Liquid Music Artist in Virtual Residence: Jace Clayton

Liquid Music welcomes back Manhattan based composer, DJ, and writer Jace Clayton, also known as DJ/rupture, as our 2017.18 Artist in Virtual Residence. Described by The Wire as a “pan-global, post-everything superhero,” Jace is currently working with Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy (another LM Artist in Virtual Residence) on a commissioned project that will premiere here February 2019. In this blog post, Jace reflects on his creative process alongside Ashwini and the different ways in which they have slowly connected both as people and as artists in their shared journey. 

Jace Clayton by Max Lakner

Blog Entry #2
By Jace Clayton

One of the most important aspects of working as an artist is being honest about deadlines. How much you can get done, how long it takes, when you can deliver, and when things require extra time to develop. This is my way of saying: this blog post is long overdue!

Seriously though, one of the exciting things about embarking on this collaborative creation process with Ashwini is having the time to slowly feel things out and let the ideas and brainstorm arrive at their own pace. Particularly for the performing arts – which are most often experienced as an event that happens over the course of an hour or two – all the days, months, and yes, sometimes years of preparation are ‘invisible’. The idea of a rehearsal is clear-cut: a bunch of people in the same room who have already decided, more or less, what the project is and how best to execute it. At the rehearsal they put that into practice – re-doing the tricky parts, recording it to watch or listen to later, giving trusted colleagues an early look. All in the service of making the final performance as strong as it can be.

Jace Clayton by Erez Avissar

But what Ashwini and I are doing these months is the thing that happens before the rehearsal. It’s the open-ended process of listening, sharing ideas, chatting about art or simply life – Ashwini’s post showed some of all this in action. On top of those critical things, there is also the need to let things sink in. Unhurried, unorganized time, where impulses can grow, unrushed, into ideas. Where subconscious hints and suggestions can slowly gain force to become full-fledged ideas. This rich time of waiting is hard to discuss, much less document. So here I am writing about it.

Ashwini Ramaswamy by Ed Bock

What’s next?

This March I was able to invite Ashwini and a friend of hers, Rajna Swaminathan, down to North Carolina. We’re working on a different project, but this is doubly useful insofar as it gives us an opportunity to get in the studio together and simply get accustomed to how each of us work – knowledge that will help the Liquid Music collaboration.

I’m spending the year in North Carolina as the Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor, a yearlong position split between Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It functions more like a visiting artist position than a regular teaching job; I’m working on several creative performance-based projects and bringing in students and faculty from each university to join me in the process. 

One of these projects involves the creation of digital music-making tools inspired by non-western ideas of sound. Working alongside the students we decided to build some tools engaging with Indian conceptions of rhythm. The town of Cary, North Carolina has an active Indian classical music community, and slowly my student team and I decided that we would focus on the two-headed drum called the mridangam. When I mentioned the project specifics to Ashwini I was delighted to learn that she has collaborated with an incredible mridangam player – and that Ashwini’s dance form is intimately tied to percussion. From there it soon became obvious that we could brainstorm and refine our digital tools working with Rajna and Ashwini, and in turn open up that process to a kind of public rehearsal this spring. And maybe, just maybe, the tools I’m developing down in North Carolina will be used in whatever Ashwini and I cook up.

Jace Clayton by Max Lakner

The more honest a collaboration is, the more open you have to be to let it go in any direction. And to work as an artist is, partially, to be open to unusual and unlikely alliances. Inspiration can come from almost any direction.

DJ Rupture brings you a new mix CHANGE THE MOOD! 22 minutes of hottness. **** direct download link: http://is.gd/rupt17 ***** if u want tracklist, come find Rupture at Dutty Artz's CHANGE THE MOOD! party this Friday Aug. 17, 2012, at Glasslands in Brooklyn. info: http://www.negrophonic.com/2012/change-the-mood-august-17th-glasslands-bklyn/ Dutty Artz presents CHANGE THE MOOD! a fundraiser party for Beyond The Block. Fri. August 17th at Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 11pm. $10 Hosted by Pupa Bajah and Jasmin Cruz NYC debut of Chants (live from Madison, WI) DJ Ushka vs. a Rhino Chief Boima vs. a Robot DJ Rupture vs. an Elephant Taliesin vs. a Vampire Geko Jones vs. a Chicken-Stealing Fox Atropolis vs. the Euro visuals by Rainstick | Rupture’s birthday | silent auction fundraiser

Keep up with Liquid Music Artists in Virtual Residence Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton through journal entries and updates on the LM blog:
 Artist in Virtual Residence: Ashwini Ramaswamy
Artist in Virtual Residence: Jace Clayton/DJ Rupture
Liquid Music Connects: Students Visit "Virtually" With Artists In Residence Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton AKA DJ Rupture

Follow Ashwini Ramaswamy:
Website: http://www.ashwini-ramaswamy.com/
Instagram: @ashwiniramaswamy (instagram.com/ashwiniramaswamy/)
Facebook: facebook.com/ashwini.ramaswamy

Follow Jace Clayton:
Website: jaceclayton.com
Instagram: @djrupture (instagram.com/djrupture)
Facebook: facebook.com/DjRupture/
Twitter: @djrupture (twitter.com/djrupture)

Follow Liquid Music for Updates and Announcements: 
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries) 
Facebook: facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic

Interview: Brian Harnetty on "Shawnee Ohio" with Mark Mazullo

Liquid Music welcomes composer, sound artist, and writer Brian Harnetty to perform his composition Shawnee, Ohio on March 20th at Macalester College's Mairs Hall. In this blog post, Macalester Professor of Music History Mark Mazullo interviews Harnetty, finding the insight and inspiration behind the project that Compass Magazine says "fits into a practice considered ‘sonic ethnography,’ the study of culture, people and place through sound.”

MM: Your piece, "Shawnee, Ohio," is about place, in both a geographical sense and a human sense. You have a family connection to this small town, and in your many visits there, you have been impressed with the way its residents, "bound together by a common heritage of booms and busts," have persevered and held each other up by keeping the town alive. There are many ways to tell this story. How does music, specifically, allow us to gain unique insight into it? Why is this a musical story?

West Main Street circa 1909. Photo courtesy of Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive.

BH: I think an important reason is that music has been of great significance to people from this region: labor songs, ballads, old timey and country music, high school orchestras, records, and radio. The more research I did, the more examples I found of music being made and listened to, and I wanted to reflect this in the project. Although the region doesn’t have the same fame and recorded documentation as Kentucky, for example, there is a distinct character to the recordings from Ohio, which you can hear in archives such as the Anne Grimes Collection in the Library of Congress. More personally, “Shawnee, Ohio” is also about my grandfather who grew up there at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the music he played and heard when he was young.

Over the past seven years, I’ve been visiting Shawnee and nearby towns, asking myself again and again: “What do these places sound like?” and “What stories do these sounds tell?” I’ve been focusing on my ears as much as my eyes or other senses. The more I listened, the more stories jumped out at me from local residents and the forest itself. And, when I began working with archival recordings, there was singing right alongside storytelling. They are fused together, where the singing tells a story, and the talking becomes musical. When I hear residents talking, their speech becomes a kind of singing; I hear melody and rhythm, inflection and character – the grain of their voices –and setting music to go with them feels just like making songs.

There’s an old folk tradition of passing down a familiar melody and switching out the words to fit local places and current events. Murder ballads are a great example. In fact there are two nineteenth century murder ballads in “Shawnee, Ohio,” telling gruesome stories from Gore, an appropriately named nearby town. It was a great way to pass along the news! I am tapping into this tradition throughout “Shawnee,” whether people are singing or speaking. The past mixes in with the present and tells a complex story of labor struggles, resistance, ecological damage, social life, and hope.

Tell us something about your artistic inspirations in combining music with images and oral history. Have you always been interested in these connections, or was there a moment or particular experience in your life that drew you in this direction?

When I was a young kid, I was always positioning myself near the adults at parties or weddings or funerals so I could listen to their conversations. Even without fully understanding what they were talking about, I could hear the cadences in their voices; and how a conversation would slowly evolve out of nothing, and would seem to go nowhere. My father still excels at this kind of conversation, languid and full of insight and quiet camaraderie.

As a student, I loved the way my teacher, Michael Finnissy, incorporated all kinds of music from the past into his compositions, part of a tradition of musical borrowing going back to Charles Ives and beyond. I was also very much interested in Robert Ashley’s spoken operas, and Harry Partch’s use of vernacular language in pieces like “US Highball” or “The Letter.” But for me, the grain and scratch and hiss of recordings was just as important as the music itself. I transitioned into a hybrid between notation and sampling, drawing from DJs and remixers such as J Dilla and Madlib. Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music loomed large in my imagination, too: both the content and texture of individual recordings, and the fact that it was a huge idiosyncratic collection guided by Smith’s equally peculiar vision. Everything I’ve done since first listening to it has been, in one way or another, a response to it!

But, I realized there was also great responsibility to sampling and music borrowing. Many ethical issues came up, and I became wary of indiscriminately using other people’s music, understanding that if done with privilege and power, it can become a damaging cultural appropriation. I started to work with specific sound archives over long periods of time, and interacting with the people and communities connected to the recordings. Other documents––including photos, maps, and letters––became important to me. Eventually, the projects became visual, too, and my approach to different media was the same: evoking the past to inform the present. I began to understand that I was not only performing my own music, but performing the whole archive like a giant instrument, and my contribution was just one small part among many.

Photo courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive

Your decisions in this piece around questions of musical style, instrumentation, and form are all clearly influenced by the Appalachian region. Did you have to learn anything new in order to compose this music? What were some of your challenges in writing it?

I’m not a traditional musician, but I have been studying and listening closely to different kinds of Appalachian music for many years, mostly the old timey ballads and instrumental songs. This is music that predates bluegrass and tends to be slower, more sparse, and darker, all qualities that I like. I also relied on working with traditional musicians, like Anna Roberts-Gevalt on banjo, to find a spot between traditional and experimental music worlds.

Listening, for me, is always the biggest (and most exciting) job for each project. I work with sound archives a lot, and the challenge here was that most of the recordings were not part of a formal collection, but were given to me from residents of Shawnee. This meant many hours of sifting through recordings, digitizing them from deteriorating cassette tapes, searching for clues and traces and sounds that resonate with me, and trying to understand the contexts around them. These recordings––of miners talking about their work and its dangers, a boy asking his grandmother questions about her past, murder ballads, and resistance songs––are at the heart of the piece, and once I understood how they would work next to one another, I composed everything around them. All of the instrumental parts are rooted in archival research too, in music that residents listened to. I incorporated into the score fragments of labor and popular songs, and even the music the Shawnee High School orchestra would have played in the 1920s.

Another challenge was to reconcile my experimental background with the rural material. This meant determining exactly who the main audience would be, and I decided it should be the residents themselves. I ended up making a piece that contained my own personality and influences, but would also be familiar to the people in Shawnee. There are other examples of this, like the late period of the British composer Cornelius Cardew, where he was writing and playing music for local labor groups. I am, more and more, seeing the communities that I work with as co-authors of the music, where they are playing an active part in influencing how it gets made. This is done literally through the use of samples and remixing (where authorship is already in play), and more subtly with how interactions and friendships and the place itself might influence what material to choose and how the projects unfold.

We struggle in our society to understand the value of things, like art, whose worth is not quantifiable. How do you talk about the value of art, specifically your own art, and especially in its relation to industrial, economic, and social forces that continually threaten its vitality? Are works like "Shawnee, Ohio" unique in their ability to speak across such lines? What about concert music that does not combine with words and images: is there a future for such art, and if so, what does it look like to you?

I don’t think the projects I work on will be commercial successes, so you’re right; they are not quantifiable in terms of money! For me, value and meaning get mixed together; they grow slowly and are much harder to see. When I work with a community over a long period of time––in this case, people and places in and near Shawnee––I develop many different projects across media, including performances, recordings, essays, and installations, all part of a larger socially engaged art practice. So, the greatest value is in the relationships that are formed as a result of taking the time to listen to community members, and the residue of these interactions can find its way into the art that comes out of them. There is also value in creating projects that allow those voices and stories to be heard, of people often overlooked or marginalized.

I guess I’ve had a strange relationship with concert music, and am often working outside the classical world. Partly by choice, partly by necessity: I knew it would be difficult to keep writing the same kind of music that I did when I was a student in London, for example. So, instead I let the landscape around me in Ohio influence how and what I wrote. I also promised myself that I would work on a small scale, independently, and with whatever and whoever was around me and willing. And now, I just can’t seem to separate the people and places and issues that I am passionate about and the music I am writing. It has all become part of the same thing.

I’ve been a fan of the writer Wendell Berry for a long time, and I set out to make my musical projects in a similar manner to the way he talks about farming – on a human scale and with a stewardship and connection to the people and places around me. This turned out to be critically important: I was no longer writing based on instrumentation or in a particular style, I now wrote for what was necessary to make a project work, and with people I trusted to take risks with. So, there is value in that, too.

And yes, there is absolutely plenty of room for music that doesn’t combine words and images! I’ve just widened my search to find it in many different – and often rural –places, in addition to the concert hall and urban cultural centers. I can hear that vitality in sound archives, or in the communal listening practices of Pauline Oliveros; in a family playing music together in their living room, or in the scratch and warble of a recording of fiddle music from a century ago.

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Mark Mazullo is Professor of Music History and Piano at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. A performer and writer, he is the author of the book, Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues: contexts, style, performance (Yale University Press, 2010), as well as many articles and essays that have appeared in such journals as The Yale Review, Musical Quarterly, American Music, Popular Music, and others. As a pianist, he has a special affinity for Beethoven, and he is currently preparing the last five sonatas for performances at Macalester College and elsewhere in the 2018.19 season.

Harnetty will perform Shawnee, Ohio at Mairs Concert Hall at Macalester College on Tuesday, March 20, 2018 at 7:30pm. Mark Mazullo will host the post-concert Q&A. Purchase tickets here.

Follow Brian Harnetty
Website: www.brianharnetty.com
Twitter: @bharnetty
Instagram: @bharnetty
Facebook: facebook.com/Brian-Harnetty

Follow Liquid Music for Updates and Announcements: 
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries  
Facebook: facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic

Poliça's Channy Leaneagh on the evolution of "Music for the Long Emergency"

By Katie Hare

In the 2015.16 season, Liquid Music brought together and tracked the creative process of two innovative ensembles, local favorite Poliça and Berlin-based s t a r g a z e, as our first Artists in Virtual Residence. Over the course of 18 months, a long-distance musical collaboration was in full swing – numerous video calls, emails, mp3 shares, and a couple of meetups all led to the making of Music for the Long Emergency. It premiered with a very memorable performance at the Fitzgerald Theater on November 16, 2016, just one week after the U.S. presidential election.

This week, Poliça and s t a r g a z e will release the project as an album, followed by performances at Symphony Space in NYC and at First Avenue in Minneapolis on February 21, 2018 (more here). In celebration of the event, we asked Poliça’s Channy Leaneagh about her band's relationship with s t a r g a z e and the evolution of Music for the Long Emergency.

By Graham Tolbert

How has the relationship with s t a r g a z e transformed since your early days of collaboration in 2015?
We now have the creative intimacy to know what’s possible; knowing the musical personality of each of us. After writing music together we have a palette to draw from and inspiration for new colors to create together.  We’ve also have shared experiences by now that have built a friendship beyond collaborating; like dancing in an empty ballroom at the Eaux Claires music festival, taking s t a r g a z e to our favorite spots in Minneapolis and cooking meals together. Creating music with people is about giving time and care to each other; listening beyond our egos, responding to each person’s voice and building a new utopia for the duration of the song. All of that can happen if the chemistry is there; and with s t a r g a z e it was and is.

How will the First Ave performance be similar to/different from the Liquid Music presentation at the Fitzgerald in 2016?
Bringing the show to the club instead of a theater will be a completely different energy; excited for that! Music for the Long Emergency has a lot of intensity that will explode in the First Avenue speakers. We’re also bringing the absolute best and most brilliant lighting designer, Arlo Guthrie, for some new production for the Minneapolis and Chicago shows.

Part 1 of a mini-documentary series following Liquid Music virtual residency artists Poliça and stargaze as they collaborated on a fall 2016 premiere performance. 

Considering the political events over the past year, has the overall project evolved in reflection of our current moment?
A deepening of our determination to create in spite of the capitalistic fires that seek to burn all creative freedoms! Making music with a large group of people; having to listen to each other, let go of expectations and self-interest, being quiet or speaking out/having a solo when the group needs you to... these are qualities of creating art with lots of people and those are the qualities of rebelling against the current political time we are in. This is not a time to give up; not a time to stop creating. Love songs and love in action is anti-fascist.

You are releasing Music for the Long Emergency as an album Feb 16! How do you feel on the eve of its debut?
I’m so very ready to be performing again alongside s t a r g a z e and the Poliça family. This is our 4th album and I feel very grateful to be where we are and be able to perform these songs around the world!  We are also bringing the band Divide and Dissolve to Minneapolis and Chicago to open the show. Check their music out – they use noise music to literally dissolve white supremacy from the clubs where they play. Their music is intensely moving and beautifully brave.      

Liquid Music alum Daniel Wohl is working on an overture for Music for the Long Emergency. How are you developing this piece with him? How has his participation in the project contributed to its growth?
We won’t rehearse with the full group until February 12th at MASS MOCA (three days before its debut!) but Daniel and I have been in touch on building the vocal melody for his piece so I luckily had a head start! It’s going to be a beautiful addition to the Music for the Long Emergency; in fact I think it was the missing piece.

Catch POLIÇA and s t a r g a z e's performance at First Avenue on Wednesday, February 21, 2018 with special guests Divide and Dissolve, IN/VIA. Purchase tickets to the performance here.

Follow POLIÇA:
Website: http://www.thisispolica.com/
Twitter: @thisispolica
Instagram: @thisispolica
Facebook: facebook.com/thisispolica

Follow s t a r g a z e:
Website: http://we-are-stargaze.com/
Twitter: @wearestargaze
Instagram: @we_are_stargaze
Facebook: facebook.com/wearestargaze/

Follow Liquid Music for Updates and Announcements: 
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries  
Facebook: facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic