.

Sonic Residues - December 21, 1997

Concert 1

12:00 Noon


Trish Anderson

On Ice 1

9:00

Melb

Trish Anderson delivers a palette of eccentric sonic theatre. In this, a snippet of the recent On Ice show, she joined forces with the 'third eye', Caitlin Newton-Broad, engineer/musician Fran Power and video manipulator and musician Gary McKie.

on ice stretches the boundaries from heart to the computer, glimpse the creative process inside the ice palace....freezes........snap, the kill......chill.

Sampler and interactive computer software and live video mixing combine with voice and body to create a theatrical experience rarely seen in these pragmatic years.

 

Bruce Bennett

Textures 1 Morning

3:30 6:20

USA

The two pieces for tape, Textures II and Mourning, are from a larger collection of tape pieces titled Music for Theatre. These pieces were commissioned by Marc Sabin for the premier performance of his script, Perfectly Frank, in San Francisco in 1992.

Textures II is a reminiscence of Textures I -- a distorted memory or residue of what came before. The process of proceeding from a single quiet tone to a complex and distorted spectrum reveals the possibilities of vast musical or sonic world contained within a single tone.

Mourning is a forlorn, wailing soundscape bespeaking loss and despair. Both pieces were realised at the E. L. Wiegand Electronic Composition Studio in San Francisco in the spring of 1992. Many thanks to Don Buchla for the wonderful synthesiser.

 

Ros Bandt

Are You Really There?

12:00

Melb

Are you really there? journeys between virtual communities and obsolete technology: an investigation of the actual, the useable, the used, the discarded, the hoped for and the future. A superseded imagewriter printer is turned into a bowed cello, while the sounds of a 1920 underwood typewriter become the vehicle of communication in a letter to my deceased mother. The voice is morphed from man to woman from here to there, through real and fictitious worlds. Are we real? What is real? will we be real in the future? Is this really a piece? The perception of consciousness is being disoriented in the same way that sounds themselves become references only to those who are familiar with them.

Credits and location recordings:

 

Eirik Lie

112 Par Sko

6:30

Norway

112 Par Sko (112 Pair's of Shoes), 1993. This piece was written to commemorate the centenary of one of the worst natural disasters in Norway's history, the landslide in Verdal in 1893, that claimed the lives of 112 people. The piece is quite programmatic, with simulations of the deep rumble just before the slide, the terror screams of the victims (some of which actually sailed along several kilometres on the slide on the remains of their houses before they drowned in the mud), and finally a requiem. The music was part of an installation consisting of lights, smoke, and a large-scale model of the landslide site, complete with mud, moving houses, and sculptures of people crying for help. The installation was visited by approximately 30,000 people over a four-month period. The piece is played by Eirik Lie on a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. It was recorded solo in one take without overdubs.

This piece, and more music by Eirik Lie can be found on his solo CD "12 Bilder", available directly from the composer: Eirik Lie, Bjornerabben 9, N-0383 Oslo, Norway

Email: eirikli@notam.uio.no

 

Sarah Peebles

Nocturnal Premonitions

2:15

Canada

This piece was created using a Macintosh IIfx computer with Sample Cell I, Audio Media, andSound Designer software in 1994. Volume levels and sample groups were controlled within the Sample Cell programme, and sounds were triggered via Kawai MDK-61 MIDI keyboard. Soundmaterials were derived from samples recorded and /or "sculpted" by the composer: Lake Ontario, small prayer bells (Japanese), "higurashi semi" dusk cicaeda and frogs of Japan, the shakuhachi of Helen Dryz, and tabla (from Sample Cell-Prosonus CD-ROM). This predetermined composition was performed and recorded in real-time, without editing.

 

Sarah Peebles

The Curse of the Border Vacuums (1995)

8:00

Canada

part I: Radio Neighbourhood (00:00 - 5:17) part II: Senore Marconi (5:17 - 8:00)

This "music" is a real-time creation, using no multi-tracking or editing, and it's title, The Curse of Border Vacuums , is borrowed from the book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" , by Jane Jacobs (Vintage Books - Random House, 1961). It refers to the urban landscape surrounding the composer's studio, Studio Excelo, with its distinctive neighbour, the Eton House Tavern, and other charming features (sounds which make up the composition are not intended to be programmatic).

 

Douglas Doherty

On the Toon in the Toon on the Tyne

3:00

UK

" Gannin oot on the toon on the toon" is what many Geordie lads and lasses do every weekend. Literally translated this means "Going out to have a good time with friends in Newcastle". This is where you find, in the opinion of many eminent and qualified judges, the most consistently beautiful girls in the UK and so say some, in the world. I do not exaggerate, and would certainly not consider myself to be in a position to do anything other than report expert assessment. The other factor that stands out in the minds of many is their constancy of dress. Be it weather in which you might stub your toes on cannon balls fallen from brass trays of a sultry heat-wave, the code is the same: very little. Geordie lasses trekking through snowdrifts clad only in tiny shoes and dresses that have shrunk in the wash (surely no one would buy a dress that small ?) are a common sight. The male population also has more than its fair share of the body beautiful and bountiful, though it does tend to wear rather more clothes.

After a day out shopping or "doon the coast", often with their "mam" for the lasses and "the lads" for the lads, the evening usually begins with a trip on the Metro, probably the safest and certainly the cleanest such transport system I've ever used, leading to a rowdy disembarkation at Earl Grey's Monument (though tea is not on many people's mind). Here the revellers may proceed immediately to their favourite pub or club to meet other friends. In the way they may take in the persistent preacher keen to save their souls. Whatever they do, laughter is an important feature of their activity and of course for the many Catholics the next day is indeed when they will themselves "Praise the Lord".

 

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