People Like Us presents “Genre Collage” + Aki Onda
Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘Do or DIY’ on WFMU has had over three quarters of a million hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set to live guitar improvisation. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Shelley Hirsch.
Kenneth Goldsmith sings Roland Barthes with live String Quartet
A live String Quartet (Mari Kimura, Dana Lyn, violins; Jessica Pavone, viola; Egil Rostad, cello) will perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and improvisations in the style of Anton Webern while Kenneth Goldsmith sings text by Roland Barthes.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship at Princeton University for 2010. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Climax Golden Twins with Sublime Frequencies Film Screening
MY FRIEND RAIN
Sublime Frequencies, 2007.
(36 minutes)
Filmed on various trips through Southeast Asia by Robert Millis and Alan Bishop from 2002 to 2007, My Friend Rain is an impressionistic collage of musical segments and tropical ambiance. Decay and rebirth through the endless Asian monsoon cycle. Locations include: Myanmar (Burma), Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Indonesia.
INDIA AT 78rpm
Excerpt from a work in progress, 2009
(19 minutes)
An excerpt from a project about 78rpm records and the intersection of folk and classical musical traditions in India. Mostly filmed in 2008 in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, including processions, street musicians and an interview with a slightly nutty Indian 78 collector.
PHI TA KHON: GHOSTS OF ISAN
Sublime Frequencies, 2006
(47 minutes)
Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan documents a traditional Buddhist “ghost festival” held yearly in Thailand’s Isan province that features beautiful handmade masks, outrageous wooden phalluses, ceremony, ritual, dancing, and endless live Thai mo lam music. The film has almost no narration (some titles set the scene and provide a little background), the idea being to create a sense of trance and to throw the viewer into the middle of the celebrations to just enjoy the colors and sounds. Music is what led me to explore this festival and sound is one of its key elements: there were live bands, bells, loudspeakers and boom boxes co-mingling all over town, creating an amazing soundscape. The live bands progressed from traditional acoustic ensembles to overlapping electrified bands with hybrid Western instrumentation and back again. Phi Ta Khon appears at once to be deviant and holy, pagan and Buddhist, Thai and Lao; it is full of incongruent characters and situations. But the Thai are master assimilators: everything falls into place and works together for the participants, coming back to Buddhist merit-making for future lives and for a good harvest and monsoon season, while living in the moment with family and friends. This is a 45 minute edit of Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan. The DVD is 75 minutes but in reality there is no way to accurately present the full 3 day festival in all its ridiculous, drunken glory.
Intermission ambiance provided by DJ Victrola Favorites, playing scratchy old and mysterious music from the early days of recording, as well as field recordings and music from Asia and beyond.
Climax Golden Twins is a Seattle, WA based experimental collage outfit originally consisting of Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor, then picking up Scott Colburn in 1996. The group’s earliest material was recorded in 1993 but wasn’t released until their 1996 album Imperial Household Orchestra. In 1994 they started Fire Breathing Turtle to distribute their work along with audio exotica, especially their ongoing “Victrola Favorites,” complations of rare 78s from around the world. With numerous tapes, CDRs, mini-CDs, singles, side and solo projects, audiophile records and other aural collectables, being a CGT fan is no simple, or inexpensive, task.
Early CGT albums Climax Golden Hiss (1995) and Imperial Houshold Orchestra (1996) offer a glimpse into their unique world of lo-fi collage — organic, acoustic instruments mix with found sounds, electronics, and clips of sampled exotica. Their fascination with bygone days of phonography begins here, and their quirky sense of humor is already present as well. Locations (1998) focuses on voice and found sound. Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds (Anomalous, 2000), is a studio album that returns to their earlier formula with random noise-punk interludes, dreamy scapes and acoustics mixed with field recordings.
Also in 2000 was the album known as “TheRock Album” (Fire Breathing Turtle), a critically acclaimed tongue and cheek foray into the rock mindset, with a nod to prog rock and the math rockers who loved it.
Session 9 arrived in 2001 and is one of CGT’s many music for film projects, a weird, haunted mix of non-objective soundscaping. Lovely (Anomalous, 2002) reworked older material. Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered appeared in 2004 and contains a collection of samples from eerie 78s, found speech, excellent Godspeed You Black Emperor style apocalyptic post-rock and shimmery guitar tracks. Member Rob Millis put out Leaf Music Drunks Distant Drums – Recordings from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar also in 2004. Scott Colburn owns and engineers at Seattle’s Gravelvoice Studios and Jeffery Taylor owns and runs Seattle’s Wall of Sound record store. The band shares a special kinship with one of the city’s most famous cult bands — The Sun City Girls and have worked since their inception to support the American experimental music underground.
Share – featured guest Carolyn Teo
what is share?
SHARE is first and foremost a platform to explore expression, in a variety of artforms. Through its weekly open jam sessions, SHARE.nyc engages its participants and spectators in a continually changing dialog on art and culture. As such, SHARE represents an ongoing exploration of collaborative performance as cultural exchange. It mines the relationship of artistic practice to cultural identity, remapping a multiplicity of cultural discourses. The act of creating artistic content in a multicultural collaborative context is a fascinating and natural extension of the SHARE concept.
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday in New York City at the Issue Project Room (through December), from 8 to Midnight.
open jams and walk-in sets
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join
8pm, free —
Tonight’s featured guest:
Carolyn Teo is an artist from Sydney, Australia, who works across media in photography, video, sound, textiles, performance and d.i.y electronics.
Carolyn graduated from Sydney College of the Arts, after having done a stint in Canada as an exchange student at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. It was here that she discovered her love for sound and electronics, which further developed her character Wun Thong. Carolyn is currently living in Montréal, involving herself in the arts community there by collaborating and performing with local artists.
Using elements of chance and improvisation, Wun Thong hypnotizes his audience with his visual aesthetic, mystical balls and exotic birdcalls.
So who is Wun Thong? Where did he come from this archetypal old Chinese man, mixed between cultures (and perhaps genders)?
Wun Thong literally plays his laptop, mixing in sounds from the Australian bush, found objects and electronics, taking us on a haunting yet whimsical journey through sound.
http://www.carolynteo.com
http://www.carolynteo.com/?cat=25
Share @ Issue Project Room
The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
http://www.share.dj/share/event_info.php?eventID=579
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
WFMU Free Music Archive and ISSUE Project Room
We’re pretty excited to be working with WFMU on their new and fantastic Free Music Archive to put up some selected excerpts of performances going on here.
The Free Music Archive is a social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio. Fellow curators include radio stations like KEXP (Seattle) and KBOO (Portland OR), webcasters like DUBLAB (Los Angeles) and Halas Radio (Israel), netlabels (Comfort Stand), and amazing online collectives like CASH Music.
check it out here:
