Saturday, June 15th, ISSUE presents the debut NYC collaborative performance from vocalist and composer Jennifer Walshe and San Francisco-based musician Wobbly (Jon Leidecker). The artists perform solo and collaborative works ranging across their shared interest in the idiosyncrasies of digital sound and the outer reaches of online culture. The show harvests artefacts from a wide range of sources including Walshe’s ALL THE MANY PEOPLS, and materials from Wobbly's weekly radio show Over The Edge -- as well as close readings of statements by Silicon Valley VCs, dream diaries, Irish myths generated by neural networks and much more.
Walshe’s set-up centres on her voice and writing, whether live, synthetic or generated by artificial intelligence. Wobbly’s Monitress system attempts to find the idiomatic sound of mobile devices.
Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin and graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition in June 2002. Her chief teachers at Northwestern were Amnon Wolman and Michael Pisaro. In 2000 Jennifer won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. In 2003-2004 Jennifer was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; during 2004-2005 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. From 2006 to 2008 she was the composer-in-residence in South Dublin County for In Context 3. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2008 she was awarded the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur. In 2009 she lived in Venice, Italy as a guest of the Fondazione Claudio Buziol. She is currently Professor at Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart.
Jon Leidecker has pursued the medium of electronic music since the mid 1980's, emphasizing live performance and collaboration. Early works utilized sonic collage & musical appropriation, growing out of a series of appearances on Negativland's live-mix radio program Over The Edge -- improvising with recorded sounds to produce music which inherently resists the act of being recorded. Recent work investigates the history and musical aesthetics implied by the physics of acoustic and electrical feedback, research into the technology and creative workflow required for immersive sound diffusion (including five years of work as a member of the engineering team for Dolby's 3D sound format Atmos), and the use of mobile devices and their built-in microphones as cybernetic improvising partners. In 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona commissioned the podcast 'Variations', a nine hour musicological tour through the history of collage & the practice of 'sampling' through the 20th century -- charting how the definition of composition changed as the site of a 'finished' migrated from written musical notation to the capturable (and increasingly manipulable) sonic recording. Wobbly's live and studio collaborations include work with Negativland, the Thurston Moore Ensemble, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Laetitia Sonami, Matmos, People Like Us, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Tania Chen, Thomas Dimuzio, The Freddy McGuire Show and Sagan. In 2015 he inherited Negativland's long-running Over The Edge radio collage program, broadcasting from Berkeley's KPFA FM.
