Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Yasujiro Ozu + Sound Art = Hitokomakura


Rare it is to see a compilation of music dedicated to a director of this cultural and historic significance.
Even more rare that the work on said compilation would not only involve artists with a degree of genuine
familiarity to the directors work, but who understand the aesthetic character and cultural, political and
historical value of the filmmakers oeuvre as well. And possibly most importantly, how to translate those
qualities to corresponding sonic and compositional values (meaning in this case, yes, there is much
delicacy of touch and 'silence' to be had throughout).... So here is a rare thing indeed!:

Link to and/OAR 'Hitokomakura' Site

On "Hitokomakura" and/OAR not only bring together a quality roster of minimalist composers and sound-artists
(mostly working in the electronic field, along with some subtle electro-acoustic work and field recordings)
but also presents the collection with an understanding of Ozu's significance in the canon of cinema in a
manner that compliments his elegance, refined subtlety and deftness of visual touch. Further reaffirmed
by the involvement of Criterion Collection supplying the accompanying visual element, both in the sleeve-art
as well as the corresponding downloadable PDF documents - giving this whole project an even greater stamp
of authenticity.

Man, am I ever surprised and appreciative when these kind of things are 'done right'. Case in point being
this beautifully conceived and executed sonic tribute to Ozu's art . Exceptional in many senses of the word.

From the and/OAR site:

"This release turns its focus upon Yasujiro Ozu's use of "pillow shots" (i.e. short poetic pauses that appear
between the acting segments of his films. The term "pillow shot" was not coined by Ozu himself, but
several years after his passing in the early 1960s by a Japanese journalist who was trying to draw a
comparison of the intermediate scenes to "pillow words" found in traditional Japanese poetry.
This is a double CD release with both CDs featuring audio plus a cross-platform compatible
PDF booklet containing pillow shots (courtesy of Criterion Collection) and liner notes.

Each artist who appears on this release was asked to choose one or more "pillow shots" to use as inspiration
for their pieces. A link to web pages containing a large assortment of pillow shots" was provided, and
accordingly, the pillow shots were reserved on a first come, first served basis. The artists also watched
the films from which the pillow shots came from in order to get a sense of how their chosen pillow shots
were employed by Ozu.

The sound work featured represents a wide range of artistic approaches, but as always with these projects,
the artists were chosen specifically, based on their previous work and on how it might contribute to the
collective whole of each project."

Featured artists include:

ALEJANDRA & AERON
AONO JIKKEN ENSEMBLE
ASUNA
MARC BEHRENS
KEITH BERRY
LAWRENCE ENGLISH
HERIBERT FRIEDL
BERNHARD GUNTER
HACO
JOHN HUDAK
JASON KAHN
HITOSHI KOJO
KOURA
DALE LLOYD
YOSHIO MACHIDA
ROEL MEELKOP
KIYOSHI MIZUTANI
DEAN MOORE (with Michael Shannon)
STEVE RODEN
SAWAKO
MICHAEL SHANNON
STEINBRUCHEL
TAKU SUGIMOTO
SUKORA
TOSHIYA TSUNODA

Text by Doug Cummings (Masters Of Cinema and Filmjourney.org)
and Dale Lloyd (and/OAR).

Thursday, August 16, 2007

The Wire : Adventures in Modern Music - Chicago : Sept 26 - 30


With finding that Seattle will not be hosting another installment of the Wooden Octopus Festival
this year I was motivated to look elsewhere in the country for genre-spanning festivals of more
avant-leaning sounds and came across the annual event hosted by The Wire in Chicago every September:

Link to The Wire 'Events' Site

This years fest is of particular note as its the 25th anniversary of the magazine and features such notables as:
Boris, Michio Kurihara, Burning Star Core, Hair Police and Ulrich Schnauss to name a few.

Being the 15th year anniversary of me becoming a regular reader it inspires a want to attend this year more than
usual and to celebrate 'Adventures in Modern Music' ten years behind those who have been with the mag since
its inception. Now also seems a good time to simply draw attention to The Wire and its (near)-consistent history
of being *the* music magazine in the world with the most diverse and expansive coverage of sounds that don't
easily fit into any one given genre-coding of non-commercial sonic creativity. So, thank you The Wire:

Link to The Wire Magazine Site

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Decibel Electronic Music Festival : Sept 20 - 23


Link to Decibel Electronic Music Festival Site

Ok, so after impressing the sonic-socks off of audiences with acts like Apparat, Thomas Fehlmann, Murcof,
Mokira, Taylor Deupree and Richard Chartier last year Decibel is back with another diverse lineup again in 2007.
Inspired anticiaption for these artists this time around:

Olaf Bender
Biosphere
Pixel
Kangding Ray
Rafael Irisarri

8/27 ADDENDUM:

"Decibel will feature the Seattle debut of "COLORFIELD VARIATIONS" curated by Richard Chartier and featuring
A/V works by Ryoichi Kurokawa, Steve Roden, Tina Frank, Stephan Mathieu, Frank Bretschneider and many more."

http://blog.myspace.com/richardchartier

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2007 DECIBEL FESTIVAL SHOWCASE INFO AND TIMESLOTS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Link to Decibel Showcases

This year, like the previous two sees Decibel expanding their venues beyond just clubspaces and
dancefloors to include the Henry Art Museum, Broadway Performace Hall and Town Hall for this years
ambient showcase, which is co-sponsored by the Seattle International Film Festival.

New Forms Media Art and Electronic Music Fest : Sept 6 - 15 : Vancouver

SKOLTZ_KOLGEN

The westcoast is crazy once again this year with the electronic festivals this late summer/early fall.
Between San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver its proving to be an amazingly active month(s) for the
electronic arts. Check what BC has going on:

Link to New Forms Festival Site

Previous years have featured exceptional meetings of contemporary audio/visual works and performances
by the likes of Tujiko Noriko, Fennesz, Philip Jeck, Francisco Lopez, Tim Hecker, Skoltz_Kolgen, Deadbeat,
Tomas Jirku, Jan Jelinek, Mitchell Akiyama, Otomo Yoshihide and Keith Fullerton Whitman.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

"Colorfield Variations" Exhibit curated by Richard Chartier : Sept 8 - NYC


Genuine dream-bill of audio and visual works curated by Line label-head and digital ultraminimalist
composer Richard Chartier. Any degree of geographic proximity to NYC would make this a must!
Frustratingly, this is the very same week I'm to be in San Francisco for the SFEMF, as this exhibit and series
of performances seemingly outshines anything else happening on the westcoast in the early weeks of sept.

Link to Issue Project Room site

Saturday, September 8th
COLORFIELD VARIATIONS
curated by: Richard Chartier (www.3particles.com)

This program, curated by renowned sound artist Richard Chartier, is a collection of audio/visual works reinterpreting the Color Field movement by an international array of critically acclaimed sound and new media artists including: Frank Bretschneider, Alan Callander, Chris Carter + Cosey Fanni Tutti (Chris&Cosey/Throbbing Gristle), Sue Costabile, Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand, Mark Fell (SND/Blir) + Ernest Edmonds, Tina Frank + General Magic, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Stephan Mathieu, Steve Roden, and Bas Van Koolwijk. Colorfield Variation includes new works especially created for this program.

Color Field painting, an abstract style that emerged in the 1950s following Abstract Expressionism, is characterized by canvases painted primarily with stripes, washes and fields of solid color. The first serious and critically acclaimed art movement to originate in the nation's capital, Washington Color School was central to the larger Color Field movement. As a reaction to the emotional energy and gestural surface of Abstract Expressionists, the Color Field artists and members of The Washington Color School turned away from the individual mark in favor of color itself becoming the content of the work. Breaking painting down to the fundamental formal elements, the Color Field artists created pure simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields on a large monumental scale.

During the early sixties, Color Field painting was the term used to describe younger artists whose work were related to second generation abstract expressionism yet clearly pointed toward a new direction in American painting. Artists such as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Leon Berkowitz, Frank Stella and others eliminated recognizable imagery from their canvas and presented abstraction as an end in itself with each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image.

This program in its original form was created for Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran (www.wpac.org) as part of the city wide Colorfield Remix events which took place in April-June 2007 in Washington, DC.

AUDIO/VIDEO SCREENING program:

STEVE RODEN (US)
“dark over light earth” / 13:00 / 2007
www.inbetweennoise.com

ALAN CALLANDER (US)
“CF01” / 5:00 / 2007
www.visionload.com

FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER (DE)
“looping i-vi (excerpt)” / 12:00 / 2004-5
www.frankbretschneider.de

STEPHAN MATHIEU (DE)
“Orange was the color of her dress” / 10:00 / 2007
www.bitstream.de

SUE COSTABILE (US) + BEEQUEEN (NL)
“AMP_SWELL” / 3:49 / 2005
www.sue-c.net / www.beequeen.nl

TINA FRANK + GENERAL MAGIC (AT)
“Chronomops” / 2:00 / 2006
www.frank.at

BAS VAN KOOLWIJK (NL)
“FDBCK/AV - Silver” / 3:29 / 2007
www.umatic.nl

CHRIS CARTER + COSEY FANNI TUTTI (UK)
“Chronomanic Redux” / 10:00 / 2007
www.cartertutti.com

RYOICHI KUROKAWA (JP)
“Scorch” / 3:04 / 2005
www.ryoichikurokawa.com

EVELINA DOMNITCH + DMITRY GELFAND (RU/US)
“Ten Thousand Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid” / 8:00 / 2007
www.portablepalace.com

ERNEST EDMONDS (AU) + MARK FELL (UK)
“Broadway One”(excerpt) / 2:00 / 2004-5
www.markfell.com / www.ernestedmonds.com

LIVE PERFORMANCE:
SAWAKO (JP/NY) (20:00)
www.troncolon.com

LIVE PERFORMANCE:
"SPECIFICATION.FIFTEEN" (40:00)

RICHARD CHARTIER + TAYLOR DEUPREE
www.12k.com
www.3particles.com

For this collaboration, sound artists Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree were invited by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, to create a new live work inspired by the Seascapes series of renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition. The result is this live recording, Specification.Fifteen. This work premiered on March 30, 2006 in front of the curved panoramic window of the Museum’s Lerner Room as the sun set across the city’s skyline. Specification.Fifteen evokes the stillness and opposing yet related spaces of Sugimoto1s Seascapes, which suggest infinitesimal change and variation under a seemingly uniform surface.

A second performance for Transmediale.07 at the Akademie der Kuenste [Berlin, Germany], where the work was also exhibited and awarded one of five Honorable Mentions from the Jury. For this live performance a new video work was created utilizing the 13 Sugimoto Seascape images which had been present in the Hirshhorn exhibit. Over 45 minutes the perfectly aligned still images transition and dissolve between and over each other in an often barely noticeable 3 minute hazy and hallucinatory shift.

“Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.” - Hiroshi Sugimoto

Sunday, August 12, 2007

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival : Sept 5 - 9


Link to SF Electronic Music Festival Site

This years San Francisco Electronic Music Festival looks to be another diverse bill of early(ish) composers and some
more modern folks.From hardware and tubes, to synths to laptop composition. Some of the names in this years fest:

Annea Lockwood
Murcof
Tim Hecker
David Behrmann

...with more to be announced.

Unfortunately this year doesn't coincide with other significant sonic events taking place in the Bay Area, as last year the
diverse and adventurous Bleeding Edge Festival was within the same week as well as events at Recombinant Media Lab (Ryoji Ikeda, Skoltz_Kolgen). Nonetheless, I am going, going, going.

Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" + "Creature from the Black Lagoon" - Cinema in the Park


Things one doesn't expect to see in public parks, showing on large projection screens out under the stars, for free. Much less on the same night:

Wong Kar- Wai's masterful and gorgeous cinematic ode to times long-past in Hong Kong (and contestably one of the most visually poetic films ever made in the history of cinema) "In the Mood for Love" showing in the International District's Hing Hay Park. With the audience consisting of a significantly larger-percentage-than-not of asian teenagers (like 90%??).
Ongoing film series through August, with a evident asian-culture focus:

Link to Hing Hay Park infos

Later that same night in a different locale the 3-D print of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" showing at Capitol Hill's Cal Anderson park as a late-night movie, again on a large screen out-of-doors. Cal Anderson has been such an excellent addition to Capitol Hill since its opening in Fall of 2005. Especially in summer, with the open landscape allowing for much visible expanse of sky and shade under the trees. It should be pointed out, that the ongoing film and jazz series at the park through the summer is in fact *not* just all of a 'lowest common denominator' nature:

Link to Cal Anderson Park infos

With both of these bracketing the showing of "To the Stars by Hard Ways" in the Russian Sci-Fi series currently at the Northwest Film Forum (written about here previously) it made for the makings of a kaleidoscopic and darn-near thematically confounding night of cinema both inside and out.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Rafael Irisarri, Tyler Potts : Seattle JewelBox Theatre - 8/5

RAI

Link to Rafael Irisarri on Miasmah Label Site

Night of Ambient Pop-Concrete music from these local denizens. Don't let the 'local' part throw you.
They all produce Ambient-Concrete of a international calibre. Think the 'Type' or 'Miasmah' labels for reference.
Since this appeared in the Seattle Weekly, I'm assuming its now 'open to the public' rather than the 'invite only'
status the show was previous. Short notice, but if you're free tonight, this' gonna be a good one!

From Seattle Weekly:

Rafael Anton Irisarri, Tyler Potts, Denshion
Slow Music By RACHEL SHIMP

"Tonight’s triple-threat ambient showcase with Irisarri, Tyler Potts, and Denshion will swap a minimal amount of patience
for maximum atmospheric pleasure. Each composer utilizes piano tones and other acoustic instruments in a unique way,
and while they all drift and meander, none make the misstep of flat-lining. Frequent show-goer Irisarri is on the other side
of the stage tonight with a laptop, effects units, and a guitar to debut work from his Miasmah full-length, Daydreaming,
before heading on tour. Daydreaming evokes the naturalist, orchestral ambience of Germany’s Marsen Jules, as well as old masters like Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie (with whom Denshion has worked). At times it feels elegantly weathered, like something nice that’s been left outside and gently battered by the elements. “If the piano sounded more defined, shiny and polished, the record would have lost its fragile, almost broken sound quality,” says Irisarri, who cites Mahler as a favorite. “I love the way he arranged a motif to repeat for several measures, only to be taken away when you were enjoying it the most. It’s like experiencing something good, love for instance, only to be separated from it—just like real life.”

JewelBox/Rendezvous 2322 Second Ave., 441-5823 , http://www.jewelboxtheater.com. , No Cover! Sun., August 5, 7:00pm