We would like to welcome you to the eighth in a series of intimate house concerts hosted by Bill Thompson, Brent Fariss, and Clark Crawford. In this particular series we will be following a format of one installation followed by three solo performances. The solo performances will be performed from the loft above and out of sight of the audience seated below. We have always struggled with the all too common phenomenon of audience members looking at what is being performed at the expense of listening to what is being performed. Through this series we are hoping to refocus our energies back into the act of listening as a primary vehicle of experiencing our surroundings.

We Are Getting Nowhere - William Meadows

Using the Kyma Sound Design system, I created and organized several different environments for processing
live electric guitar and pre-recorded audio. The audio recordings are of John Cage, reading his "Lecture on Nothing" and from other works and interviews. These recordings provide a framework for a structured exploration of processed guitar. Audio clips are randomly selected and vocoded with the guitar, others are manipulated through granulation or extreme time-stretching. The Kyma timeline provides a means for organizing these processes, and it becomes, in effect, the score of the piece. While playing the guitar, I am also controlling several aspects of the processing through the use of numerous foot pedals, switches, and faders. With the exception of the original Cage recordings, everything is being created live the Kyma system.

First Note - First Song Susan Alcorn

Some thoughts on my performance for Saturday, August 16th:

I don't know what I'm going to play tonight, and I won't know until I hear the first note or make the first sound, though at times I think that any note or sound is merely the reflection already played out of that first note that began our universe.

Recently I have been working on an album inspired by music of the Chilean Nueva Cancion, so some of that may come out -- the music of Violeta Parra, Victor Jara, Inti-Illimani, and Illapu; and the musical universe of the Mapuche, the Inca, and the Araucan. I will probably also perform one or two of my own compositions. "Twin Beams" which begins with a B note (for those of you with your harmonicas) is a song I wrote last year for the Chris Cutler Project. "Broken Obelisk" was inspired by a small antiwar vigil which took place in March near Barnett Newman's statue at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

Violeta Parra wrote that the song is a bird without a flight plan who never flies in a straight line. Eschewing mathematics, it soars through the swirls and eddies of moving air. Tonight I will play songs or perhaps pieces of songs with a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.

Blurry the distinction and uneven the border between notes and sound. Music has so much to say and so little time to say it. For this reason, I often feel that music should be more shamanic ritual in nature and less recital for each note is a god or goddess, and they live with others of their kind in the primordial space under the fingers, between the strings and surrounding the twelve notes that humans have delineated. And in this community of countless notes surrounded by sounds and noise, each has a story to tell if it is properly beckoned and if our ears will hear it. This is the nature of music. It is this beauty, the depth and the heart of sound formed from this community of notes and from the original sound that I hope to touch lightly, to bring forth, and to share with you in this time and space tonight.

 
Bonneville - Alex Keller

"At my first performance in Austin I will premiere a new piece called Bonneville. Like several pieces from the last few years, Bonneville works with organic structures created by inorganic sounds."

Alex Keller creates work in different mediums: sound design, experimental sound art, traditional music composition, and performance. His work explores formal ideas of narrative in music and sound, investigates the relationship between an authentic sound event and a recorded one, and uses different experimental production techniques.

Presented by:

ThomFariCraw:
modern music initiative

Dedicated to the creation and presentation of the highest caliber of modern experimental music

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