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May 302013
 
Greg Bryant

Greg Bryant

 

There are several great shows happening this weekend, including at least three featuring Theatre Intangible participants.

Joe Nolan says June’s First Saturday Downtown Art Crawl will be one of the biggest of the year, and I have no reason to doubt him. A highlight for music fans will be T.I. participant Joe “Jocephus Brody” Hudson’s new monthly music series at The Space Gallery. The first installment will be Textbook Punk (T.I. participant Chris Murray of Square People). This all goes down Saturday night from 6pm to 9pm at the Downtown Arcade.

On Sunday, you have a tough choice: Space music or free improv. There’s Gerber & Gerber w/ Torben Asp at Notable Blends at 5pm or The Greg Bryant Expansion feat. Paul Horton, James DaSilva, Giovanni Rodriguez and Josh Hunt at Nine48Jazz at 6pm. The Gerber brothers, Greg Bryant and Paul Horton have all appeared on T.I. in the past.

Notable Blends is the private coffee club of the Davis brothers (of Davis Cookware in Hillsboro Village). Todd and Tony Gerber blew minds at the Tim Kaiser Brick Factory show last year. Torben Asp is a space musician from Denmark who will be in town for this very special show. Dr. Michael O’Bannon from Atlanta will be doing the video projections. Plus, FREE coffee! Sunday, June 2nd, 5pm, Notable Blends, 434 Houston Street, Nashville, Tennessee 37203.

Nine48Jazz is one of Nashville’s most intimate jazz clubs. The Greg Bryant Expansion performance will be the LAST performance in their current space. Soon after, Nine48Jazz will be moving to a new location on Rosa Parks Blvd. Expect really amazing free improv music. More info on the Facebook event page. Sunday, June 2nd, 6pm, Nine48Jazz, 948 35th Av. North, Nashville, Tennessee 37209.

Greg has a great podcast called JazzWatch, featuring interviews with jazz greats. Check it out here.

Gerber & Gerber appeared on this T.I. episode. Greg Bryant and Paul Horton appeared on this one. Chris Murray, this one.

 

 

Nov 032012
 

If you give most 1st Saturday Art Crawls a skip, consider making tonight an exception! For one, tonight is the last aftercrawl party to take place at Brick Factory’s Cummins Station location. They’re already in the process of moving to the neighborhood which houses Chestnut Studios, Infinity Cat Records, United Records Pressing, and house venue Noa Noa. I scoped out the new digs yesterday afternoon, and the space is MUCH larger than the Cummins Station pad. There are multiple rooms, making way for a dedicated wood shop, art gallery, photography studio, stage, and much more. I can’t wait until Brick Factory opens to the public again!

For two, tonight’s Art Crawl features the intriguing “temporary hyper-reality” environ Jerkwater Burg. An experiment by local artists including members of Blacktooth Records, Square People, and Fly Golden Eagle, the Burg will take over Open Gallery in the downtown Arcade tonight from 6pm to 9pm. I’ve been incorrectly pronouncing and spelling it “Jerkwater BUG” until this very moment. In fact, I had to correct the spelling in all the spots I wrote it above. Is the Burg already screwing with my mind?!?!

I can’t do any better than the description on the Facebook event page:

The evening of November 3, Open Gallery will play host to an environment built up of corporeal experience. ‘Jerkwater Burg’ is the collaboration of Nashville artists, under the guise of Blacktooth Records (in the archival sense), who work in varying mediums, combining their abilities in order to manipulate multiple senses with the hope of wholly influencing and enhancing the physiological, psychological, and emotional state of its audience. It is not a gallery showcase, but a temporary hyper-reality, designed to encourage its inhabitants to feel something new, something strange.

In ‘Jerkwater Burg’ an attempt is made to house an environment not unlike what Alan Watts described as, “the experiencer and the experience becoming a single, ever-changing, self-forming process,” one where the situation is familiar – semiotically, artistically, etc. – but unlike the unification of the place and person, we desire a slight discomfort with what we call the Arpeggio of Meaning while still holding belief in the singular experience. Magical. Curious. Off-putting. Inviting. A kind of forcing of an unconscious suspension of disbelief.Our idle frustration with our own inability to project a concrete meaning on experiences is fascinating to us, and in our current age we think that many others feel the same. Perhaps it is that these affects exist entirely outside of logistics. We invite you to explore ‘Jerkwater Burg’.You may accidentally find yourself in the middle of Jihad or adorning yourself with Mimosa in the springtime. Perhaps you’ll discover your lover to be too coquettish in this space, or that all your friends are a pale mutiny of dispossessed voidoids hatched in a misty somewhere between fictive and mundane. And we know you’ll want to help – we do too, that’s the idea – but we can’t help, and we view all these attempts at meaning as banging your head against a wall: it’s nice when it stops.The more unsure we are of the exact spacial province we’re inhabiting, the further into the ‘liminal hinterland we go. You have to know it feelingly in these ugly, mystifying times and the last thing we want to do is rest on our laurels when it comes to this slug we’re trying to salt.

Yes, I know. This could go either way. But I’m a sucker for experiential art ala St. Louis City Museum, and I’m placing my bet that this exhibit will be the most talked about Art Crawl show in a long time. The folks behind Black Tooth Records haven’t steered us wrong yet.

Jerkwater Burg
6pm-9pm, free

Open Gallery
The Arcade
244 5th Ave. N.
Nashville, TN 37219

Oct 042012
 
Robbie Hunsinger

Robbie Hunsinger

I don’t know how Soundcrawl director and co-founder Kyle Baker does it. I have enough trouble organizing a one day festival. Soundcrawl 2012’s schedule spans five continuous days! And every single event is a major attraction for lovers of sound art and avant garde music.

As the Soundcrawl home page states, “Soundcrawl is a sound art and new media organization presenting works by best and brightest new media artists and composers in a unique ‘opt in’ gallery format. Since 2009 we’ve received 450+ works by 90 composers in 43 countries on 6 continents, and presented 72 to audiences in Nashville, Tennessee.”

Check out our 2011 interview with Kyle Baker. The really cool thing about Soundcrawl is that it’s interlocked with the October 6th First Saturday Art Crawl. As you roam from gallery to gallery, you’ll discover sound stations playing Soundcrawl official selections.

But this year, that’s just the beginning. Here’s the schedule of events:

Saturday Oct 6th

First Saturday Art Crawl, 6-8pm The Arcade

Tracy Silverman, 9:30pm Brick Factory

Sunday Oct 7th

 Soundcrawl: Art of the Future, 5PM – 8PM

Monday Oct 8th

Soundcrawl Presents Benton-C Bainbridge & Tony Youngblood,  7PM

Tuesday Oct 9th

Soundcrawl Presents Tim Hinck, 7PM – 9PM

Wednesday Oct 10th

Soundcrawl Presents Robbie Lynn Hunsinger,  7PM – 9PM

I’m really looking forward to Robbie Hunsinger‘s performance. The Facebook event page states, “This concert will feature opportunities for audience participation along with several premieres: a duet for arduino and soprano sax, a composition for alto sax and vocoder, and a multimedia composition for two English Horns and Bass. This last piece is her third project in a multimedia series based on source material captured from a canoe in Ebenezer Creek, an eerie, historic black water swamp in Georgia. This will be Hunsinger’s first composition for multiple player interactive multimedia and each player will independently control imagery in real-time.”

VERY COOL!

There’s also video artist Benton C Bainbridge‘s collaboration with some young ruffian. 😉

That event’s Facebook event page states, “An evening of FastMappin’; wherein video artist extrodinaire Benton-C will map projections onto what you bring while Tony Youngblood provides mind-expanding musical accompaniment. Put it in the Beam and Benton-C will Map it.” Guaranteed fun.

There’s also electric violinist extraordinaire Tracy Silverman (whom Terry Riley liked so much he wrote a symphony for), digital media manipulator Tim Hinck, and the carnivalesque symposium known as Art of the Future:

Grab your interesting friends and head down to downtown for a great night of sounds and wonders as Soundcrawl presents Art of the Future, an eclectic mix of live performances and innovative media installations in a carnival atmosphere.  Stroll through cutting edge new media from 5 until 8pm: interact with a video, listen to sound art from a world away,  tweak the knobs on a sound sculpture, lose yourself in an electric haze of sound from accomplished performers, take in new visual art, experience what’s possible when imagination and technology mix.

Every event except the Art Crawl is happening at my favorite Nashville creative space Brick Factory Nashville. Don’t miss it!

Joe Nolan wrote a great SoundCrawl preview over at the Nashville Scene.

Brick Factory Nashville
(Inside Cummins Station)
Suite 126
209 10th Ave South
Nashville, TN 37203

Sep 292011
 

On October 1st and 2nd in the heart of the country music capital of the world – walking distance from neon signs, country cover bands, line dancing tourists, and tip bucket buskers  — downtown Nashville will waft with sounds unfamiliar. It’s fitting that SOUNDCRAWL, the year’s most challenging and innovative music festival, is happening on the turf of music’s lowest common denominator, thumbing its nose to an industry that stamps art into commodity.

The ambitious festival will envelop three downtown spaces: the Arcade, the Presbyterian Church, and the Bank Gallery. You can see the full schedule at the Soundcrawl website and find out how to get into Sunday’s ART OF THE FUTURE event FREE here.

Soundcrawl co-founder KYLE BAKER talks with Theatre Intangible about the festival’s past, present and future. For more on the crawl, check out last year’s Theatre Intangible interview with the other founder, AARON DOENGES.

TI: What was the genesis for Soundcrawl?

Kyle: In the spring of 2009, Aaron [Doenges] and I were on his back patio discussing a festival called SOUNDWALK in Long Beach, California. At the time, their website was down, so we just envisioned partnering with the Art Crawl and assumed that that’s what their event was like, too. Afterwards, we went back to their site and realized we had created something substantially different.

TI: How has Soundcrawl evolved over the past three years?

Kyle: Well, in 2009 the vision was more “art project” than festival, you know, like the project where somebody puts pianos on street corners or something. We loved the idea that we’d take these great works and serve them up for public consumption by putting them in art galleries for one night. Since then, we’ve been driven to serve the art well, and that’s led to a more structured and independent experience.

TI: In Soundcrawl:Mainstage, sound art will take over the First Saturday Art Crawl at the Arcade. What can we expect?

Kyle: Typically, the response has been something like,  “This sounds like Star Wars!” When we first heard that in 09, we got defensive. “No! It’s ART, dangit!” Now I realize it’s a compliment. We’ve tried to run with that expression a bit.

We love the Art Crawl. We love the vibrancy and the energy of the whole event; and so our first stop is there, to present our Mainstage selections as we have in years past. The Arcade will pretty much be taken over by avant-garde audio. Continuing our embrace of emerging video art, we’re also presenting the video software Weiv on our new Soundcrawl Hologram. The software is one part game and one part art, allowing users to control aspects of the video art by using Wii controllers. It’s a lot of fun, and we’re pleased to help introduce it to Nashville.

TI: What are some of your favorite pieces playing the crawl this year?

Kyle: My favorites this year are “My Parents’ Phone Number” by Ethan Frederick Greene, and “Cloud I: Windmills I-65” by Bin Li. Both of them are inventive pieces that are very approachable. I recognize very clearly that Soundcrawl is introducing the whole genre of audio art during the Art Crawl, and it’s very pleasing to me to find works like these. They are clever and imaginative, strongly constructed, but are able to be understood at many different levels of engagement.

TI: What role does experience play? Why can’t I just download these works and listen to them on my headphones at home?

Kyle: Don’t tempt me! – Soundcrawl Internet Audio festival. . . (laughs). . .  Because we don’t experience art that way. That’s not how we use our computers. I think a great deal about audience expectations, and I’ll tell you, that there are few things humans approach with as open a mind as an art gallery. Computers are tools, we evaluate the things we use them for based on utility, I think. We tend to know what we expect when we go to a concert too. Theatre and art galleries are the two spaces where I think the audience has only a vague idea what’s going to happen and is excited (rather than fearful) to be in that position.

TI: Soundcrawl:Listening Room takes place in a bank vault. Attendees are encouraged to bring a blanket and sandwich. I think it’s safe to say this will be the world’s first bank vault experimental music picnic. What inspired this incongruous listening party?

Kyle: Well, we were looking for a space near the Art Crawl to retreat to, and Todd just opened The Bank. It’s one of those friend of a friend connections. It’s a very good thing for us, because, like I said, there are few things we approach with such an open mind as an art gallery- and we don’t want it to be a concert. You should see the space. He’s painted all the walls with just super crazy images, it adds a ton of energy to the room.

TI: Soundcrawl:Art of the Future features live performances, audio installations, visual art, and video installations. What excites you about this program?

Kyle: Art of the Future is my baby. I’ve been waiting to put something like this together for a while. My background is in theatre and production design- I even ran a haunted house when I was young. To me, Art of the Future is a pop-up new media gallery that happens to be hosting some live performances. Ultimately, I’d love to present each piece in its own installed space, but we’re still a few years away from that. I love giving the audience options and having multiple things happening at once. I love the “magic” of automated art and the personal connections we have with live performances existing in the same space.

TI: New media can often be a challenging experience. Have you had any negative responses to the works in the past Soundcrawls? How do you deal with them?

Kyle: We haven’t really had any. I suppose that’s because of the “opt-in” format we use.  If they don’t like something, they “opt-out” and go on with their evening.

TI: What about positive responses?

Kyle: What we hear most times is that people are surprised that the art is so profoundly moving. They didn’t expect to like it at all, but yet the beauty of a work touched them.

TI: You’re a graduate in Composition from Belmont University, and you won the university’s prestigious Competition Contest. How has your education shaped your composition? What was it like winning the award?

Kyle: My education has had a profound impact on my work, but a lot of my learning took place outside of school. I learned a ton when I toured with Drum and Bugle Corps during undergrad, and that sense of precision and pageantry has continued in my work. Belmont was incredibly gracious and supportive of my ideas while I was there. Winning the award was a great night, and meant that the piece was played by the orchestra. That was a lot of fun.

TI: Your album of compositions Bootcut Classical (including the sound art piece “Psychosis”) is available on Amazon.com and other outlets. How does being a composer yourself affect your selection process?

Kyle: When we listen to the submissions, I tend to root for the composer like it’s a sporting event. “Com’on man!… Awww, why’d you do that? Two-hand catch!” etc. I’m intensely focused on the internal logic and rhetoric of a piece. . . but I have a bias towards the aggressive.

TI: What else do you look for in Soundcrawl entries?

Kyle: Passion, agility & rhetoric. Say something!

TI: Who are some of your favorite artists and musicians in Nashville?

Kyle: I really like the band EASTERN BLOCK, and the Americana band FAREWELL DRIFTERS. Both groups are just incredibly talented. If there’s any justice in the music business, they’ll be headliners soon.

TI: What’s the number one thing you want people to take away from this year’s Soundcrawl?

Kyle: Wonder. I hope they walk a way with the same post-event high you get from a good play or concert. The world becomes incredibly real and different because you’re seeing it through the artist’s eyes.