMUR by creating new pieces for the LEMURbots and Tru One, his clawhammer banjo/sensor interface.
  • Zach Layton will create a new work for improvising live trio plus improvising robots.
  • Percussionist Max Lord will perform on the Marimba Lumina with choreographer Ellen Godena in a work for robot percussion and spontaneous robot-inspired movement

Hope to see you there!

A.I.N.T. it Sweet

Josh Ronsen has launched the Austinnitus Audio Series to showcase artists featured on the Austinnitus list. There are already plenty of good recordings to check out and Josh continues to add more. I’ve especially enjoy hearing documentation of some one-off performances, otherwise lost to the ether, such as A.I.N.T. #4. A.I.N.T. stands for Austinnitus Improv NighT, as good an excuse as any for Josh to create ad-hoc ensembles and let them loose on the world. The fourth (and final?) of this short-lived series featured Sharon Crutcher (vocals), David DeMaris (keyboards, trumpet), Holland Hopson (saxophone, banjo, electronics), Genevieve Walsh (flute), Brandon Young (vocals).

[audio:http://ronsen.org/austinnitus/audio/aint4-1.mp3]
Part 1

[audio:http://ronsen.org/austinnitus/audio/aint4-2.mp3]
Part 2

[audio:http://ronsen.org/austinnitus/audio/aint4-3.mp3]
Part 3

[audio:http://ronsen.org/austinnitus/audio/aint4-4.mp3]
Part 4

[audio:http://ronsen.org/austinnitus/audio/aint4-5.mp3]
Part 5

LEMUR ReSiDeNts for February Announced

I’m pleased to have been chosen for a residency at LEMUR in Brooklyn for the month of February. Other artists-in-residence include Zach Layton and Max Lord. We’ll be presenting our work at the end of the month. Look for more information soon. The official announcement is below.


February ReSiDeNts Announced

We are happy to announce our second group of ReSiDeNts, who will be creating new works at LEMUR in February:

Holland Hopson is a composer, improviser, and electronic artist. Holland will bring Old-Time Appalachia to the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots by creating new pieces for the LEMURbots and Tru One, his clawhammer banjo/sensor interface.

Zach Layton is a composer, improviser, curator and new media artist based in new york with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental music, biomimicry and contemporary architectural practice. His work investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces and kinetic visual patterns. He is planning to create a new work for guitar, sax, drums plus robots. The piece will be composed using an open score format encouraging improvisation among the human players and neural network software to encourage improvisation among the robots.

Max Lord is a percussionist who will be writing a new piece for the LEMUR robots in collaboration with NYC-based choreographer Ellen Godena. The score will integrate a live performance on the Marimba Lumina with robot percussion and spontaneous robot-inspired movement.

Artists from all performing and installation disciplines are encouraged to apply to ReSiDeNt, including musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers, video artists, interactive installation artists, performance artists, multimedia artists and others. To learn about applying to ReSiDeNt, visit http://lemurbots.org/resident.html. Deadlines are rolling, with March submissions accepted until February 18th.

Cotton-Eyed Joe

The Allmusic blog has an appreciation of sorts for the enduring fiddle-tune cotton-eyed joe. Read it here. The article states: “Legend has it that Cotton-Eyed Joe was a pre-Civil War slave musician whose tragic life turned his hair white and was famous for playing a fiddle made from the coffin of his diseased son.” Wow! Never heard that before, but it’s a darn good story. Somehow more plausible to me is the claim that “…Cotton-Eyed Joe isn’t a person at all but the name of a specific non-partner spoke-line dance and that one doesn’t meet Cotton-Eyed Joe, one does the Cotton-Eyed Joe.” In this case, the lines “Where did you come from / where did you go?” could quite literally refer to a dance partner.

Who do I think Cotton-Eyed Joe might have been/might still be?

  • a Joe with unusually white eyes, of course
  • a Joe with starry eyes
  • a Joe who had picked cotton so long that his hands were cut and his eyes were bleary
  • a Joe hardened from a hard-scrabble existence, yet nevertheless has soft, kind eyes

One aspect of the lyrics that I enjoy is the idea that Cotton-Eyed Joe steals your love away. And as in so many old-time tunes, stealing your love could either mean stealing your heart or it could mean stealing the person who you love or, somehow, both. “I’d a been married a long time ago if it hadn’t a been for Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

Grand Time at 21grand

Now that there’s a spiffy poster for my upcoming show at 21grand, I thought it was time for a proper announcement:

21grand
416 25th St. (at Broadway)
Oakland CA

Oakland-based heavy-Americana trio P.A.F. curate an eclectic evening of improv, noise, psych and rock crossing lines and blurring distinctions between your scene and mine.
• Holland Hopson: banjo and electronics
• Improvised trio with local greats Matt Ingalls, Jake Rodriguez and George Cremaschi
• Premier performance of psych master Nehemiah St. Danger‘s latest work
• P.A.F. – original lineup featuring Eric Carlson, Gene V. Baker and Scott Pinkmountain

PAF poster

Cycling 74 announces Max 5

David Zicarelli has posted a preview of Max 5 on cycling74.com. It looks like a significant upgrade in terms of the user interface and usability of the program. I’m looking forward to finding out more as the release date (sometime in the first quarter of 2008) nears. Thanks to Create Digital Music for drawing my attention to this announcement.

Some features that I find interesting:

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