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Tonight at 1st Saturday Art Crawl: Jerkwater Burg “Temporary Hyper-Reality” 2012-11-03

Brick Factory, Visual Arts No Responses »

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

Sunday at Blair School of Music: Blair Percussion VORTEX perform Michael Gordon’s TIMBER 2012-11-04

Concerts No Responses »

Nov 012012

Michael Gordon and Mantra Percussion

Blair School of Music‘s VORTEX percussion ensemble is one of the most vital group of artists working in Nashville today. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Michael Holland, VORTEX put on the brilliant John Cage Centennial Celebration earlier this year. Next year’s equivalent celebration, the Southeastern United States Premiere of George Antheil’s restored original Ballet Mecanique, promises to be the most ambitious daylong event Blair School has ever presented. Three words: 16 player pianos!

But it’s the Sunday evening VORTEX performance that has me presently excited: the Nashville premiere of Michael Gordon‘s “Timber.”

The 2011 composition is written for six percussionists, each playing a different length of simantra, a Greek instrument used in liturgical services. Avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis used simantras in his 1969 work Persephassa. A simantra is essentially a wood block struck with a mallet, and in fact, Timber employs six different lengths of 2X4 wood.

Yes. VORTEX will be banging 2X4s.

But don’t let the novelty of the composition fool you into believing it lacks substance. On the contrary, the use of the specific lengths of 2X4 yield a complex tonal habitat. Michael McCurdy, percussionist for Mantra Percussion, the group that premiered “Timber” in the U.S., had this to say:

One of the most intriguing things about these instruments is the vast harmonic spectrum that exists in each one of these 2X4s. It’s not like a marimba or a xylophone bar where the fundamental pitch is something that is the prime feature of the sound. And these 2X4s . . . what we find is that the harmonic spectrum and all of the interaction that the frequencies have with one another actually contributes to the music itself. It’s almost as the sound is moving around the ensemble and it’s projected out into the performance space, it’s almost like an angelic chorus that’s behind the sound that comes from the harmonics in each one of these 2X4s. And really that’s one of the most amazing features of this piece.

I pulled that quote from the following video. It’s a great introduction to the piece, and I recommend you check it out.

Matthew Guerrieri from the Boston Globe wrote,

…one of the things that makes “Timber’’ so compulsively listenable is the way Gordon structures each player’s crescendos and decrescendos, creating waves of sound in the performance space. Contact microphones are attached to each simantra, to bring out the overtones in each instrument. The changes in timbre and rhythmic pattern are so subtle that they seem more like natural occurrences than conscious decisions on the part of composer and performers.

It is to Michael Holland and VORTEX’s great credit that they sought out a new composition that’s innovative, challenging, and rich in texture. I can’t wait to hear how the harmonics interact with Blair’s intimate Turner Hall. The Sunday event is a must-see. Don’t miss it!

Blair Percussion VORTEX perform Michael Gordon’s “Timber”
Sunday, November 4th, 8pm, free show
Blair School of Music – Turner Hall
2400 Blakemore Avenue, Nashville, TN 37212

Tonight at Zeitgeist Indeterminacies: Stan Link w/ Robert Bond 2012-11-01

Concerts No Responses »

Nov 012012

Tonight is the last Zeitgeist Indeterminacies event of 2012! Composer Stan Link is performing and percussionist Robert Bond is moderating. Both teach at Blair School of Music. The series title Indeterminacies is taken from a John Cage idea of processes whose outcome is not predetermined.

On the Facebook event page, Zeitgeist provocatively hinted at something special by writing that the event, “will only ever occur here [tonight.]” I’m guessing they’re referring to this: Stan wrote three special pieces just for tonight’s show. Once they are performed, the master copy (and only copy) of the score will be destroyed. I’ll accept wagers on methods of destruction with odds to office shredder and engulfed in flames.

Here’s the press release from Zeitgeist Gallery with the full details:

Thursday, November 1, 6-8pm, public invited

In the gallery: New work from: Richard Feaster

Zeitgeist is pleased to announce the last installment of the Fall 2012 Indeterminacies program featuring Nashville-based composer and musician Stan Link. Robert Bond, musician, educator, and critical thinker will moderate a conversation.

Stan will present three pieces he has composed especially for this performance:

“Flametree”– soprano, guitar and live computer processing

“Passing Through” marimba and computer

“Event” for viola and guitar.

These pieces will be performed once from an original score and then the score will be destroyed.

The program will feature:

Stan Link, composer and computer processing

Michael Slayton, composer

Zach Bowers, marimba

Shelby Flowers, marimba

Kevin Rilling, marimba

Ali Cole, soprano

Emma Dansak, viola

Josh McGuire, guitar

Jonathan Rattner, video artist

Stan Link is Associate Professor of Composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music and an internationally recognized composer and performer. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory and studied composition with Ed Miller and Richard Hoffmann. He later became a student of Roman Haubenstock-Ramati at the Vienna Hochschule fur Musik and went on to study composition at Princeton with Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, Peter Westergaard and Claudio Spies. He taught composition at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia and at the University of Illinois. As a creator of a wide range of acoustic and computer music ranging from solo chamber pieces to a ballet for orchestra, electric guitar and African drums, his pieces have been heard on concerts, broadcasts, webcasts and new music festivals across the United States, in Europe, and Australia.

Robert Bond is a drummer, performer, producer, remixer, educator and consultant. He is currently adjunct teaching at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute also at Vanderbilt. He has recorded for the Rough Trade and d-Pulse labels, and served as creative for the London Symphony Orchestra. He is also currently a facilitator for the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.

This event is free and open to the public.

Stan Link Indeterminacies
6:00pm until 8:00pm, free show
Zeitgeist Gallery
1819 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN

Wednesday at Noa Noa: Paul Metzger, Tim Kaiser, Robbie Lynn Hunsinger 10/31/2012

Concerts, Noa Noa No Responses »

Oct 292012

Here’s a fantastic lineup coming to Nashville on Halloween night: Paul Metzger, Tim Kaiser, and Robbie Lynn Hunsinger. This is going down at 7pm sharp at Noa Noa (house), 620 Hamilton Avenue, Nashville, TN 37203. This is an early show, so you’ll still have time for Halloween parties, haunted houses, etc.

Minneapolis’ Paul Metzger hears sounds conventional string instruments can’t fully realize, so he modifies instruments to suit his needs. You’ll often see Paul performing on a modified banjo or guitar with sympathetic strings added, or more recently on electro-organic conflaborations like an optical Theremin gourd. Paul is considered one of the finest American instrumentalists alive today, and rare is the opportunity to see him perform in the South. Do not miss this for anything!

ISSUE @ 110 Livingston: Jozef van Wissem (Paul Metzger excerpt) from Damian Calvo on Vimeo.

Duluth’s Tim Kaiser makes custom acoustic and electronic instruments out of material he finds at salvage yards, thrift stores, and yard sales. He comes up with incredibly elegant ideas like using metal leaf rake tines and an electrical ground bar to make custom kalimbas and snowmobile drive-track gears as circular bridges for electric khotos and other bowed string instruments. But he doesn’t rest on the laurels of cool sounding (and looking) instruments. The best part is the ambient experimental music itself: intricate, melodic, and breathtaking. He is the modern day Harry Partch.

Nashville by way of Chicago’s Robbie Lynn Hunsinger is a classically trained oboist and new media artist who combines acoustic music and technology to make innovative art. She most recently played to a packed house at this year’s Soundcrawl. Her experiments include dueting with an Arduino controlled vibrating motor attached to a snare drum, using a hacked Xbox Kinect to control visuals and sound effect parameters, and conducting a Wii-mote armed audience in an interactive visual symphony. I’ve been talking with Robbie about the Halloween show, and I can tell you that she has some VERY cool things planned.

Microphone controlled multimedia performance “Bees” from Robbie Lynn Hunsinger on Vimeo.

Duet for Arduino & Soprano Sax from Robbie Lynn Hunsinger on Vimeo.

Update: Yazoo Brewing Company has very generously donated their beer for the event. Bottles of Pale Ale will be available for those over 21 for a small donation to the bands. Very special thanks to Chris Davis for facilitating this and for helping organize / promote this show.

More info on the Facebook event page.

Wednesday, October 31st, 7pm, $10
Paul Metzger, Tim Kaiser, Robbie Lynn Hunsinger
Noa Noa (house)
620 Hamilton Avenue, Nashville, TN 37203

This is an early show that will start promptly at 7pm. Music ends around 9:30pm. Park on street or in surrounding business lots. Come casual or costumed. We’ll accept you either way.

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