demo for as yet untitled project
with Sar Friedman (concept, voice, harmonies & arrangement)
Olivia Chaney, Harmonium, Voice, http://www.myspace.com/oliviachaney/music
Serafina Steer: Harp, Voice www.serafinasteer.com
Joe: Guitar
Cecil Cuthbertson: Oboe
J Milo Taylor: baritone guitar, treatments, engineer, co-producer
Audrey Chen (cello/voice/electronics)
Werner Moebius (electronics)
J Milo Taylor (electronics/electric baritone guitar)
Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician and performance artist born outside of Chicago in 1976. Using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work focuses on the combination and layering of traditional and extended techniques. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is often extremely personal and visceral. Her performance work incorporates sound, movement and visual/sculptural concepts. Chen performs solo and in collaboration with a wide number of musicians and dancers. Among musicians, she has worked with many great artists, including Phil Minton, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jim Pugliese, Alessandro Bosetti, Mike Cooper, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, and Gianni Gebbia. Some current projects include: duos with Phil Minton, Frederic Blondy, Robert van Heumen, Katt Hernandez, Nate Wooley, a new trio project with Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh, 3AandE: with Seamus Cater, Robert van Heumen and Nate Wooley and Trockeneis: with Andy Hayleck, Dan Breen, Catherine Pancake and Paul Neidhardt. Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD USA where she is member of the Red room and High Zero Collective, an on-going series and international festival devoted to experimental improvised music.
Werner Moebius works with sounds, beats and files in the context of audio culture, sonic and intermedia art in between conceptualisms,contemporary music, electroacoustic improvisation and electronica. He uses the plasticity of sound to set up dialogues with other media and music methodologies. From abstract sound material he creates a unique mix of styles ranging from minimalistic soundscapes to weird instrumental poppy tunes. Generating sounds is taken as a basis to develop complex compositions as well as audiovisual and transitive concepts in collaborations with artists of differing media.
Works, performances and collaborations with many artists including Fennesz, Christoph Kurzmann, Gelatin, F.M.Einheit, David Moss, Jason Khan, N.U.Unruh, Hans Joachim Roedelius, Billy Roisz, Cornelie Müller, Alexeij Sagerer, Hanno Leichtmann, Johannes Strobl, Stephan Mathieu, Rudi Mahall, Didi Bruckmayer, Alexander de Goederen, Oliver Hangl, Ulli Koscher, Heidrun Holzfeind, Paul Divjak, Georg Wagenhuber, Christoph Hinterhuber, Machfeld, Gernot W. Koza, Frenk Lebel, Hans Falb, Stefan Parnreiter, Renèe Stieger, Phillip Quehenberger, Marco Eneidi, Hermann Stangassinger, Hannes Schweiger, Wilbert de Joode, DD Kern, Lee Patterson, Gene Coleman, Todd Carter , Mariella Greil.
Worktype: Multimedia Performance
Location: Serpentine Gallery, London
The Sound Moneyfesto was launched by Lee Scrivner at the Manifesto Marathon 2008 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The mp3 above is his demo of one of four compositions performed by the ensemble.
It used music, satire, and word play to comment on the 2008 banking crisis (specifically the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and the idea of sound money.
The Sound Moneyfesto was launched in concert with manifestos from Marina Abramovic, Brian Eno, Gilbert & George, Yoko Ono and Vivienne Westwood.
Year: 2008-2010
Location: London, Vienna, Edinburgh
Worktype: Improvisation Duo
Info: Collaboration with William Huckerby
http://www.myspace.com/notanum6er
Lead Belly was born in Louisiana somewhere around 1888. Living the often violent life of an itinerate musician he found himself twice imprisoned for murder. In 1933 his reputation reached the Lomax family, who, after no small personal tragedy of their own, were traveling the Southern states, recording American work songs, ballads and blues in prisons, penitentiaries, and brothels. Moving around the country in their Ford sedan, John, and his sons John Jr. and Alan, set about recording such artists as Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton. They came across Lead Belly in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and with their state-of-the-art acetate disc recorder they cut several sides together over the next few months. They soon parted ways; Lead Belly to a fifteen year career as a solo artist, and the Lomax’s continuing their collection of folk musics for the archives of the Library of Congress, and the Works Progress Administration. Despite the difficult relationship between the academic Lomax’s and the hard-living blues artist, it is through this short-lived collaboration that Lead Belly’s work reached a wider audience, of which I count myself a part. My father, following a period of time working in the Caribbean after leaving school in 1964, had become interested in what was still at that time called ‘negro music’. A Presto vinyl record (PRE 689, 1965) containing a selection of Lead Belly’s early Lomax recordings, is one of the earliest artifacts of any kind that I remember from my childhood. For this project, I was interested in engaging with a populist folk tradition, in the hope such a strategy would enable me to think about electroacoustic composition in a new way. The sound material selected, was by necessity, lo-fidelity (A short promotional film made by Lomax and Lead Belly, found on YouTube). The surface noise in the piece, the glitches, and crackles, are inherent to the source material, and are intended to reference the sounds of old blues records, and to address issues of the value of distribution of heavily compressed audio on the internet, thought of here, as a repository of cultural memory. The piece was entirely constructed from Lead Belly’s voice and signature 12-string guitar.
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Occasional Solo Outings | Solo Expanded Guitar | Acoustic | Electric | Electronic |
| Heroes | Antiheros | Zeros |
john fahey, robert johnson, christian fennesz, godspeed you black emporer, animal collective, ry cooder , woody guthrie, leadbelly, richard thompson, nick drake, skip spence, 6 organs of admittance, sunburned hand of the man, boris, sunn o)), pauline oliveros, hidegarde westekamp, halim el dabh, nas al ghiwane, yellow swans, lee ranaldo, glenn branca, django reinhardt, scott joplin, sir richard bishop, james blackshaw, bert jansch, tom rush, karen dalton, explosions in the sky, lemchaheb, jil jilala, low, modest mouse, blind lemon jefferson, mississippi john hurt, buster keaton, brothers quay, david lynch, jan svankmier, lumiere brothers, henry miller, ben okri, marquis de sade
Some Past Gigs
August 8th 2007 @ Songbird, Visions Bar, Dalston
August 18th 2007 @ Plac.Art.X, Regensburg, Germany
February 22nd 2008 @ Scaledown, Soho, London
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7000dhs (2006) Step 1 Export
7000dhs (2006) Flute ou Chien
7000dhs (2006) Le vegetable le moins cher
Year: 2005-2006
Location : Morocco
Worktype : Laptop Improvisation Group
Materials: Tape Machine, PureData, Electric Guitar, MaxMSP, Ableton, FX, Field Recordings
Info : Laptop Performances, Tour of Morocco
7000dhs (2006) Ritual
7000dhs (2006) Le vrai gnaui blues
7000dhs (2006) Taforalght 1
7000dhs (2006) Taforalght 2
Work Details
For the summer months of 2005 and 2006 I took part in a number of interdisciplinary art festivals in Morocco. These recordings, made in Marrakech, are examples of context-responsive electro-acoustic improvisations made by an ensemble of 4 players assembled for the project. A strategy based upon genetic algorithms, that is to say, a collaborative process of selection and modification of sounds was developed, prior to performance, in order to create cohesion and a group identity in, at times, quite difficult circumstances.
7000dhs (2006) Marrakash
7000dhs (2006) D’hadra
7000dhs (2006) Tous les Portes sont fermees
Genetic Algorithms: Rules of Evolution
1 each directory represents the gene pool for that 15 min section of performance. contribute as many specimens as you see fit (15 max?) =a lot of genetic material to become familiar with
naming conventions: ritual001-01.wav
means ritual sound file 001 – first generation
after a generation of evolution it would become
ritual001-02.wav
a further evolutionary step would result in
ritual001-03.wav
and so on
ritual001-04.wav
ritual001-05.wav
….
3 it would be interesting for each dna strand (sound file) to go thru a minimum of 4 steps
i.e to pass thru each of the ‘fitness selectors’ following the original entry into the gene pool.
adam
cate
ed
joel
milo
4 process
once you have downloaded the all the material, have a listen and assess the sample’s fitness for selection or rejection.
material selected is to be subjected to one of two processess
genetic splicing – dna from two selected samples is exchanged
mutation – dna is subjected to audio processing, and mutated into the next generation
nb/ neither of these processes should be applied to the entire strand, only sections of the strand may be processed, leaving some of the previous generation’s dna intact.
upload the next generation, with their new tag – e.g ritual001-01.wav, after modification, will be renamed, ritual001-02.wav
kill the parents (we should leave the originals online, but they are now unfit, and should be rejected)
by the end of this first stage of the process we should end up with a number of files:
ritualxxx-05.wav
ritualxxx-05.wav
ritualxxx-05.wav
ritualxxx-05.wav
ritualxxx-05.wav
ritualxxx-05.wav
ritualxxx-05.wav
these will serve as our genetic base for the improvisations in marrakesh