April 8, 2016 by Liquid Music

Jace Clayton is an artist who exists between the cracks of DJing, art music, media art, and theater, among other disciplines. The themes of his projects are specific as an obscure, experimental musician or as grand as the U.S. terrorist threat level system to thoughtfully weave together issues of politics, identity, and the role of technology. If you want to get a better sense of of the breadth of Jace’s work - you can hear him speaking about it in a beautiful, concise way in his Creative Capital artist talk:

In this interview we touch on some of the most inspiring aspects of Jace's work while learning about Jace’s brand new piece for Saul Williams and the Mivos Quartet to be premiered at the next Liquid Music show on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 7:30pm at the James J. Hill Reference Library in Saint Paul, copresented with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature.

JP: How did you first get involved with Saul, Mivos, and Liquid Music?

Jace: I actually used a Saul Williams track on my first mixtap–mixed live to cassette back in the day! The one where he's rhyming over a kind of mournful cello line, that begins "I will not rhyme on a track--niggers on a chain gang used to do that." I have yet to meet Mivos or Saul personally, but am very much looking forward to working with them. This is the second time I participate in a Liquid Music event. The first was my 'Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner' performance.

JP: You often work with a huge variety of musical genres which will often exist side by side within one piece, placing familiar sounds in unfamiliar contexts. What interests you in this recontextualization and in drawing on such a broad musical palette?

Jace: Genre guidelines are increasingly irrelevant and ideas of historical lineage are falling by the wayside. It's a fascinating time to be making music. The question is: what to do with this freedom? And at a very pragmatic level, the question becomes: who comes out to hear your work, and how? Music isn't political (unless it's propaganda like anti-war sing-a-longs or jihadi rap) but the site of its production always is, because you're talking about gathering bodies and manifesting in a place.

JP: Politics, social justice, surveillance, power structures and identity are topics that are common throughout your work. Do you see your music as a response to these issues, do you feel like music can actively influence politics, or does your music do something else entirely?

Jace: Something else entirely! One way to put it would be: people doing the hard work of organizing for social justice is a very necessary, very particular thing. Music is something else entirely. It is a meeting ground and a place where the past and future share a moment. If politics asks the question 'how are we to live" music slips in at another level, wondering "how much can happen in a moment." So it is sensual and philosophical all at once. Basing a politics on identity is just as bad as basing one's music on some identity. Music interrupts tidy edges. The idea is to stay plural. To stay as open and flexible and tender as a folksong.

JP: Text is often an essential element in your work. How did you approach the use and role of text in this piece? Does it differ than the ways you’ve approached text in previous works?

Jace: I'm asking both Saul and Mivos to speak the texts, which I'm excited about. I love incredible world-class vocal performers, and I also love asking people who don't read in public at all–gathering different voices with different relationships to vocal authority is fascinating to me. Part of the text is from N.H. Pritchard, an experimental black poet from late 60s/early 70s NYC. I'm treating a few pages of his highly idiosyncratic poems (that play with typography and layout) like scores, in part because you can't simply read them aloud without adding layers of your own interpretation. Like with my Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner performance (dealing with Julius Eastman), I do value engaging with lesser-known artistic figures from the recent past whose work has a certain restlessness and power. It's good to add complexity to the historical record.

JP: You asked the musicians for the first piece of music that they memorized as a child and composed using that material as a starting point. I see this process as relating to your work as DJ: discovering a fixed sound which can carry so many cultural associations and implications and then placing it in a new context, through the lens of your own musical voice. Do you see this process as relating to your work as DJ and how do these musical memories shape the sound world of this piece?

Jace: I'm interested in rethinking classical composer-ly structures. In the classical world it's fully expected that you'll write music for musicians you haven't met, who will have to play it whether or not they even like it. That's quite alien to my way of working. I prefer dialog and negotiation. I actually don't like giving commands to musicians. So a simple beginning for me was to ask musicians for their earliest memorized piece, and use that as little DNA fragments that seed my creation.

JP: What are you listening to lately and what do you find interesting about it?

Jace: My essay on Vince Staples for The New York Times Magazine last month is a good place to begin!

JP: What’s next?

Jace: This summer my debut book will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It's called Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture. I can't wait for you to read it! I'm curating an event series this summer that I'm extremely excited about, but that's hush-hush until we finalize the schedule in a few weeks.... And of course, I'm working with another string quartet for a performance at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art this May, for a festival called Medialive.

See the premiere of Jace's composition for Saul Williams and the Mivos quartet LIVE AT THE James J HIll Reference Library Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 7:30pm

Follow Jace Clayton:

Website: www.jaceclayton.com
Blog: www.negrophonic.com
Twitter & Instagram: @djrupture
soundcloud.com/djrupture

Keep up w/ composer/sound artist/musical massage therapist JP Merz:

JP’s next project is also at BMoCA’s Medialive where he is making a series of computer-controlled, musical massage chairs - attempting to create an intimate human experience mediated through technology.

jpmerz.com
facebook.com/jpmerzcomposer/
@merz_jp
soundcloud.com/merzjp

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic/

The Faces of Liquid Music's Adventurous Audience: pt.1 / April 7, 2016 by Liquid Music

By Karla Brom

At Liquid Music we think and talk a lot about the audience for new music. Our patrons inspire us creatively and in many ways shape our course. With this new blog series, we decided to go directly to the source and ask our audience members what draws them to new music, and especially to Liquid Music. Our questions were always the same: How did you hear about Liquid Music? What are some of your favorite recent performances? What kinds of music do you listen to at home? Are you a fan of classical?
But the conversations went all over the place...

David Dybiec AND ALBERTO FIERRO, Liquid Music subscribers

Tell us something about yourselves: Alberto: I am a Mexican citizen and have been a diplomat for 23 years. My responsibilities have always been promoting cultural awareness and cultural affairs and now I am the Consul of Mexico in Minnesota (there are 200,000 Mexicans living here). I became a cultural promoter because I love the arts but I’m not an artist myself.

David: I lived in Minnesota from the age of 6-18 and this is the first time I am living here since then. I’m an arts educator (mainly for primary school students), painter and sculptor. We moved to Minnesota almost 3 years ago, during Liquid Music’s first season.

When and how did you first hear about Liquid Music? David: When Alberto accepted the post in Minnesota, we were very excited. Our last posting was in Orlando and the cultural scene there was not as diverse as we knew the Twin Cities would be. We started googling everything about culture in the Twin Cities and found Liquid Music that way.

What appealed to you about the series? Alberto: We have pretty adventurous musical appetites and have been exposed to new music before – we attended a new music festival in Ottawa, which was our first exposure. Mexico also has an interesting new music festival. We are music lovers, but not experts or academics, we like to be surprised.

How many performances have you attended? David: We’ve been to at least 80% of the performances – the only reason we’ve missed any is because we were out of town when they happened!

What are some of your favorite recent Liquid Music performances and why? Alberto: They’ve all been wonderful in different ways. The series feels like a laboratory – music in the making. Our expectation is that we’ll see something performed for the first and maybe the only time. Some favorites are Glenn Kotche and Third Coast Percussion – we were delighted that something that outlandish could happen – here we were literally watching music being made [Wild Sound included Third Coast Percussion constructing their own instruments]. We don’t imagine hearing or seeing it again.

David: We liked the Timo Andres program, the way it was structured with his work at the end. Ethel: Documerica for the imagery – the vocabulary of visual and musical overlap. Julia Holter because of her ethereal voice.

Alberto: We don’t do research on the artists before seeing a show, usually have no clue about them unless they are famous. So we don’t know what to expect, but we trust the Liquid Music brand. We love the intimacy of many of the venues and the diversity of the audience. This isn’t music you can hum along with, like you can with classical music (and that’s a good thing!) – you have to listen from within – it is all about letting yourself be taken.

What kind of music do you listen to at home? David: We are happy to have such great public radio available in the Twin Cities – we’re often tuned in to 99.5 (classical) or 88.5 (jazz). Otherwise the music we listen to depends on the mood. If it’s a party it is going to be something like Tito Puente!

Do you also attend SPCO concerts? Are you a classical music fan? Yes and yes. We are so lucky to have two great orchestras in the Twin Cities, and we go to the SPCO frequently. Classical music is a totally different experience – you know what to expect, you usually know the music already.

What other arts activities do you take advantage of in the Twin Cities? A little bit of everything. We live close to the Walker so we go there for performing arts. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Soap Factory, Minneapolis Film Society, Schubert Club, contemporary dance. We love TU Dance!

Kaitlin Frick, Liquid Music patron and volunteer

Tell us something about yourself: I am an arts administrator currently working at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Uptown, Minneapolis. I love working with artists and creative types, and spend most of my free time checking out new music – recorded and live music. I hit a personal landmark last year by attending 100 shows over the course of the year! I’m always on a quest for newness – I do a lot of reading and listening.

How did you hear about Liquid Music? What appealed to you about the series? I was working at the SPCO in 2012, when Kate Nordstrum started there. I had followed her work at the Southern Theater and was immediately intrigued by her desire to present innovative music programming.

I play violin – I was trained classically from a young age, and had spent a lot of time with classical music throughout my teens and in college – so much time that I kind of burned out on the traditional classical music experience. The work that Kate was doing blew my mind – the fact that concerts were being programmed in non-traditional venues and blurring the lines defining musical genres. To hear work performed by artists who are drawing from all sorts of inspirations and backgrounds in classical, folk, electronic, spoken word, rock, etc. was inspiring to me and sort of refreshed my interest in classical music – allowing me to listen with new ears. I’ve probably been to 2/3 of the Liquid Music shows.

What are some of your favorite recent Liquid Music performances and why? The Dawn of Midi/ Nils Frahm show was a wonderful pairing. I had been a fan of Nils Frahm for a while and was so pleased to see he was coming to town in a venue so intimate as the Amsterdam! It was incredible to see him at the helm of his multi-keyboard setup. But Dawn of Midi I had not heard of and was really quite floored by what they do – an acoustic trio that sounded like minimalist electronic music! It was like they were physically looping their sound. When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t always tell which instrument (piano, drums, bass) was making which sound.

The Helado Negro Island Universe Story show was also a highlight for me. I had seen Roberto play for something like 20 people, opening for Sinkane the previous fall at the Turf Club. So I was so thrilled to see that his Liquid Music show could catapult him onto the national music scene the way it did when he sold out the Ordway Concert Hall last spring. This show exemplified for me one of Liquid Music’s strengths: the ability of the series to allow for unbridled collaborations, which serves audiences and the musicians – as the artists are able to take their work into new territories, audiences are able to discover new music. For example, after this show, I started listening to Stereolab and Laetitia Sadier, started listening to Wilco with new ears, and I was turned onto the techno stylings of Oliver Chapoy aka Certain Creatures!

I also very much appreciated the collaboration of Son Lux, Serengeti and Sufjan Stevens as Sisyphus. The talk at the Walker with these guys and the artist Jim Hodges was fascinating. We were working on a print with Jim at Highpoint at that time, so it was really cool to hear him talk about the role music plays in his artistic process.

What kind of music do you listen to at home? What other kind of music do you go to hear live? I listen to lots of different kinds of music, as well. In terms of rock music, I really love post-punk – Protomartyr is one of my favorite newer bands, and the band Shopping was also a favorite discovery from last year. I also, not surprisingly, love music that crosses genres, like The Soft Moon, which is a post-punk band which is post-punk but also darkwave and electropunk. Liquid Music alum Noveller opened for them last year at the Entry. I’m also very into electronic music, my favorite album of the year was by a local group called Beat Detectives. Super fresh sounding innovative art-house/ outsider house group.

I see a bit of everything, I mostly stick with small venues in town for intimacy and also affordability, so I usually end up seeing lots of shows at the (7th Street) Entry – also some underground venues like house basements and I’ve been exploring the underground techno scene as well. I’ve been to Pitchfork twice and also made it to Decibel last year. I’m more an urban festival goer than someone who is going to camp out for the weekend to listen to music.

Billy Elliot, Liquid Music subscriber

Tell us something about yourself: I’m a huge music fan and save all of the stubs from performances I’ve been seeing since 1976. I have about 1700 ticket stubs which is something like 43 shows a year. Also, I had my name about 40 years before the movie came out!

How did you hear about Liquid Music? I used to go to the Southern Theater all of the time and that is how I heard about Liquid Music. I’ve been going since the first season and try to go to all of the shows if I can. I like that it is quirky and eclectic, that it is not part of the mainstream, that it is off the wall. Also, each venue has a different feel and different acoustics and that adds to the performance. I never look up artists to listen before the performance – I like to be surprised when I get there.

What are some of your favorite recent performances? Nils Frahm – I loved the way he played multiple pianos. Nadia Sirota swept me away. Ethel: Documerica – I liked the way they transformed some old rock and roll songs. Miranda Cuckson was amazing.

What kind of music do you listen to at home? I like progressive rock and roll, jazz. I’m a big Tangerine Dream Fan.

Are you a classical music fan? Yes – Stravinsky’s Firebird Suites or Mussorgsky for example. I like string quartets and the viola.

What other kinds of arts activities do you take advantage of in the Twin Cities? I’m a member at the Walker; go to a lot of theater – Theater in the Round, Guthrie, Mixed Blood, Gremlin Theater. I probably see one modern dance performance a year.

Thanks to David, Alberto, Kaitlin, and Billy for sharing their stories with us. Tell us about your Liquid Music experience(s) in the comments section and be sure to follow us for updates and announcements and Liquid Music artists' happenings:

Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic/

Extra-curricular Listening Pt. 5 - Tristan Perich/Surface Image / March 22, 2016 by Liquid Music

By Patrick Marschke

As purveyors of contemporary chamber music with a growing and increasingly adventurous audience, we are wholeheartedly committed to the creation and cultivation of new and diverse types of music. An essential part of this process is providing bridges and context for new listeners to discover and appreciate what could sometimes be considered "challenging" music. Context that we will attempt (<—key word) to provide through our 'Extra-curricular Listening' blog series.

For each concert we will provide some extracurricular listening (or watching) and some rabbit holes for LM followers to excavate and discover their own exciting but perhaps obscure corner of the music world.

In preparation for this Thursday's Surface Image copresented with the Walker Art Center's Sound Horizon series we delve into the world of Tristan Perich.

One Bit Symphony

An important predecessor to Surface Image is Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony:

“Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case, 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally ‘performs’ its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit—programmed by the artist and assembled by hand—plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself.”

“I don’t really think of it as a limitation. I have a beef with the idea of limiting your options and exploring that. I think of it more as writing for simple voices. As you go down the sampling bit rate, when you get down to one bit, every value is zero or one. There is no volume control, there’s no timbral adjustment, it’s a really raw, beautiful electronic tone.” - Tristan in The Wire Magazine

If the sounds in 1-Bit Symphony and Surface Image sound faintly familiar, you might recognize traces of “chiptune” or early video game music. The technology at that time meant that the game soundtracks had to take up as little space as possible. Video game composers stretched the limits of this limited digital space to make some of the most iconic sounds of their time. Tristan has repurposed these sounds and elaborated on their potential in incredible ways throughout his career.

Check out Koji Kondo or Yoshihiro Sakaguchi (nostalgia warning) for some early examples of chiptune.

Oval

Oval is arguably the origin of glitch music—a genre oriented around the idea of “aesthetic failure”; pushing digital devices to their physical limits and recording/sampling the audio artifacts. While that sounds like a very abrasive/violent process, the sounds that Oval arrives at are actually quite warm and ambient—somehow finding the humanness in the inaccessible insides of our devices—all in 1995! Oval and Surface Image test the limits of digital sound and both end up creating entirely visceral and immersive worlds with their incredibly restricted mediums.

Ryoji Ikeda

Japanese sound/digital artist Ryoji Ikeda uses comparably “raw” digital sounds to Perich, that similarly create a very distinct feeling of digital space.

Like Ryoji, Perich also works in a visual realm. Check out Perich's entrancing “wall drawings”:

Lesley Flanigan

"Lesley Flanigan is an experimental electronic musician living in New York City. Inspired by the physicality of sound, she builds her own instruments using minimal electronics, microphones and speakers. Performing these instruments alongside traditional instrumentation that often includes her own voice, she creates a kind of physical electronic music that embraces both the transparency and residue of process — sculpting sound from a palette of noise and subtle imperfections.”

Here again in Lesley Flanigan’s music we find deep emotional content derived from electronic sound manipulation, in Leslie’s case paired incredibly effectively with the human voice. Leslie uses feedback, hand built speakers, and loop pedals to craft engulfing sonic spaces.

Philip Glass

Surface Image is not exactly “minimal” what with the 40 speakers and incredibly intricate machine coding processes, but one can pick up traces influences of the early minimalist in its dense aural landscape. The seemingly boundless kinetic energy of Surface Image can be similarly heard in Philip Glass’s frenetic “Spaceship” from Einstein on the Beach.

SEE SURFACE IMAGE LIVE AT THE WALKER AT CENTER GALLERIES THURSDAY, MARCH 24 (FREE)

Follow Tristan:
www.tristanperich.com/
Twitter: @tristanperich

Follow Vicky Chow:
www.vickychow.com/
Facebook
Twitter/Instagram: @vcpianos

Meet s t a r g a z e / March 10, 2016 by Liquid Music

Over the course of the season, there's been a lot of noise about Liquid Music's Artists in Virtual Residence, Poliça and s t a r g a z e. In November of 2016, musicians from s t a r g a z e will travel across the pond to perform onstage at the Fitzgerald Theater with members of Poliça. Now that you’ve had a chance to meet André de Ridder and Channy Leaneagh, our interview mini series continues with introductions to the musicians who form the core of s t a r g a z e.

Up Next: Meet Chris Bierden, Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson from Poliça!

Aart Strootman, Guitar

How did you become involved with stargaze?
I met Bryce Dessner when I was playing a piece he wrote for Bang On A Can with a Dutch ensemble called Luna Park. He was there and we talked endlessly about the music by Steve Reich and so forth. After the concert he asked my details so I could replace him during a festival by Nico Muhly in the Barbican. There I played his solo part in his double guitar concerto, conducted by, indeed, André de Ridder. That's where it all started!

If you could perform at any venue in the world, where would it be?
A completely unknown (so I wouldn't know where it's located yet!) little church, with a wooden ceiling. Authentic and just the most lovely acoustics. I mostly prefer these places over pop-venues.

What was the last piece of music you listened to?
Nine Inch Nails - Copy of A

If you found $10 on the street, what would you do?
Call a friend and have a coffee or 2 at the cosiest spot I know around

When you first heard that Poliça and stargaze would be collaborating for a Liquid Music show, what was your first reaction?
(...) Ohhhh YEAHHH!

Marlies van Gangelen, Oboe

How did you become involved with s t a r g a z e?
Through the french horn player Morris. He was asked to join the ensemble and then they needed an oboist as well.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Ow, this is an easy one: it would definitely be Wadi Rum - also known as The Valley of the Moon. It's a desert in Jordan. I would live as a bedouin musician with three camels and a telescope.

What is your favorite word or phrase?
Noemarou. It's not a real word, it's made up to express amazement.

What was the last piece of music you listened to?
This morning while waking up i listened to W H O K I L L by TuNe-YaRds! I can't think of a better way to start the morning.

Maaike van der Linde, Flute

How did you become involved with stargaze?
I was studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London when I met André after a Villagers concert in the Barbican Centre. I did a fantastic master's degree which was mainly focussing on developing creative musical ideas, cross art and community projects and with a very open approach to very diverse musical genres. We were talking about how it was to be trained as a classical musician but always wanting to play in bands too. Back then André was just starting with stargaze and collecting people from all over Europe, there was no flute player yet and I was the lucky one... the first show I did with stargaze was with Villagers at Haldern Pop and I never left.

What did you eat for breakfast today?
I'm now in Amsterdam but this morning I was still in Berlin at André’s place. I was there to meet the people from Poliça and have a first jam and listening session! It was really great, yesterday we visited their concert in Berghain Kantine and this morning they came over for late breakfast at André’s place where Justin, Marlies and I were staying too. I had croissants and grapefruit and cappuccino for breakfast.

What is your favorite word or phrase?
Petrichor: The smell of rain after a long period of drought and heat.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
I'm really happy in Amsterdam actually... I love this city and I live in an amazing apartment in the centre, it's kind of a commune where everyone has their own apartment. In this house live people who used to squat this place - a former school building - in the early 80's. Everyone is much older than I am and I really like that... It's not like it's a house full of moms and dads, just great friends with more life experience and good advice. I travel a lot for concerts and projects and that is very easy from Amsterdam too. But if I would have to move.... I think I would move to a simple cottage in the mountains and in the forest because I do miss being in nature a lot. I would love to live in a place where there's no light and sound pollution and where I am surrounded by sounds from nature. I would love to have a fireplace too!

When you first heard that Poliça and stargaze would be collaborating for a Liquid Music show, what was your first reaction?
YES!!! And now that I've met them and things become real, I'm even more excited and I think everyone is!

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SPCOLiquidMusic/

Follow Aart Strootman:
http://aartstrootman.com
Youtube

Follow Marlies van Gangelen:
http://marliesvangangelen.com
Twitter: @MarliesGangelen

Follow Maaike van der Linde:
http://maaikevanderlinde.com

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

Keep up with the Virtual Residency:
First Look
Interview with André de Ridder
Interview with Channy Leaneagh
Catching up with s t a r g a z e: Weekender Festival, Berlin 2015
Virtual Residency Mini Doc Part I

Extra-curricular Listening pt.4 - Jake Rudh on Laurie Anderson / March 3, 2016 by Liquid Music

We asked friend of Liquid Music, DJ, and host of 89.3 The Current's weekly show Transmission Jake Rudh to help us explore the ever-unfolding world of Laurie Anderson as part of our extra-curricular listening series in prep for Anderson's performance on Saturday, March 19, 2016 at 8:00pm. Dive in and see what you find.

Laurie Anderson is one of America's most celebrated (and daring) creative pioneers working in the worlds of art, theater and music. For over five decades she has pushed the boundaries of what those worlds are and can be and luckily for us, continues to do so today. Because of Laurie's expansive talent over multiple mediums, her work means different things to many different people. I was honored to have been asked by the SPCO's Liquid Music Series what it means to me and to share a few personal highlights of her work.

O Superman

"O Superman" ... the song that introduced much of the world to Laurie Anderson and can be found on her debut album "Big Science" from 1981. It was so popular in the UK, that it actually hit the #2 spot on the singles chart. An influential piece to many, you can find it covered, remixed and quoted in many different places. One place I was happy to see it was on permanent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As an extra treat, you can find footage of David Bowie covering this song during his 1997 "Earthling" tour online.

Peter Gabriel + Laurie Anderson: Excellent Birds

Outside of her own expansive catalog, Laurie has collaborated with some of the world's most respected artists crossing many different genres. From William S. Burroughs and John Cage to Jean Michel Jarre, Philip Glass and Peter Gabriel.

Laurie Anderson PSA

One thing I've always enjoyed about Ms. Anderson is her humor. For as serious of topics as she covers with her work, there is often a lighter tone that is always appreciated.

The Puppet Motel

Though she has over 30+ years of exceptional material to choose from, I wanted to include "The Puppet Motel" from 1994's "Bright Red" release as it's a personal favorite (both song and album). It's produced by Brian Eno and his genius is felt throughout. As is often with both artists, the magic is in the subtleties.

In Our Sleep (featuring Lou Reed)

Laurie began dating Lou Reed back in 1992 and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013. There's no doubt they supplied each other much creativity and inspiration, and it's our good fortune that they decided to record some of it.

Heart of a Dog

One of Laurie's latest works is a documentary called "Heart of a Dog" touching on subjects such as death, loss and most importantly unconditional love.

Follow Jake Rudh:
Facebook
Twitter: @JakeRudh
transmission-music.com/
Transmission Radio: Every Thursday 10 p.m. 89.3 The Current

Keep up with Laurie Anderson:
www.laurieanderson.com
Twitter: @OnlyAnExpert
Facebook

Surface Image: Interview with Vicky Chow / March 3, 2016 by Liquid Music

By Lauren McNee

We had a chance to catch up with pianist Vicky Chow following our in depth conversation with composer Tristan Perich earlier this week in preparation for the Twin Cities premiere of Surface Image. Below Chow answers a few of our questions about collaborating with Tristan Perich, her pre-concert rituals, the creative process of commissioning music and the magic of Surface Image.

Don't miss the free show on March 24, copresented with the Walker Art Center's Sound Horizon Series.

Photo Credit: Kaitlin Jane Photography — Photo Credit: Kaitlin Jane Photography

Favorites

What are 3 things you can't live without?
My dog, the beach, noodles
or
My family, my piano, my iPhone
or
Sushi, my Murakami books, bathrobe
...I think it'll depend on the day you ask me

What is your first memory?
When I was 2 years old living in Hong Kong, I remember my aunt always picking me up and washing my feet in the bathroom sink because I'd always run around with my bare feet.

Favorite pre-concert rituals?
Getting a good night's sleep the day before, a good meal, and stretching.

Favorite cocktail?
I like bourbon straight up, neat. Not really a cocktail person.

Best advice you ever received?
Everybody's winging it.

When do you feel the happiest?
Late at night in my apartment in Brooklyn, and everyone's asleep. It is calm and I can finally hear my own thoughts.

Who are your musical heroes?
Nik Bartsch, Maria Chavez, Martha Argerich, Steve Reich, John Cage, Shara Worden, Glenn Gould

Day in the Life

At what moment did you realize you wanted to become a professional musician?
I knew the moment I started piano when I was 5 that this is what I wanted to do. I reconfirmed it when I had to write down what we wanted to be when we grew up in class when I was 8. I knew I wanted to attend Juilliard and move to New York and be a pianist.

What does a typical day of practicing/rehearsing look like for you?
Wake up, caffeinate, walk dog, procrastinate, emails, fb, meal, tea, procrastinate, clean my apartment, do laundry (if there’s dirty clothes), and finally when I’ve done all the mundane stuff, I can sit down and immerse myself at the piano. For some reason I have to organize my physical space and life before I can concentrate. I get distracted by all of the things that are out of place. I think it is because I know that once I do that, I will fail to clean my apartment for a while so I need a clean slate before I do anything like that. These days, I’m barely home, usually only coming back for 2-3 days before having to leave for the next thing. So I always do a sweep, laundry, and practice before I leave again.

What was the last piece of music you listened to?
My Brightest Diamond "This is My Hand"

Arrangements of Shara Worden "This is My Hand", New Music Detroit

Creative Process

Tell us more about the creative process of self commissioning this piece. Did you have any specific sounds in mind when you started to work with Tristan? How did the piece evolve as you worked together?
I just knew after I discovered Tristan’s music that he was someone I really wanted to work with. His musical sound, his medium, his voice, was something that resonated very strongly with me. I was always fascinated with electronics and with him being also a pianist, he understood the capabilities of the instrument extremely well and was able to push and challenge my virtuosity as a performer. One of the satisfying and rewarding things about working with a composer is that they understand who you are as a performing artist and they can incorporate and write things that will push me and highlight my strengths and abilities on the instrument. Tristan was aware of the things that I could do really well and he went that route when proceeding with writing Surface Image. I think it also helps that his pianistic interests kind of line up with what I also like doing and do well. I think with working on this scale in number of speakers and with such a powerful instrument, it allowed Tristan to explore some sonic areas that some of the other instruments are incapable of. The sonic canvas is a lot larger.

When was the first time you heard Tristan’s music and what inspired you to commission a piece from him? Are there certain aspects of his compositional style that resonated with you?
I first heard Tristan’s music when he released his 1-bit symphony album. I was a big fan. I remember going to all of his shows and introducing myself to him. I had also just joined Bang on a Can All-Stars as their pianist and our paths naturally crossed more and culminated on this collaboration. I think we were in mutual agreement that we both wanted to work together. For me, it was one of those unexplained moments in life when I felt it was necessary for it to happen and that it will happen. I’m not sure if you call these things fate or not, but it felt very powerful when the idea came to me to work with Tristan. I was riding in a car going up to MASS MoCA in July for the summer festival there. I remember texting Tristan about it and I think he had a similarly positive reaction. He may have a different story, but this if mine and I’m sticking to it!

What advice do you have for performers looking to commission projects from composers?
When you hear a piece of music and it sends chills down your spine and makes you feel joyful from deep inside, that is probably a person you should work with. Listen to your instinct. Work with composers whose music moves you deeply. That is when a truly meaningful collaboration will take place.

Coming October 28th on New Amsterdam Records Pre-order here: https://newamsterdamrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tristan-perich-surface-image Surface Image was recorded and produced at EMPAC - the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Producer: Argeo Ascani. Mix Engineer: Jeffrey Svatek. Recording Engineers: Jeffrey Svatek and Stephen McLaughlin. Video filmed at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

The Magic of Surface Image

Surface Image has been described as a "minimalist tesseract comes to life" (I Care If You Listen) and a "sonic landscape not all that distinct from the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley" (Bandcamp). Do you classify this piece as minimalist? What stylistic characteristics point to why or why not?
Surface Image is a minimalist piece. It is at the scale of works similar to Reich’s Music for 18 and Glass’s earlier keyboard works. The musical material, the patterns and process, are somewhat apparent but the changes are very subtle. It is in several distinct sections and each musical motive is constantly shifting ever so slightly, flickering and dancing around the patterns. Before you know it, it somehow moved to the next section. There’s something very magical about it when that happens. This piece is unlike the processes of Reich in the music like his counterpoints/phases, or with Glass’s literal numerical additions in repetitions. I would compare this to some of the music of David Lang - in it’s great beauty and intimate delicacy and somewhat fragile dance my fingers have to make while performing Surface Image in some of the sections. I wouldn’t compare this to Riley’s keyboard works.

Surface Image seems to require a high level of virtuosity and mental stamina - what do you do to prepare yourself mentally and/or physically before a performance of this piece?
The more I get to perform Surface Image, the easier it gets. However, there are still moments that gets to me depending on my mental/physical state. These places either come easily or are a struggle. It is a way for me to monitor what state my body/mind is at. I need to be well rested to perform this work. If not, one could easily get lost!

Surface Image has gotten a lot of ink since the album’s release on New Amsterdam Records in 2014, including being named #4 in Rolling Stone's 20 Best Avant Albums of 2014. What about this project has allowed it to play out so successfully?
There is something about Tristan’s music that is so compelling. This was the reason why I was drawn to work with him in the first place and I think this is why others feel the same. This piece exists now in this world and I think it has caught the attention of so many music lovers because it really is unique. There is no other piece of music that I know of that is like this. It is a piece that marries the classical piano genre with the electronic art world perfectly.

You’ve had the opportunity to perform Surface Image at many different venues across the country since the Brooklyn premiere in 2013. What makes the Liquid Music/WAC show unique?
First of all this performance on the Liquid Music Series at the Walker Museum will be a premiere and it is always exciting to be able to present a work for the first time anywhere. The recording of the work on New Amsterdam was beautifully produced by Argeo Ascani and recorded by Jeff Svatek up at EMPAC but the live experience of this work is a lot different than listening to this through a pair of speakers in your home or in your car. In a beautiful gallery, you will see all of the speakers displayed, flanked beside the grand piano. The visual presentation is just as important as the musical journey it takes you. Each 1-bit sound is produced by one speaker. In a recording they are all mixed down to two channels. In this setting, you will hear and see the physical vibrations of each individual speaker. With a live gallery setting, the different sonic blend of the acoustic piano with the 1-bit electronics changes depending on where one stands in the space. It is almost like an installation, as the audience gets to move around and experience different perspectives of this work.

See Surface Image live at the Walker at Center Galleries Thursday, March 24 (free)

Follow Vicky:
www.vickychow.com/
Facebook
Twitter/Instagram: @vcpianos

Follow Tristan:
www.tristanperich.com/
Twitter: @tristanperich

Surface Image: Interview with Tristan Perich / February 29, 2016 by Liquid Music

By Lauren McNee

Live music and visual art collide on March 24 with the presentation of Surface Image featuring composer Tristan Perich and pianist Vicky Chow, a partnership with the Walker Art Center's Sound Horizon Series. Written for solo piano and 40 channel 1-bit electronics, Surface Image is an hour-long musical journey that synthesizes Perich's electronic aesthetic and Chow's virtuosity. Surface Image and Perich's Observations (for two sets of crotales and 6-channel 1-bit electronics) will be performed in two galleries at the Walker Art Center. Audiences are encouraged to create a unique multimedia experience by freely wandering the galleries while listening to live music.

Chicago-based percussionist Peter Ferry sat down with Perich at his studio in Brooklyn to talk about working with 1-bit electronics, collaborating with Vicky Chow, the beauty of minimalism and presenting music in a gallery context.

Watch for an interview with Vicky Chow later this week!

Collaborate

Working with Vicky Chow

Composer Tristan Perich interview with Peter Ferry in advance of Liquid Music performance. Liquid Music and the Walker Art Center present: VICKY CHOW AND TRISTAN PERICH: Surface Image Thu, Mar 24, 2016 'Observations' performed at 6:00pm (Tristan Perich and Peter Ferry) 'Surface Image' performed at 7:00pm (Vicky Chow) Free event as part of the Walker Art Center's Sound Horizon series.

Evolution of Surface Image

Electronic Sound

1-bit electronics

Speaker construction

Meld

Visual art <----> Live sound

Humans <----> Machines

Structured minimalism <----> Artistic beauty

Adventure

In-gallery performance

Peter Ferry is a young American percussion soloist quickly gaining recognition for “presenting percussion in a stunning, thoughtful way” (Democrat and Chronicle). Beyond his national concerto and recital touring, Ferry connects with online audiences through the TEDx stage and imaginative videos of contemporary repertoire performances. Ferry also joins Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Dal Niente and other established contemporary ensembles as a guest percussionist. An alumnus of the Eastman School of Music, Ferry graduated with the first ever John Beck Percussion Scholarship, an Arts Leadership certificate, and the prestigious Performer's Certificate recognizing "outstanding performing ability." More at PeterFerry.com

Holographic Video / February 10, 2016 by Liquid Music

To compliment the release of three new videos excerpts from Holographic, we asked Daniel Wohl and Daniel Schwarz to elaborate on their collaborative and creative process. Read about the "visual language" for the multi-media live performance below.

"I wanted to bring a visual element to the live performance to show another side of the music I was making. “Holographic” is an album which people can listen to on its own, but when they come see a live performance they get a different view point.

Daniel Schwarz’s visuals translate the sonic ‘data’ of my music into visual content. By taking the MIDI information (which gives rhythm to his video) as well as the live audio feed, the visuals are rendered in real time during our performance. The acoustic and electronic elements are being translated through Daniel’s particular custom created software and filtered through his unique visual language.

There is a lot going on in the live performance - the audience can pick up on the tone and the emotional content, but much of the imagery is left open to interpretation. Below we asked DS to break down some of the specific concepts behind a selection of pieces from Holographic to showcase the intricacies of his work."

– Daniel Wohl

Daniel Schwarz: The drone-y and forceful sounds in Formless reminded me of our current geopolitical fabric and the new ways technology has allowed us to see it. For the visuals I appropriated Google Earth fly-overs where acts of violence or human right violations are ingrained in the publicly available satellite imagery. The footage shows e.g. fights between the Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military near Donetsk, possible barrel bomb droppings around Aleppo in Syria, and a missile strike in Gaza indicated by clouds of dark red and black smoke.

In many ways it is a nod to the crucial practices of the Forensic Architecture project or Bellingcat and their creation of knowledge and evidence through similar means.

DS: Source’s soundscape is made up from a wide array of digital samples and voice recordings that are strongly manipulated. The visual content consists of live web content from various international news sources and platforms for information gathering and knowledge exchange.

The websites, initially clearly readable, become progressively more intermeshed - mirroring the manipulation of the digital sound samples in the song. Headlines, images and texts are arbitrarily juxtaposed creating new and unexpected meanings and also allow to situate the performance in its time-specific context within the current actualities of politics and social life.

DS: Shapes - Both the title and the sharp yet fragile string movements of this piece immediately brought to mind the shapes of borders and the act of crossing them; their control, oppression, and often times one-directional flow from the side of power, privilege or wealth (e.g. Mexico/US, Israel/Gaza, or the European Schengen zone). Experiencing the horrendous refugee crisis and the incapability or unwillingness of the international community to find humane solutions and approaches, lead to looking at symbols or signifiers for nationality and citizenship. How can national flags - which were designed with the clear intent to be easily recognizable and identifiable to a certain country - be abstracted and transformed into a different visual system or order? I ended up using common computer vision algorithms to detect feature sets and redrew thousands of lines connecting these machine detected points. The intention being to question understandings of what a country represents and the common populistic projections onto this symbol.

SEE DANIEL WOHL'S HOLOGRAPHIC LIVE IN SAINT PAUL THURSDAY FEB 11 AT 7:30PM AT THE ORDWAY

Follow Daniel Wohl:
danielwohlmusic.com
Twitter/Instagram: @dwohl88
danielwohl.bandcamp.com/

Follow Daniel Schwarz:
danielschwarz.cc
vimeo.com/danielschwarz
Twitter/Instagram: @_dschwarz

Extra-curricular Listening pt. 3 - Holographic w/ Composer JP Merz / February 8, 2016 by Liquid Music

JP Merz (left) Daniel Wohl (right) — JP Merz (left) Daniel Wohl (right)

This week JP Merz, composer, sound artists, and Daniel Wohl super fan shares his playlist for Daniel Wohl's Holographic.

Nic Collins

A lot of the electronic textures and techniques on Holographic could be characterized as “glitch music”. Producing sounds by intentionally misusing software, hardware, and audio files, glitch music is a tradition in which failure and “unwanted” sounds are embraced. In referencing this aesthetic, Wohl exposes the technology, highlighting the agency of humans interfacing within a digital system. One of the earliest concert works to use glitching as a musical element is Nic Collins’ string quartet titled Broken Light (1992) which involves hacked CD players which skip in a somewhat controlled but occasionally unpredictable way. This technique and material lends itself to the repetitive shifting textures with interruptions from wild, erratic flurries of notes. This glitch technique and process is featured prominently on Wohl’s own piece Progression.

Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto

In Holographic, Wohl seamlessly blends melodies and instruments from the concert hall with sounds and aesthetics from the club. A classic collaboration between classical and electronica music is the album Vrioon by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sakamoto, a prominent Japanese contemporary classical composer, recorded light, floating piano tracks and sent them to Alva Noto, a German electronica musician and visual artist, who manipulated them and added his own sounds. On this album, Alva Noto uses a technique called “microsound”, which takes a small, usually microseconds long, audio file and loops it so fast that it produces a new, distinctly electronic sound. The two have come together again, along with The National’s Bryce Dessner, to produce the soundtrack for the 2015 film, The Revenant, starring Leonardo Di Caprio.

Pamela z

On the track Source, Wohl collaborates with Caroline Shaw and Olga Bell, whose voices emerge from and dissipate into the thick electronic texture. Pamela Z is a composer/performer, who also works with vocal manipulations to create electronic textures but in a completely different way. Pamela Z often creates her own tools which utilize gesture and movement to manipulate her live vocal recordings. In this piece, BREATHING, it’s difficult to tell which sounds are coming from her and which are coming from her laptop, creating a blend of the acoustic and electronic that is characteristic of Wohl’s own music.

Matmos

Holographic is filled a variety of sound sources, from recordings of musicians like the Bang on a Can All Stars (Holographic) to fingernails clacking on a keyboard (Pixel). Electronic duo Matmos is also interested in sound sources, but in a more focused way, often crafting entire albums from just a few sources. Their album California Rhinoplasty primarily uses recordings from plastic surgery. Out of their original context, these sounds take on their own life and can be appreciated for their unique sonic qualities.

Holly Herndon

Laptop performer and composer, Holly Herndon, shares a like-minded interest in the relationship between humans and technology. In Herdon’s piece Chorus, the sound from websites Herndon visits is monitored and recorded, then used to create the sporadic and intense layers throughout the piece. In doing this, Herndon highlights the emotional content embedded in laptops, a device that has become increasingly personal. The manipulations of her voice to create accessible dance rhythms also references this human embodiment of technology and the power of technology to bring people together.

Flying Lotus

Compared to Holographic, Flying Lotus operates more in the world of hip-hop than classical, with altered drum loops rescued from old school funk or jazz albums. But both have an obsession with sounds that move, buzz, shimmer and pulsate, creating intricate, tapestry-like textures that have an organic sense of breath. In Flying Lotus’s music, the beat pushes and pulls and sounds fade in and out, feeling more like a collage than a song with clear form and structure.

The Rabbit Hole

Artists we couldn't fit in, but think are worth mentioning (in no particular order):

Ryoji Ikeda
Aphex Twin
Arca
Matmos + So Perc
Bjork
Autchre
Boards of Canada
Kaija Saariaho
Brian Eno
Angelica Negrón
Paul Lansky
Tim Hecker
William Basinski
Ingram Marshall
Nina C. Young

Special thanks to JP for his work on this post. Keep up on his goings on here:
jpmerz.com
facebook.com/jpmerzcomposer/
@merz_jp
soundcloud.com/merzjp

SEE DANIEL WOHL'S HOLOGRAPHIC LIVE IN SAINT PAUL THURSDAY FEB 11 AT 7:30PM AT THE ORDWAY

Virtual Residency Mini-Doc Part I / January 28, 2016 by Liquid Music

By Lauren McNee as part of Liquid Music's Artists in Virtual Residence Series

It is incredibly difficult to capture all that goes into creating projects like the ones Liquid Music strives to produce each season. Through our virtual residency initiative we saw a unique opportunity to bring the behind-the-scene to the front-of-the-scene, making the production of a project just as integral as the score or performance. There is artistry throughout - artistry that we know LM audiences will understand and appreciate. So with that, we are launching of a series of mini-docs featuring our artists in virtual residence, Poliça and s t a r g a z e. Over the course of the season, videographer Nate Matson (of Spaces) will capture the creative process leading up to the performance in the fall of 2016 (copresented with The Current), including virtual and live rehearsals, collaborative exchanges, and all the moments in between.

Watch Part I below to see Poliça move into a new physical and musical space, performance clips of each ensemble, and hear Channy Leaneagh's thoughts on the collaboration. Stay tuned for Part II for an inside look into André de Ridder's visit to MSP.

Deeply Human: An Interview with Composer Daniel Wohl / January 18, 2016 by Liquid Music

by Michael Hammond

Left: Michael/coffee Right: Daniel/sunlight

I've known Daniel Wohl now for a few years. We first crossed paths via mutual composer friends in Brooklyn and have since worked together on Daniel's two album releases for New Amsterdam Records (2013's Corps Exquis and this year's Holographic). We also co-curated Sound / Source, an all-day electronic music festival at MoMA PS1.

The first music of Daniel's I heard was a piano piece called AORTA, performed by Vicky Chow on the Ecstatic Music Festival at Kaufman Center in New York City. I remember being struck by how human the piece sounded, in spite of its highly glitched out source material. I still think that one of Daniel's greatest strengths as a composer is his ability to create something deeply human and emotionally complex out of seemingly lifeless digital sources. Temporarily setting aside my role as "label guy" with a vested interest in his albums, I can honestly say that he is one of my favorite electroacoustic composers working today, and I feel fortunate to call him a friend.

Below is a conversation Daniel and I had a couple of weeks ago over phone (he was in LA at the time, while I was in Brooklyn). I took it as an opportunity to ask about his inspirations and process, as well as the purely logistical challenges posed by the prospect of recording and touring a project as complex as Holographic.

M(ichael): I'm always curious to learn about composer's first experiences with electronic music and electronic sound. I have my own references for growing up, listening to music and hearing sounds that didn’t sound like they were coming from any sort of source I recognized, whether it was a synthesizer in a Pink Floyd song or some computer manipulations in a Radiohead track. Those were some of the sounds that jumped out for me. For you, when you were growing up, what were those kinds of moments that grabbed you and made you think about sound in a different way?

D(aniel): Hmmm, that’s a great question. It’s tough to tell. You know how you just go through so many phases, when you’re a teenager... I guess the first song I ever really loved was a Kate Bush song.

M: Which song?

D: “Wuthering Heights” It was a huge hit in France. I was 5 or 6. I just remember loving her voice and how strange it was. The timbre of her voice was so different. That was a moment for me, just discovering the magic of music.

M: It’s interesting you mention Kate Bush. Her voice is totally otherworldly. It has that quality, this alien thing. Listening to your music, I feel like you put a lot of vocal manipulations into your electronics tracks. Even if they’re not literal samples of voices, they have this cadence that’s vocal in nature. Do you think about the voice when you’re writing?

D: Yeah, writing for strings for example, I often sing the part first. I think it’s the best way to emulate the variation of dynamics and color for a string instrument. A lot of composers just make weird noises while we’re writing music [laughs]. Of course, you can use other tools, like virtual instruments and MIDI to do that, but you’ll never get the flexibility that the human voice has.

For other instruments it’s not as useful. But for strings and winds, you can get a good sense of note length, phrasing, and dynamic shape. The human voice is the most flexible instrument. Sometimes I’ll do a vocal improvisation and then notate that improvisation for different instruments. Translating from the voice to other instruments can give you some pretty interesting results

M: Right.

D: At the same time, I find it pretty hard writing for the human voice. Going back to Kate Bush, I really don’t like “normal” voices. I can love the music and production around it, but if the voice is too conventional it makes the whole piece a bit stale for me.

M: Another thing I’m curious about is your process. Can you tell me a little about what inspires your writing these days?

D: I’m always trying to find ways to make music with other people. I find that to be the most exciting. Growing up, I’d just invite friends over and we’d just improvise together. These days, because we’re able to just produce so much music by ourselves, we don’t need to collaborate as much, and it kind of takes the communal aspect out of the picture, which was a huge part of what I loved about music. I do appreciate that we have so much control today, but at the same time, bringing other people into the process is the most exciting thing for me.

M: Totally. It breathes new life into the work. It’s very easy to fall into your own habits as a solitary composer.

Holographic Video trailer featuring "Source" w/ Caroline Shaw and Olga Bell

D: You can see that in some of the tracks on Holographic. For example, “Source.” The electronics were done and the vocals were written and Olga Bell and Caroline Shaw were singing them in the studio. But I always had problems with that track. While we were recording, I asked Caroline do some vocal improvisations. I took a few moments from those improvs and incorporated them into the track.

M: Interesting. Yeah, these days that's almost an old-fashioned approach (hashing things out in the studio). Now there’s more virtual collaboration, whether it’s taking something someone’s recorded and chopping it up. Or doing remixes. Remixes have been some of my favorite things to work on. That’s always a really fun problem to solve.

D: It’s really interesting to look into someone’s process at the level of the stems.

M: Yeah, it’s like looking into someone’s bedroom closet. That relates to another question I was going to ask you about your writing process. I remember in Berlin you were editing sounds and constantly re-editing / re-mixing. Often the pieces would turn out very different from the way they were performed. How do you know when you’re finished with a track?

<a href="http://danielwohl.bandcamp.com/album/holographic">Holographic by Daniel Wohl</a>

D: I think each piece ends up having it’s own process. All methods are available. For example, on Progression I wrote a chord progression, then I created a texture, and then I started figuring out when chords changed and what sounds would come in and out of the texture. After that it was performed a couple times and I re-edited it and worked out some more samples to include. It had its own life. But that’s a totally different process than ”Source” – which is more of an electronic track in some ways. Also “Holographic,” for example, was a piece I originally wrote for Bang on a Can, and was much more of a straight ahead composition. When it came time to get it on an album I ended up slowing down the entire piece by about 6 BPM. I don’t think any of these are a typical process but every piece needs what it needs.

For each track, you go through a relationship. There are a lot of moments where you fall in love with it, and then you hate it, and then you love it again. You have to do the work to find something new to love about it.

M: You gotta keep the magic alive [laughs] And it’s totally different when you write the piece for a commission to be performed than when you’re thinking about writing for an album.

D: I think we’re in a cross-section between performance art and album art. Classical music is very centered around the performance aspect. It’s meant to to be seen as much to be heard, whereas albums are meant to be heard. And what I’m trying to do is write something that can be both seen and heard. Frequently one of those elements is lacking, but I’m attempting to do both. Sometimes the best music is just one long held note, and that is really boring to watch but it can sound great. And some really impressive music to watch, when you close your eyes, just doesn’t have any meaning. Finding that balance is really difficult.

M: Especially because Holographic has so many moving parts. You’ve got the chamber players, the electronics, and you have the visual element. All the pieces existed before the album, so I imagine the performances have changed, too.

D: Also, the live instrumentation is not the same as the recorded album. I had to re-arrange some of those pieces for new instrumentation [laughs].

M: Yeah that’s a really unique, interesting way to go about it.

D: Yeah it’s a hard balance to find.

M: I imagine logistically it’s just way more challenging to do that kind of album and tour rather than a self-produced bedroom project. My own music has tended toward the latter, for practical reasons. I know you’re talking about how much you love collaborating, so I imagine you get a buzz out of other people performing your music, but logistically that also seems difficult.

D: Yeah, it’s pretty challenging. I‘ve got to stop doing that [laughs]. I think on the next album, if I need to work with a violin I’ll just ask a violinist. And I won’t necessarily use full ensembles. Holographic has a different ensemble on almost every track.

M: Right, but it doesn’t sound like it. If I didn’t know it was different ensembles, I wouldn’t think about it.

D: Yeah, and that’s what I want. I didn’t want it to be a collection, or a document of a bunch of different pieces. Because that doesn’t make a good album, you know? I wanted it to have it’s own distinct sound world. And that’s the way it’s recorded. It was all recorded in the same place. Working with Paul Corley (producer and mix engineer) was another way we achieved that sound.

M: Is there any kind of narrative to music or are your pieces about anything in particular or are you just focused on the aesthetics of what’s pleasing to you in the moment?

D: It’s a little bit of both. Invariably when you’re dealing with sound, you’re dealing with what you think is beautiful or satisfying and that comes with a certain context and culture. There’s always a narrative about what you’re doing, even if it’s not overt.

You could say this album has to do with my ideas about mixing electronic and acoustic instruments – organic vs. digital etc. There is the organic vs. electronic element, and the idea of deriving electronic sounds from acoustic instruments. But it’s hard to put everything into a neat little box. There’s the notion that we’re living, as human beings, in a time where interfacing with technologies is one of our main preoccupations. It’s about keeping some sort of human element in the electronic component, like the inconsistencies of human playing in live performance, while at the same time being able to have an infinite amount of sounds available to you and not being limited by what we can humanely produce.

Catch Holographic in one of its many iterations:

1/21 - Baryshnikov Arts Center (Album Release Show) -
New York, NY
2/5 - FringeArts - Philadelphia, PA
2/6 - Indianapolis Museum of Art - Indianapolis, IN
2/11 - Ordway Concert Hall (Liquid Music Series) - Saint Paul, MN
2/25 - Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Album Release via New Amsterdam 1/29

Follow Daniel Wohl:
danielwohlmusic.com
Twitter/Instagram: @dwohl88
danielwohl.bandcamp.com/

Follow Michael's project 'No Lands':
nolands.org
nolands.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/nolands
Twitter/Instagram: @no_lands

Letting Ideas Grow with LM partner Scott Stulen / January 7, 2016 by Liquid Music

Former Project Director of mnartists.org at Walker Art Center Scott Stulen gives us the scoop on his move to Indianapolis, work at the IMA, collaboration with Liquid Music, and the excitement building for Daniel Wohl's Holographic.

Sitting in the cafe of the newly opened Eskenazi Hospital, Michael Kaufmann, described Indianapolis as “a place where a few people can make interesting things happen quickly.” We had just finished a tour of the hospital including the 5000 square foot sky farm perched atop the downtown location. The halls were filled with numerous works by local and national artists and Michael explained plans for a music program in the facility. I was in Indianapolis for an initial interview for a new position at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I had been at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for five years as Project Manager of mnartists.org and wasn’t sure how serious I was about leaving Minnesota or moving to Indiana. Over the course of our honest and inspiring conversation, he sold me on Indy.

Nearly two year later, Michael was right. Indianapolis is a place where ideas can grow and find supportive audiences. And a few people can make a difference. In March of 2014 I became the first Curator of Audience Experiences and Performance, a new position not only for the IMA, but one of the first of its type in the country. I playfully describe my roll as a curator of people, not objects. Specifically, my role is to curate all of the public programs, performing arts and many of the interactive spaces on the expansive 152 acre campus which includes an encyclopedic museum, 3 theaters, a greenhouse historic mansion, formal gardens and 100 acre art and nature park. The position was created with an acknowledgement that audiences are changing, particularly younger audiences, and the museum needs to radically adjust if it is to remain relevant. Not a small challenge, but an amazing opportunity that I was eager to tackle.

The approach of my department is to focus on creating social, interactive and highly accessible experiences in the context of the museum. It is an interdisciplinary and experimental approach, where failure must be embraced (and supported by the board and leadership). In addition this new wave of programming was generously kickstarted by the Efroymson Family Fund shortly after my hire. Their gift of a million dollars over four years launched ARTx, the R&D department of the IMA which my team heads. We are now a year and a half into the ARTx programming and it has already shown a dramatic shift in bringing in new audiences, establishing sustainable platforms and generating buzz. In the past year we have presented over 140 programs including an Adult Summer Camp where campers foraged the grounds to make breakfast with one of the city’s leading chefs, built cardboard forts, hiked and made cyanotypes and closed out the day with a mini opera on the pair overlooking our lake. Or, in a nod to my Minnesota roots, we screened the film Fargo last January, outside. The event sold out with over 300 people huddled up in the 20 degree weather to watch the film, compete in a Minnesota accent contest and answer Minnesota trivia. However the best part, is that the whole front row made dishes to share with the audience as in impromptu potluck dinner. The best programs provide a platform for the audience to go in directions you never expected.

Music is my passion and plays an important role in nearly all of our programming. It sets a vibe, creates easy points of access and ties together sometimes unrelated content. Silent Night is an event we host the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when you are sick of your family and shopping, which offered quiet, solitary experiences for our guests. One offering was a personal DJ, who would play you a track, over headphones, choose specifically for you, which creates a strangely intimate experience between DJ and listener. We have commissioned several new sound works by regional and national composers for events in our art and nature park including compositions with crickets by LA based musician Chris Kallmyer, field recordings by Seattle composer Nat Evans, live hydrophone compositions in the Art and Nature park lake by Michael Drews and Jordan Munson called Water Mining and a one-time-only public sculpture, performance and sound installation—E is for Equinox—from Grammy-nominated musician and Indianapolis-based artist Stuart Hyatt. The ephemeral, powerful performance consisted of a circle of 75 electric guitar players simultaneously strumming the E major power cord over a two minute period. The cord gradually became louder, transforming the surrounding woods into a supercharged sonic volcano, before reaching maximum volume and intensity

"E is for Equinox" by Indianapolis artist Stuart Hyatt. Photo courtesy of the IMA.

Now back to Michel Kaufmann. After our initial conversations which sold me on Indy, we have collaborated on several projects, mostly notably Sound Expeditions and Avant Brunch. The goal of Sound Expeditions is to create a soundtracked city in which spaces and places both familiar and unfamiliar take on a new layer of meaning and experience. It is both a collection and an archive housed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art documenting site-based sound art and composition. Sound Expeditions commissions pair sites and composers for the creation of new site-specific compositions in Indianapolis. To date sound expeditions has released pieces by Hanna Benn, Oliver Blank, Olga Bell, Roberto C. Lange and Caroline Shaw. Daniel Wohl is committed to create a new work for Sound Expeditions during his visit to Indianapolis in February.

ABOVE: Chris Kallmyer - Sundown-Suppertime-Let-Go-Piece at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A new work for guitar, amp, and 250 foot cable using a museum as an echo-chamber. Photo courtesy of the IMA. — ABOVE: Chris Kallmyer - Sundown-Suppertime-Let-Go-Piece at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A new work for guitar, amp, and 250 foot cable using a museum as an echo-chamber. Photo courtesy of the IMA.

Avant Brunch is a one-time, specially curated experience which blends art, music and culinary delights in a unique location. The formula is to have a four course meal prepared by a leading Indianapolis Chef and not available in their restaurant paired with listening to a yet-to-be-released record, usually from the test pressing. The event is then hosted in a unique venue on the campus of the museum from the stage of the theater to a gallery, depending on the vibe of the record. Lastly the audience is instructed to remain silent through first listen of the record and savor the food.

Finally this brings us to the collaboration with Liquid Music. As I sat down to write this piece I laughed at the reality that I needed to move six hundred miles away to create this collaboration. I have long admired Kate Nordstrum and the amazing work she has supported, curated and created. Even with my close ties to the Walker, we never had the opportunity to directly collaborate. This is where Michael Kaufmann creates (yet again) another connection. Michael, Kate and I were having some initial conversations about nurturing synergy between performing arts venues and curators in the Midwest to support the creation and presentation of new work. From these early conversations the possibility of the IMA joining with Liquid Music, Mass MOCA and the Baryshnikov Arts Center in commission a piece by Daniel Wohl emerged. The IMA is honored to be included in the project, not only to help realize a new work by one by a rising star, but to bring this work to Indianapolis. Presenting new, experimental, multi-displinary work, such as Daniel Wohl is exactly what we are trying to do with ARTx and the our programming at the IMA. There is a buzz in Indianapolis anticipating this performance. We can wait and hope this is just the beginning of many collaboration in the future.

Scott Stulen is an artist, dj, curator, and programmer of Open Field at the Walker Art Center. He has developed innovative on and off-line programming including Community Supported Art (CSA) in partnership with Springboard for the Arts, Drawing Club, Headphone Festival, Analog Tweets and the Internet Cat Video Festival.

Follow Scott for updates and goings on:
@middlewest
scottstulen.com

Returning to Collaboration: MSP Film interviews Daniel Schwarz / December 21, 2015 by Liquid Music

We asked our friends the Film Society of Minneapolis St. Paul, visual commissioners of Daniel Wohl's HOLOGRAPHIC, to interview multimedia artist and project collaborator Daniel Schwarz about his process and work. Live performance to take place Thursday, Feb 11, 2016 at 7:30pm (Purchase Tickets) at Ordway Concert Hall, Saint Paul. A film by Lonely Leap documenting the project's development will also be screened at this year's MSP Film Festival.

Imposition - A/V Performance - Excerpt || Live audiovisual performance by electronic musician Edisonnoside and Daniel Schwarz. — *Imposition* - A/V Performance - Excerpt || Live audiovisual performance by electronic musician Edisonnoside and Daniel Schwarz.

Craig Laurence Rice (CR): How did you get started using motion picture as a medium of artistic expression?

Daniel Schwarz (DS): It was sort of a step-by-step process for me. Growing up in a small village in Germany, my understanding of art was mostly limited to painting and drawing from a pre-modern era. It wasn’t until I moved to Stuttgart to study computer science that I got exposed to movements and practices of the past century, and works to which I could relate more. After graduating from college I had the fantastic opportunity to join a yearlong artist residency at Fabrica, a think tank in Italy, that offers young artists and designers the opportunity to spend an in-depth time collaborating and working on projects based on their interests. It was there that I had my first chance to start working with film and motion graphics. The musician Amon Tobin put out an open call to make a music video for his new record at the time. I approached this in a very naïve way, having never filmed or edited before – I was lucky and my work got selected to be included on the official boxset. This really marked the beginning of my artistic exploration of creating software and moving imagery, and was followed by short films and the live performance, Imposition, with my friend and musician Davide Cairo (Edisonnoside).

"A journey through a dystopic landscape, playing with creation, destruction, rebirth." - Daniel Schwarz music video for Amon Tobin.

CR: You do a lot of work in still imagery – how does your connection to still photography impact your motion video work? What are the main differences you find?

DS: Motion-based work came naturally because of my collaborations with musicians, and my desire to convey both audio and visual information through software and programming. When I was studying towards my MFA at UCLA, I was lucky to work with great artists and teachers, who helped me think through my own artistic practice in depth. Moving away from mostly formal works, I enjoyed thinking about the conceptual implications of the work and focused increasingly on social, as well as political issues. I began to concentrate on appropriating photographs of online services, and also explored the presentation of the works in immaterial applications such as smartphones, websites, or even across WiFi networks.

CR: One of the things you’ve talked about is that you prefer to explore the conceptual versus narrative approach in your work. Do you ever try to work in a traditional narrative form?

DS: I don’t think those are two opposing approaches. To answer the question, I guess it depends on how you define “narrative” in this context. Story-driven? A form of narration? How to guide the reception of a piece using narrative tools? It’s interesting to think about that, and I’m not even sure how I would define it in my own practice. My prior films and performances are very formal and abstract, exploring the synthesis between audio and the visual, staying more or less close to the traditional field of visual music.

My more recent works are focusing on particular issues of social and public life, which, for me, calls for a more indexical, and fact or evidence based approach. I guess I’m trying to navigate the spaces in between open-endedness and leaving room for different readings (as put forward by Hans Haacke, Hal Foster, etc) and its recent criticism through Suhail Malik and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Jesse Bishop (JB): Can you talk a bit about the importance of collaboration and participation in your works, specifically with your upcoming collaboration with Daniel Wohl?

DS: I’m really interested in working with Daniel because it allows me to return to a more collaborative working methodology. All of my early works were in collaboration with musicians, but during my time at UCLA I was mostly working on solo projects. Collaborating with someone whose expertise lies in a different field than your own can pull you out of your comfort zone and be a great learning opportunity. Daniel comes from an electro-acoustic musical background – his compositions are extremely evocative and vivid, stirring up a lot of images in the mind.

Our work process itself is very fluid: Daniel and I had countless conversations about how the imagery will interact with the music, and what sort of images and topics we want the final performance to address. We share images or visual references, texts, other ideas, both over the internet and in-person – it’s really a lot of back and forth to find the middle ground of where music and video overlap, and the process pushes both of us in new and exciting directions.

<a href="http://danielwohl.bandcamp.com/album/holographic">Holographic by Daniel Wohl</a>

CR: Where do you get the visual inspirations for your pieces?

DS: Within this particular project it is often the larger topics that are being addressed in the song and how I feel they can be represented visually.

In some songs, however, it might be a rather technical approach based directly on the score and the language I program in.

CR: How do you find yourself being inspired to create the visuals for HOLOGRAPHIC in particular? Is it the feeling the music evokes? Or something else?

DS: Before Daniel even shared samples of HOLOGRAPHIC with me, we discussed the ideas behind it and what we felt touches on it, e.g.: Cybernetics and the idea of bridging the gap between digital and analog; the contemporary fabric of our society; Deleuze’s concept of the “dividual” and its relevancy nowadays.

Moving from there, Daniel’s vivid and varied compositions are of course very inspirational material to work with. I am creating software that translates the music to the visual medium in a way that makes sense for the composition, and aligns with this overarching idea, both within each movement as well as for the overall performance.

CR: Who would you consider as influences on your work?

DS: In my audiovisual works, which aim to explore a close relationship between musical information and visual representation, my influences range from from the realm of early digital art, the pioneers of the 1960’s like Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar and Frieder Nake, to contemporary influences from the audiovisual field including Alva Noto (and other Raster Noton artists), Ryoji Ikeda and Ryoichi Kurokawa, who all have a strong focus on the visual representation of sound.

Within my solo projects I feel very influenced by Harun Farocki and his incredible documentary work from the past four decades, Hans Haacke, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and so many other artists and writers. The exhibition “Take It Or Leave It” at the Hammer Museum in Spring 2014 was seminal for me.

A lot of inspiration also comes from the work that projects like Forensic Architecture do, as well as many activists and investigative journalists, such as Laura Poitras.

CR: How do you bring political aspects into your visual work?

DS: This is often happening in very direct ways by appropriating content that deals with the issues at stake. For me, it’s very important to make sure that my work is both fact-based as well as clearly indexical. I am interested in exploring power structures, surveillance, the prison complex, gun laws, police brutality, militarization and border politics in a way that allows viewers to see relations in different ways or bring mundane aspects to the forefront of attention by scale, mass or proximity to oneself. I hope that in doing so the viewer still has room to draw her own conclusions.

JB: How will audiences experience the performance? How will your piece interact with Daniel Wohl’s music?

DS: Daniel will perform live with a string quartet and three percussion musicians in front of a large-scale projection. Through the musicians’ performance, my software will analyze the audio information in real-time and generate the visuals. Music and imagery will seamlessly merge into one tight entity, each iteration unique, and created live in front of the audience.

Technically, we are creating a meta-language combining musical and visual information, synchronizing our machines in the process.

Timing, pitch, volume and sound source will stand in close relationships to the graphics. For some of the movements, the imagery will be fully generated by the live musicians – the sound represented as a whole on screen. In other parts of the performance, specific instruments – a bell, a drum, a violin – may trigger a certain behavior. At other times the software will act autonomously, diverging from the score and building its own structure.

Susan Smoluchowski (SS): So in some cases you will isolate a particular sound and link it to specific motions or graphics on the screen, and in others it will be more organic?

DS: Exactly. Some of it will be very formal and abstract, representing the sound the instruments make. In other instances, the visuals will move further away from a direct representation into something more figurative and representative of the overall composition. Other times we will include pre-recorded footage, time- and site-specific content, and are also looking into using our own original material by using 3-D cameras – sort of bringing real elements into the composition and furthering the idea of merging of the digital and analog.

CR: You have collaborated with numerous musicians in the past – is there something unique about working with Daniel Wohl?

DS: Of course, this collaboration is a completely new experience. Having so many live musicians on stage – working with all string players and percussionists – adds a tremendous physicality to the live performance, and I can’t wait to work with everyone during our residency at MASS MoCA.

CR: What are your thoughts on the future of the digital art form?

DS: In regards to audio-visual performances, they are becoming more and more common and we can see an increasing number of rather traditional concert houses to open up their doors to collaborations between musicians and visual artists, who had before been playing at music or media art festivals. Refik Anadol’s work with Esa-pekka Salonen at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is a great example of this.

I love where Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are moving, merging their music and live performances with issues of our networked society, transparency, surveillance and Accelerationism.

SS: What’s your next project?

DS: Right now, I’m mostly focusing on the HOLOGRAPHIC performance with Daniel, but I just returned from an incredible research weekend to the US-Mexico border with fellow friends/artists/activists from UCLA, UCI and Tijuana. It is still an ongoing conversation and we are discussing what its potential output will be.

Currently I’m also taking part in a group show at Room Service Gallery in New York, and in the online group exhibition it’s doing it.

Daniel Schwarz - Juxtapose, 2013, aluminum print, 16x7" - currently on exhibition at Room Service Gallery in New York. — Daniel Schwarz - *Juxtapose, 2013, aluminum print, 16x7" -* currently on exhibition at **Room Service Gallery** in New York.

Connect:

danielschwarz.cc
vimeo.com/danielschwarz
Twitter/Instagram: @_dschwarz

Catching up with s t a r g a z e: Weekender Festival, Berlin 2015 / December 18, 2015 by Liquid Music

By Lauren McNee as part of Liquid Music's Artists in Virtual Residence series

What do J.S. Bach, Bryce Dessner, György Ligeti and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead all have in common? No, they are not all alive. And no, they did not all play in an English rock band. Truth is, all of these famous names are composers who were programmed on s t a r g a z e's Weekender Festival at the Volksbühne in Berlin this past weekend, from Friday, December 11 to Sunday, December 13, 2015.

Formed out of André de Ridder's dream for a curated festival in the spirit of London's All Tomorrow's Parties, the Weekender inspired moments of epiphany, illumination and enlightenment. With the Volksbühne as its backbone, the festival presents innovative and unprecedented collaborations of revitalized classical music, electroacoustic pop and folk.

"Oscillating between the poles of revitalized classical music, electroacoustic pop and folk form the coordinates of a music festival that is so thrilling, so coherent and so much more up to date than the otherwise long-unquestioned mode of festivals that one can speak of a potentially groundbreaking musical event for Berlin." -Max Dax

Cantus Domus & s t a r g a z e by Annett Bonkowski

From themes of spirituality, Eastern European folk music and groundbreaking collaborations, the 2015 festival presented a killer lineup including compositions by Bryce Dessner (Liquid Music artist 2014.15), Nico Muhly, Iceage, David Lang, Jonny Greenwood, Grateful Dead and more.

"The festival managed to pull the listeners into a world full of suspenseful moments that demonstrated well how musical contrasts can be overcome to create innovative and yet accessible pieces. The context of classic and pop music skillfully intertwined, s t a r g a z e and all of the involved artists proved that it is more than worthwhile to explore the two genres in such a liberating environment like this." - Nothing But Hope and Passion

Iceage & s t a r g a z e by Annett Bonkowski

A behind the scenes look can be found on the festival blog. Stay tuned for more updates on Liquid Music's virtual residency with s t a r g a z e and Poliça...many more cool things to come!

Miranda Cuckson Sun Propeller Video Premiere / December 10, 2015 by Liquid Music

Videographer Patrick Pelham captures some of the magic of Liquid Music's recent 'Sun Propeller' concert with violinist/violist Miranda Cuckson and composer Nina Young in these stunning new videos:

Composer Nina C. Young elaborates on her multifaceted contribution to violinist Miranda Cuckson’s Liquid Music performance from November 14th at Amsterdam Bar and Hall.

Read more about Sun Propeller on the Liquid Music Blog.

Miranda Cuckson harnesses the physicality and unique technicalities of her repertoire to “go organically with what the music needs” making her, as Downbeat Magazine notes, “One of the most sensitive and electric interpreters of new music.”

Follow LM artists:

Miranda Cuckson:

www.mirandacuckson.com

Twitter: @MirandaViolin

Nina Young:

ninacyoung.com

Twitter/Instagram: @ComposerNina

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:

Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)

Special thanks to Patrick Pelham for putting these stunning videos together. Find more of his work here:

patrickpelham.com

What makes for truly “rebellious” art? / December 2, 2015 by Liquid Music

By Steve Seel

We all know the archetype of the “artist as rebel.” The status-quo-challenging outsider, the rule-breaking gadfly who revels in making waves in his quest for artistic purity. Of course, it’s an archetype that’s become so utterly mainstreamed in pop culture to have lost all meaning. (Does anybody think a Mohawk haircut is rebellious anymore?) And all too often, we confuse superficial trappings with true innovation.

Steve Seel in the studio with composer William Brittelle at McNally Smith.

So when genuine rebellion—and true originality—emerges, we usually don’t know what to make of it. Someone has gone to the wilderness and come back with a revelation to share with us; do we see them as crackpot or prophet? (Usually the former of course… since few things are as unsettling as that which is totally unfamiliar).

When this happens in music, we find ourselves in the wonderful situation of not having the words to describe what we’re hearing. What is music that melds previously disparate genres? That breaks one rule after another, that upends our expectations about how we’re supposed to listen… and even where we’re supposed to hear it, or how we’re supposed to behave when we do? (Do we stand or sit? Does this music belong in a concert hall, an art gallery, or a punk club? Can we clap when we want? Can we cheer or whoop during the music?)

LM artist Vicky Chow performing Tristan Perich's "Surface Image"

That’s why I love the term “Liquid Music.” It’s a genius expression that Kate Nordstrum, Founder, Director and Programmer for the Liquid Music concert series, came up with. The term “new classical” has tried to put a fix on what’s happening in experimental cross-genre music today, but it still references a tradition—classical music—that’s too loaded with expectations to help us listen with truly open ears. While it’s important for a new music composer to be conversant in the vast, important work of classical music’s leaders and trailblazers, he or she has still got to be free to “leave town” (i.e. the Western classical music “tradition”) to hear how the rest of the world speaks.

Steve Seel and LM performer Miranda Cuckson

And as we know, a great deal of important things have been said in music over the centuries by people who may never have heard a Beethoven symphony. From a Senegalese percussion group to gypsy-punk band from Ukraine to a hip hop MC from Brooklyn, the world’s musicians have their ways of telling their stories, in their own aesthetic language, that are equally immediate, real, and worth hearing. And now, in this age when we have finally become used to that idea, a new era of creating—and listening—with even less prejudice than before is emerging. The world’s folk, popular, and academic musical spheres are conversing like never before. It’s an amazing time for music.

And so, nothing is solid where the true experimenters of music work; ideas flow and crash into each other like waves, effortlessly. They shift their shape eternally depending on their “containers.” The only constant in Liquid Music is motion. Fluidity.

In the McNally Smith studio with Liquid Music Team and producer Don Lee at the board

It’s my privilege to get to host this series’ conversational podcast, Liquid Music Playlist. I grew up listening to my sister’s rock albums but also going to classical music concerts with my parents. I loved the “don’t follow the rules” attitude of rock but gravitated toward the thoughtful, philosophical milieu of rock outliers like Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson. I never learned to read music or play an instrument through academic training, but I became a crusader for the sublime experience of classical music on the airwaves of Classical Minnesota Public Radio (and later, for the more experimental side of rock on MPR’s The Current). I’ve always been interested in the “middle way,” of sorts, between the two worlds. The Liquid Music Series bridges that gap, but then expands its reach and breadth so much further - into a fourth-dimension of music where classical and “popular” music are merely two of the countless genres being exploded and re-combined by a new generation of free-thinking artists.

In our podcast, we’ll get to meet a huge swath of artists who are participating in this season’s Liquid Music concerts. We’ll get to know a bit about them and where they’ve come from in their musical journey as we sample from their own music—and then, in the spirit of the “continuous flow” that is Liquid Music—we’ll get a recommendation from them for an artist that they want to share with us, too, and hear some of that musician’s work. So each installment of the podcast will bring us two things to discover, not just one (a pretty good deal, wouldn’t you say?).

Conductor, arranger, performer and composer André de Ridder

Along the way, we’ll meet conservatory-trained composers who are working with improvisational singers. We’ll meet rock songwriters who are joining forces with modern chamber-music ensembles to create new collaborative compositions. We’ll meet classical instrumentalists who are working with electronics. In each and every case, we’ll meet musicians who are ecstatic about how old boundaries are coming crashing down around them.

Jimi Hendrix said, music is like “the waves of the ocean; you can’t just cut out the perfect wave and take it home with you.” The Liquid Music Series understands that music today is less fixed in-place than ever before, and the moment our preconceptions try to generate rules for listening, we’re engaging in an act that differs very little from freezing Jimi’s “waves” in time. I hope you’ll come along with me for a little wave-riding. You know what it is about waves? No two are the same, and they never stop coming.

Listen to the podcast

Liquid Music Playlist is sponsored by McNally Smith College of Music.

Timo Andres talks Magpie Aesthetics / November 17, 2015 by Liquid Music

By Patrick Marschke

We asked Liquid Music veteran Timo Andres a few questions in preparation for upcoming his visit to the Twin Cities for the world premiere of his SPCO commissioned work "The Blind Banister" for Jonathan Biss's Beethoven/5 project. Catch the show(s) November 27-29 at the Ordway Concert hall in downtown Saint Paul.

How did you get from performing Work Songs on Liquid Music’s 13.14 season to composing The Blind Banister for the SPCO for the premiere this November?
There wasn't a direct connection, though I suppose it didn't hurt to be a bit of a known quantity to the SPCO. It had to do more with this giant commissioning project which Jonathan [Biss] is undertaking, five composers writing him concertos to go along with each Beethoven. After conversations with Jonathan and his project manager James the SPCO signed on to be a lead commissioner of the piece. I'm thrilled, of course, to be writing for such an august and virtuosic group of musicians, and also to be back in St. Paul. Our Work Songs shows at Liquid Music in 2013 were one of the highlights of my musical life thus far.

How long have you been working on The Blind Banister?
It was this summer's big project, so it took about three months, a quicker turnaround than I might've liked for such a large piece. To accommodate this I wrote the entire thing in short-score for two pianos, then orchestrated it afterwards, so Jonathan could start learning the music sooner. Normally I write straight to the orchestral score.

Timo and Gabriel Kahane from 13.14 LM performance

You have talked about ‘responding to’ and ‘paraphrasing’ other composer’s music previously and said of The Blind Banister, “I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven’s concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out”—how was (or wasn’t) this project different than other ‘musical responses’?
Certainly all of my music, and to some degree all music, responds to music which came before it. My ears are constantly seeking connections between things—a bit Mahler may have picked from Brahms, for example, will stand out to me in stark relief. I've always admired composers with a magpie aesthetic—Ives, Stravinsky, John Adams, Ingram Marshall—and I think my own music naturally fell into that way of operating at some point during college.

In some of my music these references and samples are hidden, and only I know about them. In other pieces, like the Mozart Recomposition, they are decidedly not. The Blind Banister falls into the first category—you wouldn't hear it and think "Beethoven". But I used some Beethoven-ish building materials, things out of the second concerto, things from his later style, which overlap or sit well with my own compositional tendencies. It's not about feeling tension with Beethoven, certainly, and it's not anything like a collage.

What does an ideal day of composing look like for you? Do you have specific habits around the act of composing?
One of the things I love about my job is that I can work from home. I love being at home, and gradually working to make the most copacetic home that I can. I find it difficult to compose on the road (though I sometimes have to) and I never do artists' colonies or residencies.

Now that I'm 30 I've finally realized that getting up early can be pretty wonderful. My partner is a doctor and I wake up with her most mornings, so I can generally set to work around 8 or 8:30. Strong coffee is a constant and I take frequent breaks. There's a great piece of software called SelfControl, which irrevocably blocks access to certain websites for a set amount of time—that's switched on if Twitter or something becomes too alluring.

The best way I've found to solve a musical problem, or get over a stumbling point, is to get the music in question stuck in my head (by playing it over and over) and then go take a walk or have a bike ride about it. I can whistle or hum whatever I'm working on and my legs give it a nice pulse, and the change of scenery helps clear the head.

Cooking is another way to break the day up. I'll almost always make something for lunch and also be tending some longer process over the course of the day.

In the afternoon I'm usually pretty spent on writing, so it's piano practice time, or tending to clerical chores like mailing scores, updated the website, or doing email. Email is really the worst—it can take over an entire day if I'm not very firm with it.

I don't actually have a huge amount of time for listening to other music, which is an ongoing problem, and something that I'd like to work on.

If you could come up with a name for New Music besides “New Music” what would it be?
"Music"

How do you balance being a performer and a composer? Do you think this dual role is becoming more typical, as it was pre-20th century composer/performer schism?
My theory is that as music became so hyper-specialized in the mid-20th century—almost a scientific discipline—it didn't leave any room or time for composers to spend learning to play it. That role had to be delegated almost entirely to another group of specialists, New Music performers. It was all just so difficult that it demanded 100% of a musician's time and attention. We still have performers who specialize in contemporary music, or course, and the level of virtuosity is higher than it's ever been. But also the music being written now acknowledges and benefits from human performers more, from our strengths and our foibles. It feels like things have mostly returned to how they used to be, pre-Modernism.

How would you introduce classical music to someone that is completely unfamiliar with the genre?
I wish I could take them all to a concert I went to a couple of weeks ago—the LA Phil and Dudamel playing the Rite of Spring at Disney Hall. It was really quite thrilling.

I once saw you perform a show of alternating Glass and Schubert pieces: who/what do you think someone might pair your music with in a similar format?
There are many pairings I could imagine working well. I've played my own music with Schumann a whole bunch, as well as Ives. The singer/composer Gabriel Kahane and I do a show which interweaves our own music with Ives, Britten, Bach, Adès, Andrew Norman, and lots of other little things. I think the iTunes shuffle feature opened a lot of people's minds to different juxtapositions of music 10 or 15 years ago, and programming is slowly getting more interesting as a result. Not all the experiments work, but that's why they're experiments.

What advice would you give your 20 year old self?
To not fear collaboration—it can be extra work, but it can also be wonderfully freeing.

What book have you reread and/or gifted most?
I'm not a re-reader, mainly because I am a very slow reader, constantly overwhelmed by the number of books I haven't read yet. Though I've been reading a lot of poetry recently, and enjoying the necessity of re-reading it—new collections by Andrea Cohen and Kay Ryan, and of course always Tomas Tranströmer.

What is your favorite noise?Most cooking-related noises, the sound of a well-tuned bicycle, the general clatter of a family existing in a house.

What is your favorite thing on the internet?
Am I allowed to say Twitter? I love Twitter, and it makes me sad that the people running it don't really seem to love it and are constantly mucking with it.

What’s next?
Ideally, more of the same, but better?

Where can people find you on the internet?
My website, andres.com, is where I keep a concert schedule, an archive of all the music I've written, and a very occasional blog. Twitter or Instagram are more of-the-moment, both @timoandres.

Timo Andres with Gabriel Kahane, Nathan Koci, Becca Stevens, and Ted Hearne from LM13.14 Work Songs — Timo Andres with Gabriel Kahane, Nathan Koci, Becca Stevens, and Ted Hearne from LM13.14 *Work Songs*

Lastly and shamelessly, why should readers go to Liquid Music shows?
I like to think of Liquid Music as a laboratory—it's where you go to really have your ears bent. The name of the series is actually perfect. Music is not some monumental, immutable solid—it takes the form of the container it's in. The artists Kate Nordstrum brings in know this, and are creating delightful and necessary estuaries. It's the perfect complement and supplement to a great orchestra, which can't always afford to be as experimental.

Extra-curricular Listening: pt. 2 - Miranda Cuckson w/ Guest curator Innova Recordings / November 12, 2015 by Liquid Music

As purveyors of contemporary music, or perhaps more accurately “current music," with a growing and increasingly adventurous audience, we are wholeheartedly committed to the creation and cultivation of new and diverse types of music. An essential part of this process is providing bridges and context for new listeners to discover and appreciate what could sometimes be considered "challenging" music. Context that we will attempt (<—key word) to provide through our 'Extra-curricular Listening' blog series.

For each concert we will provide some extracurricular listening (or watching) and some rabbit holes for LM super fans to excavate and discover their own exciting but perhaps obscure corner of the music world.

For this week's show we asked Chris Campbell from innova Recordings to use his encylopedic knowledge of innova Records to put together a playlist to pair with this weeks Liquid Music Series show || Miranda Cuckson: Sun Propeller

MIranda Cuckson: Sun Propeller

By Chris Campbell

“Her tonal luster and variety of touch enliven everything she plays.” – The New York Times
“One of the most sensitive and electric interpreters of new music.” – Downbeat Magazine

American Composers Forum and innova recordings are happy to be partnering up with Liquid Music on a few of this season’s shows. On this playlist you’ll hear sounds that pair well with what this weekend's show. From the languid, post-minimal string writing of Jane Antonia Cornish, to long electronic brush strokes by Paula Matthusen to the prog/jazz stylings of Gordon Beeferman’s band, this is music for you to explore and get lost in pre-show, post-show or any other time you want.

NYC based, UK born and trained composer Jane Antonia Cornish recently released Continuum with Decoda, a fluid virtuoso roster-ed chamber ensemble in NYC. "These four world premiere recordings of chamber works explore terrain as disparate as the cyclic nature of the ocean’s tides, our relationship to space and memory, and deep connections to place" - Cornish re: Continuum. (Innova)

In this piece written for violin, piano, glasses, and electronics from 2008, Composer Paula Matthusen harnesses the talents of violinist Todd Reynolds and pianist Yvonne Troxler to explore ideas about memory through repetition and erasure alongside a bed of miniature electronics. (Innova)

Patrick Castillo's The Quality of Mercy, offers an abstract meditation on reconciliation. Deriving musical and structural content from plainchant (the Kyrie from the Mass for Pentecost), The Merchant of Venice, birdsongs, urban field recordings, and other sources. (Innova)

Four Parts Five consist of composer Gordon Beeferman (on piano and Hammond B3 organ), Peter Hess (woodwinds), Anders Nilsson (electric guitar), James Ilgenfritz (bass), and Adam Gold (drums), the album’s four pieces showcase tight, disciplined ensemble playing that spans the sparse, punctuated spaces of “1” and the spiraling, expansive curls of “4” with equal facility. (Innova)

Some great videos of Miranda for those unfamiliar with her significant body of work:

Violinist Miranda Cuckson embraces even the sharpest, most unapproachable-seeming pieces, conveying the music with such palpable control and insight that it's as if she's holding the door into these worlds open for the audience. When work is at its most forbidding, she grabs the flashlight that is her skill and artistry and leads the way through.

Miranda Cuckson, violinist, plays Etchings

Violinist Miranda Cuckson talks about her collaboration with composer and pianist Michael Hersch

One of the best ways to keep up with artists and new music these days is through social media—follow and share if you find something you love!

Follow Liquid Music for updates and insights:

Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO
(twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)

Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries
(instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)

Innova:
www.innova.mu
@innovadotmu
soundcloud.com/innovadotmu

Miranda Cuckson:
www.mirandacuckson.com
Twitter: @MirandaViolin

Nina Young:
ninacyoung.com
Twitter/Instagram: @ComposerNina

Be sure to share your own discoveries and thoughts in the comments below.

Crepuscular Rays and Sun Propellers / November 3, 2015 by Liquid Music

by Nina Young

Miranda Cuckson is giving a solo show on November 14th, and I’m thrilled to be joining her on electronics. Miranda has programmed an exciting evening of music by Dai Fujikura, Kaija Saariaho, Ileana Perez-Velasquez, and Richard Barrett. Most of these works have a live, interactive electronic component. The violin’s (or viola’s) live sound is picked up with a microphone, sent to my computer, and then different “patches” (software packages programmed by the individual composers) process the sound. Finally, a new altered version is sent out into the venue’s speakers and mixes with Miranda’s live performance. My role is that of quasi performer / engineer / trouble shooter: I’m running the patches, following the scores, and responding to and with Miranda’s playing – sometimes more like a chamber musician, and sometimes like an orchestra following a concerto soloist. It’s an honor to work with Miranda – she is a really unique, sensitive, and versatile musician who presents a wide aesthetic variety of new music. In fact, I think she’s so great that I flew in from Rome to do this concert with her. ☺

Nina's Sun Propeller 'patch' - the custom build electronic software that will accompany Miranda's detuned violin. — Nina's *Sun Propeller* 'patch' - the custom build electronic software that will accompany Miranda's detuned violin.

The unifying thread behind Miranda’s programming choice revolves around elements of nature, specifically light and air. SPCO’s Liquid Music series is billing this concert as Sun Propeller and that happens to be the title of my violin and electronics that you’ll hear on the 14th! So now I’ll tell you a little bit about it. The term “sun propeller” refers to the propeller-like rays of light that occur when sunbeams pierce through openings in the clouds. For those that want to rush over to Wikipedia, crepuscular rays is the scientific name for these columns of light that radiate from a single point in the sky. Returning to “sun propeller”, the phrase is the literal translation of the Tuvan word for these special sunbeams, “Huun-Huur-Tu”. This also happens to the name of a famous Tuvan folk group that I was introduced to in college, and have been obsessed with ever since.

For those unfamiliar with Tuvan folk music, stop everything (after reading this) and check it out. The tradition is perhaps best known for the practice of throat singing – a vocal technique that produces multiple tones at the same time. A singer begins with a low drone-tone and then accentuates the different overtimes of the harmonic series to create radically beautiful timbres. The changing emphasis of the harmonic series allows some quasi melodies to pierce through, but the music really values timbre (tone color) and vertical relationships rather than traditional western melody and harmony. As a fan of electronic music, I was really intrigued by this sound world and immediately began to draw relationships to different studio filtering and synthesis techniques.

Diagram of bow placement options that create "organic filters"

To be clear, my piece is not trying to emulate Tuvan music in any way, but I was drawing inspiration from the physical and poetic principles behind the Tuvan sound world. For example, I call for the violin to be scordatura – a musical term for retuning a string instrument in unusual ways. Miranda tunes her lowest string down a 4th to a D, and the upper string down a step to a different D. The final tuning of the violin is D-D-A-D (rather than G-D-A-E) and this totally changes the way the instrument resonates. The lowest string now provides a textured, low growling D drone upon which the rest of the music emerges. The piece then organically grows out of this initial sound. I also asks for Miranda to place her bow along the strings in some unusual positions. Sun Propeller starts with the bow unusually far along the fingerboard. This allows for subtones (notes lower than the string is typically capable of producing) to emerge. Later on you’ll notice that the bow moves across the violin, all the way from where the left-hand fingers usually play, to right on top of the bridge. In one part of the piece Miranda does this while she repeatedly plays 16th note “A”s. Even though the pitch repeats, its timbre entirely changes. She’s creating an organic filter – very similar to what the throat singers do.

Another interesting thing about Tuvan throat singing is that it is a direct imitation of the sounds of nature (babbling brooks, wind brushing through tall grasses, sounds reverberating between mountain faces, etc). The music is often performed outdoors and is used to pay respects to the spirits of nature. This means that the music has a location/space-specific element to it. Suddenly the sound source, and the way it interacts with the objects around it (reverb and spatilization characteristics) becomes very important. This is paralleled in my piece through the use of multi-channel electronics. The number and placement of speakers can fundamentally reshape the concert hall and expand the sound capabilities of the performer. You’ll get to hear different spatilization tehcniques in my piece, the Saariaho, and Fukijura’s.

The JACK Quartet performing Phase I of Nina C. Young's "Memento Mori" on March 12, 2013 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City. Phase I: "ut cuspis sic vita fluit dum stare videtur" (life flies on like an arrow, while it seems to stand still) www.ninacyoung.com

Additional Info:

Website: www.ninacyoung.com

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/nina-c-young

Twitter/Instagram: @composernina

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ninacyoung

Tables Turned: André de Ridder Interviews Channy Leaneagh / October 20, 2015 by Liquid Music

BY LAUREN MCNEE

This interview mini-series began with s t a r g a z e's André de Ridder answering questions posed by Poliça's Channy Leaneagh (if you missed it, you can read the interview here) as part of Liquid Music's first ever "virtual residency" featuring the two ensembles. This round, it was André's turn to ask Channy a few questions about her favorite things, thoughts on Classical music, and dreams for the future. Enjoy!

Poliça's Channy Leaneagh, Photo Credit: Cameron Wittig — Poliça's Channy Leaneagh, Photo Credit: Cameron Wittig

Who, What, Where, and Why

Did you have musical parents? Was music present in your house or did you discover it completely by yourself? Do you have siblings and did or do you make music with them?
My mom learned the accordion as a kid. That was a valuable instrument in the small Czech community she grew up in South Dakota with all the polka dances and etc. My dad was a self-taught piano player and pursued songwriting until I was about 9 years old. He is a very talented musician and I learned a lot from him about songwriting and evoking emotion when I sing. They both valued music and put all of their three kids in private lessons and orchestras and gave us access to music both live and on the stereo. I have never made music with any of my siblings though.

What is your experience with and attitude to 'classical' music? Did it change from when you first got into music to how you perceive it now? Do you agree with many that it has an elitist feel and social connotation about it? What interests you about it? Do you go to opera or orchestral concerts when you're at home?
I’ve had four wonderful violin teachers, and they all introduced me to some really great classical pieces for solo violin and also chamber and orchestra; so my first introductions were as a student. I liked classical music as a kid and I still do; it’s soothing to me even when it’s jagged and dissonant. Music with lyrics/vocals can be too stimulating for me sometimes. I often want to listen to sounds without a personal point of view—I just want to feel the music. It’s similar to electronic music to me in that sense. You have to search it out a lot more so than other musical styles; it’s separation from pop-culture makes it seem exclusive but I think it’s just modest. It’s like a shy kid being accused of being snobbish. I don’t discredit classical music’s part in history of being very white and western though; it’s past isn’t as inviting as rap or jazz but I hope that is changing and the future of classical music will be a more inclusive one.

What classical instrument do you like most the sound of and which one are you most intrigued about to feature in our collaboration?
My favorites are the viola and oboe. I like those tones the best. I hope those two instruments will be involved in our collaboration and I am also looking forward to the bass flute.

What's the compositional process in Poliça? Do you personally write songs and then bring them to the band to arrange and develop?
The compositional process is akin to an assembly line. We are very egalitarian. Ryan is always at the head of the line. Most of the time I react first to what he’s made and lay down the lyrics and melody. The bass player, Chris Bierden comes next reacting off of the new combination of Ryan and I. And finally the drums come in to react with their beats. Sometimes I come after the bass and drums but always Ryan starts the clock.

What do you like doing to switch off from everything, what gives you respite and recharges your batteries, creatively speaking?
Walking is my main thing for switching off but I also like reading and drawing for getting away.

Where would you like to live and work/write for a while, if given the chance, outside your home country?
This question was probably the hardest. I never dream about moving somewhere else. I lived and worked in Cambodia for a few years and do miss it now and then. I guess I could see hiding away there for a few years someday.

As a conductor I am often told that life only starts at age 70! On the other hand I have heard people say pop music is a young wo(man)'s game. How do you feel about that and where do you see yourself in say 20 years time? Are you sometimes thinking about musical life after relentless touring and album-cycles? What are your dreams for the future?
I believe that’s true for the life of a conductor; I predict you have a long and fun career ahead of you. I believe the future of classical music is strong and exciting and it is doing such cooler and more rebellious things than pop music! I don’t consider myself a pop musician but the kind of music I make is for sure a young woman's game and; being a “professional” musician also feels like a branding game and a self serving game but I like fighting against those things and seeing if I can still stand on my own two feet.

I always want to make music but I don’t hope to engage in selling myself for too much longer. In the future I see myself screaming into the microphone in a cacophony of noise at night while teaching pre-school during the day and spending my in between time fighting the evils of capitalism.

André de Ridder conducting s t a r g a z e, Photo Credit: Emanuel Florakis — **André de Ridder conducting s t a r g a z e,** **Photo Credit:** Emanuel Florakis

Favorite Things

Favorite contemporary/modern composer?
Nico Muhly

Favorite old 'dead' composer?
Fritz Kreisler

Favorite recent band/artist discovery?
Oneohtrix Point Never

Favorite recent collaboration (outside your work), in the music world anywhere, recently?
The Body and The Haxan Cloak; I Shall Die Here (2014 via RVNG).

Favorite music festival, currently?
My favorite collaboration thus far was with Alex Ridha of Boys Noize, Orlando Higginbottom from T.E.E.D (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs) and Ryan (Olson). We met up at a studio after a Poliça show in LA and jammed out. Orlando was on piano, Alex on electronics and Ryan was processing my vocals and I just sang over them and we made one of my favorite songs ever. We were listening to each other and reacting without any walls between us. Those are the most treasured moments in making music; when we listen to each other and we are subtracting our own self to combine with others. I hope some truly inspired moments can occur in this Stargaze and Poliça collaboration.

Listen

"Raw Exit" from Poliça's Shulamith (2013)

“Relief” by The Dodos featuring s t a r g a z e orchestra at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in Ireland (2014)