Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda return to the Chapel Performance Space after their cancelled 2015 date on the "Ke i te Ki" tour, extended Issue Project Room residency and touring Voices & Echoes festival of 2013. Though of two different generations they share a deep interest in the documenting of sonic environments and the exploration of site-specific happenings. As an early sound-art pioneer in the 1960's, Akio Suzuki on recordings like "Na-Gi" has documented his investigations into the sonic character of select locations and generating responses engaging with their acoustic topography. His ongoing work in field recordings and acoustic observation continues into the present day with the soundwalk project, "Oto-date" translating as "sound-point" in Japanese, in drawing a course through the urban scape, Suzuki defines listening locations in the city and invites audiences to stop and observe carefully at given points on the map. Having created numerous soundwalks at various festival, public garden and gallery settings across the world including the UK's cutting-edge AV Festival, 2015's Borderline Festival in Greece and the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong. It's in these site-specific works that his sonic explorations overlap most-explicitly with that of electronic composer and visual artist Aki Onda. The decades-spanning "Cassette Memories" project and ongoing multiple volume series compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings and travels collected and assembled in live performance by Onda in both indoor and outdoor locations across the world. His extensive touring of the project, building it's body of sonic materials and locations as a essayist work in-action was documented last year by Michael Snow in the pages of Bomb Magazine.
It's been a notable year for electronic composer and Berklee School of Music graduate, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Following the gloriously nuanced night of experimental modular synthesizer work at Kremwerk this past summer, wherein she delved further into the territory mapped out in her critically hailed "Ears", she returns for a second tour at Barboza on the heels of "The Kid". In the course of the last year, Smith's meeting of pop songwriting and explorative analog synthesis were heard in such prestigious settings as David Lynch's Festival of Disruption, the 2016 edition of Moogfest, NTS Live and The Broad's Nonobject(ive): Summer Happenings series in Los Angeles. Working outside of more traditional album and live performance settings, Smith was also selected to soundtrack the “Explore The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks” video series, commissioned by google in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. Her performances of this year have revealed a unexpected polarity. On one end, a newfound penchant for songwriting bearing no small relation to the feminine synthpop's great progenitor, Kate Bush. On the other, pure analog synthesis exploration and sound painting as heard on her collaborative volume, "Sunergy" in the RVNG labe's FRKWYS series. The meeting sees Smith in a setting alongside one of the most notable women in early modular synth exploration, the duo "Making Sounds with Suzanne Ciani, America's First Female Synth Hero". Talking on Don Buchla and his inventions, the San Francisco Tape Music Center and his Memorial Concerts of this past year, Ciani and Smith share not only their memories of the man but also how creations guided their lives, "His Instrument Gave Me Wings: Remembering Synth Inventor Don Buchla".
