Posts Tagged ‘People Inside Electronics’
People Inside Electronics presents Gnarwhallaby this Sunday
Our friends over at People Inside Electronics are putting on a show with our friends in Gnarwhallaby this weekend. It might seem weird to say “our friends” about both groups in that sentence, but it’s really true, and the friendliness-factor is a big part of what makes our city’s scene so wonderful. Anyway!
In addition to a couple Gnarwhallafavorites from the Polish cadre of composers that influenced the formation of the band, this show has pieces for musicians + electronics from Morton Subotnick and Donald Erb, and a world premiere from Isaac Schankler.
Here’s a video of Gnarwhallaby performing Włodzimierz Kotoński pour quatre, which is also on the program.
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/84455079]Full details and tickets are up at http://peopleinsideelectronics.com/gnarwhallaby-wild-beasts
Limited tickets available for PiE’s house concert/party/fundraiser with Vicki Ray
Our friends over at People inside Electronics recently got their 501(c)3 status approved. To celebrate, they’re throwing a house concert/party with Vicki Ray, in part to fund their upcoming season. Tickets are limited – there are only 15 available – for the December 7 party at Vicky’s house.
Funds raised from this event will go to supporting PiE’s upcoming season, which looks awesome. For details, visit peopleinsideelectronics.com/vicki-ray.
People Inside Electronics presents Kathleen Supové this weekend
This Saturday, October 11, People Inside Electronics kick off their season with Kathleen Supové’s Digital Debussy program, featuring music by Matt Marks, Annie Gosfield, Jacob Cooper, Eric KM Clark and Randall Woolf. Supové’s playing is something everyone should see live. Her performance of LA local composer Carolyn Yarnell’s The Same Sky is stunning – so much so that I actually went to MySpace to find the video of it I’d seen way back when.
The show starts at Art Share at 8, and tickets – which are cheaper in advance – are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/851884.
Listen to Sō Percussion premiere a concerto by David Lang; see them at Green Umbrella tonight
A couple of days ago percussion quartet extrodinaire Sō Percussion premiered a new concerto, man made, by David Lang. It’s awesome, and was paired with Mahler 5, all conducted by Dudamel. If you missed it, NPR has you covered. You can hear the whole concert here:
http://www.npr.org/event/music/351416658/la-philharmonic-live-dudamel-mahler-and-new-music
Even better than sitting at home listening, you can hear the ensemble tonight on the LA Phil’s Green Umbrella series, in a performance of Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature and Michael Gordon’s Timber. The show is at Disney Hall at 8, and tickets are available at http://www.laphil.com//tickets/green-umbrella-percussion-marvels/2014-10-07.
People Inside Electronics and Classical Revolution this Saturday
This is yet another great weekend for shows in LA. People Inside Electronics are bringing bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood to MorYork Gallery for a Saturday night program of music for voice and electronics.
Looking for a slightly earlier way to hear some music on September 7th? Classical Revolution LA have you covered. Elliott Goldkind and the Krysalis Ensemble will be rocking The Silverlake Lounge at 6.
IT IS POSSIBLE TO MAKE BOTH.
Here are links:
Los Angeles Percussion Quartet plays on Saturday, Nominated for a GRAMMY
We are incredibly proud of our friends in the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet. If you haven’t heard yet, their album Rupa-Khandha, released earlier this year on Sono Luminus records, is nominated for two Grammy awards! Huge congratulations to Matthew Cook, Justin DeHart, Eric Guinivan, and Nick Terry. Here’s hoping you guys bring home some trophies.
The good news about this for you? You can hear them this Saturday night at Atwater Crossing, in collaboration with People Inside Electronics. The concert includes the premiere of Isaac Schankler‘s Blindness. Complete details are up at peopleinsideelectronics.com/lapq. See you there.
Interview: Composer Veronika Krausas on Misfits and Hooligans
This Saturday, Catalysis Projects and People Inside Electronics are collaborating to put on a show called Misfits and Hooligans at Beyond Baroque in Venice. I caught up via email with composer/the-brains-behind-it Veronika Krausas to talk about the show. While it’s nice to pretend I’m an objective journalist (I’m not), I’ve gotta say that the whole concept of this concert sounds completely awesome to me, and that I’m way excited about it, and think you should probably go. Thumbs up/high five, Veronika, I can’t wait.
The concert that your group Catalysis Projects is putting on with People Inside Electronics is called “Misfits and Hooligans,” and features music for all sorts of instruments that are often thought of as such. Aside from my being sad that melodica didn’t make the cut, this is really exciting. Where did the concept come from? And are you concerned about angering violists by including them on this?
AHHH … there are so many wonderful instruments that just didn’t make the cut … bagpipes, tuba, trombone, nose flute, banjo, and yes melodica. I think the violists are thrilled to be included. Probably everyone not included is wondering how they can get into the club! The question really should be – are you a misfit or a hooligan? But then it depends which country you hail from because in the lands that enjoy soccer (aka as non-American football), a hooligan might have a slightly less savory connotation than a hooligan in my less aggressive-less violent-more mischievous-Edward Gorey-esque usage of the term. Even so, I think I’m more of a misfit than a hooligan although I definitely appreciate musical hooliganism!
But, back to the concert! The composer Daniel Rothman started a new music series at Beyond Baroque and asked me to organize a concert. I enlisted my pals at Catalysis Projects, the visual artist, filmmaker, and writer Quintan Ana Wikswo, composers and performers Isaac Schankler and Aron Kallay (also of People Inside Electronics) to help with this extravaganza. It started out as a ‘so what pieces do you have’? type of thing and slowly emerged as a collection of ‘interesting’ instruments and it went gloriously downhill from there! On the program there are also some truly wonderful and crazy pieces for harpsichord by the French Baroque composer Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer, whose name alone is great! (We’ve all adopted Pancrace as our Misfit or Hooligan middle name!) Pancrace (as he is now known by his friends) was a contemporary of, and eclipsed quite a bit by, his pal Rameau! I heard Arthur Omura play Marche des Scythes and it was one of those ‘AH HA’ moments for me with the harpsichord. I drank the Royer Kool-aid and that was it. I’m now officially hooked on the harpsichord. It was such a wonderfully bizarre piece that it and 2 other of the pieces from Royer’s Première Livre de Pièces pour Clavecin are being performed on the concert. He unfortunately only has one book of harpsichord pieces.
Aron Kallay is playing a gorgeous piece for toy piano and electronics by Tom Flaherty. Isaac Schankler has this great duo for accordion and electronics called Chocolate Phase that he’s playing with Daniel Corral. I’ve asked them to wear lederhosen but that idea didn’t go over so well. He also has his wonderful viola piece Dear Mr. Edison.
My instruments are harmonica and double bass. Let’s make the harmonica the misfit and the double basses will be the hooligans! Jonas is a solo harmonica piece that the harmonica player Bill Barrett commissioned a few years ago and it’s finally having its premiere at this show along with a great text and film by Quintan Ana Wikswo called The Anguillidae Eater. The text is about the migration of eels to the Coronian Spit in Lithuania (which is one of my favorite places in the world) with a surreal twist. It goes perfectly with the harmonica music. The piece is named after my grandfather Jonas, who loved harmonica and smoked eel and was Lithuanian. He was probably more of a friendly hooligan that a misfit. I still have his harmonica in my studio.
The musical hooligans are represented in my double bass trio called Gardens of Stone. This piece was inspired by a poem by the Canadian writer André Alexis:
out of silence, to another silence
from sun and water, dry white salt.
time moves like that, crest to crest,
and our selves, yours and mine,
are what is left from sea …
You often compose for multimedia. What’s your approach to collaboration with other artists?
I’ve been so fortunate to have an amazing group of writers, film makers, artists, acrobats, and musicians around me that they’re always so inspiring. The process always happens so naturally – someone suggests an idea (or I have an image or sound in my mind) and that small kernel just grows (often like a weed) and just emerges. Somehow we’re always on the same sort of wave length when working on projects.
Art by Krausas's collaborator Reneé Reynolds
You’ve also done a good bit of work outside of music on your own. Did you study visual art, photography, or writing formally, or have you sort of picked it up over time?
I’ve only studied music but I am an accidental photographer, occasional book-maker, story writer, and filmmaker. The great thing about ideas is that often they take on a non-aural form, which sometimes gets translated into music and other times into another art form. I started to collect quite a few photographs of graffiti from all over the world and one year decided to put them into a book. Definitely an accidental photographer. Another friend (writer and artist Renée Reynolds) and I started with the idea of an errata in a magazine and slowly this developed into a project of a limited hand-made book that had very divergent ideas of our interpretations of what is an errata. The cover was floor tiles held together with duct tape – itself an errata of sorts.
You’re actually the first composer I’ve interviewed who is on a university faculty. I’ve heard some composition professors say that they only get to compose in summer because teaching and the work associated with it take so much time. What’s the balance like, for you? And are you pleased with it?
Tough during the year but it’s like anything – you make time, especially when you’re inspired or have a deadline. As those deadlines approach I’m sure my students notice the crazed look in my eyes…I teach at 8am so I’m not sure how much they notice at that hour!
Being that you’ve had works performed all over the place, how would you say LA compares or fits into the world scene for new music? Seems pretty strong to me, but I’ve never spent time in New York.
I never imagined myself living in LA and ended up here a little bit by accident. Since arriving I have LOVED it. The musical and creative environment is so vibrant that it’s really inspiring to live and work here. There so much music and art and dance and performance going on, it’s just a little spread out! And the weather is pretty darn great.
Anything on the horizon you can tell us about?
I’m off to Belgium in the fall – my chamber orchestra piece analemma is an official selection for the World Music Days.
Also, I’ve been asked to present my films at a series run by Gerry Fialka in the fall. Although not a film maker – just an accidental one – I have worked with several really spectacular film and video makers (Quintan Ana Wikswo and Nana Tchitchoua – who runs the Tula Tea Room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology). This event with feature some of the works I’ve done with them and my own ‘accidental’ foray into making a film. A few years ago someone ran an idea for a short film by me and I offered what I thought was a good (and slightly quirky) suggestion. They didn’t like the idea or even use it so I thought “it’s a great idea, I’m going to make it.” So I came up with 7 short and silly scenarios that became 7 intermezzi for film that I wrote and produced. It was shot by Marc Lempert and the music was by friends. A very fun project.
Thank you!
Get your tickets for this weekend’s show at brownpapertickets.com/event/235385. See you there!
Interview: Isaac Schankler on People Inside Electronics
This Saturday night, People Inside Electronics present Nothing is Real: psychedelia for piano and electronics at Pierre’s Fine Pianos in Westwood. Amid preparations for the show, artistic director and founder Isaac Schankler managed to find a moment for an interview.
Tell me a bit about this weekend’s concert. You’ve got a ton of pianists on it, and what looks like a cool mix of pieces by local (Shaun Naidoo) and seriously established (Alvin Lucier) composers.
Yes! We’re really happy to have a bunch of amazing pianists involved: Vicki Ray, Vatche Mankerian, Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Louise Thomas, Aron of course, and Rafael Liebich, who also happens to be our new assistant director.
As far as the music goes, part of our mission all along has been to program works by established composers alongside newer works, to show that there’s a kind of history that’s there that people are continuing to build on. For this concert the classic pieces are Alvin Lucier’s Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) and Charles Dodge’s Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental. Lucier’s piece is a kind of stripped-down arrangement of the Beatles tune, which you hear first from the piano and then emerging from a teapot, which the performer is able to play with onstage to control the resonance of the sound. Dodge’s piece takes an old recording of the tenor Enrique Caruso and digitally manipulates it — it was one of the first pieces to use digital manipulation in this way.
One of the things that these pieces have in common, we realized, was the illusory nature of the electronics. There’s this idea that, once you record something, it becomes detached from our ordinary reality and becomes this kind of putty that can be shaped at will. A liberating and scary thought! Hence the “psychedelic” theme that the concert is loosely organized around, though the selection is pretty diverse within that. Linda Bouchard’s Gassho is very meditative, and Mike McFerron’s Torrid Mix is inspired by hip-hop. Pierre Jodlowski’s Serie Noire is based on clips from old noir films, and Shaun Naidoo’s Voices of Time is based conceptually on a J.G. Ballard story. Those last two are quite virtuosic, by the way.
Oh! And I should mention that we just added yet another piece to the program, Benjamin Broening’s Nocturne/Doubles.
How did People Inside Electronics get started?
PIE got started in 2009, when Aron Kallay and I were both graduate students at USC, and we noticed that while there was a lot of new music in LA, there wasn’t a whole lot of electroacoustic music being performed (aside from the efforts of a few groups like SCREAM and Sonic Odyssey). And we had the thought, well, if the venue doesn’t exist, why not create one?
You’ve collaborated not only with artists working in other mediums, but with scientists and engineers as well. Could you discuss some of your collaborative efforts, how you got people involved, and what the reaction was like?
Sure, I can give a couple examples. In 2010 we worked with Alexandre François and Elaine Chew, who were both engineering professors at USC at the time and part of a research group called MuCoaCo (Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory). Alex designed this really cool piece of software called Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation). Mimi is a kind of improvisational partner, and there’s also a visualization aspect to it that allows you to see what Mimi is up to. I was really taken with the software, and performed with it at our June 2010 concert. The reaction was great, because it piqued the interest of science-minded people beyond the usual new music crowd. I think it’s exciting for people to see unusual and artistic uses of technology — even though they work with it day in and day out they don’t necessarily know what it’s really capable of.
Then there’s our collaborations with other artists. For example, on that same concert we presented Veronika Krausas’ Waterland, which included video by Quintan Ana Wikswo and text by Andre Alexis. Veronika is curating a concert in April that we’re co-presenting with the interdisciplinary arts organization Catalysis Projects, so you can expect a lot more of that in the future.
What has the reaction to your concerts been like in general? Do you feel that there’s a strong and supportive scene for electroacoustic composition here, or is it something that could use some improvement?
Yes, I would say people have been very supportive! For example, we’ve started to have funding campaigns for our last couple of concerts, and raised over $2000 total through that, so that’s been really encouraging. (You can still donate to our current fundraiser at indiegogo, actually.) We pour a lot of time and energy and money into making these concerts happen, and it would be really hard to do that if people hadn’t responded in the way they have. So if you’re reading this and you’re one of those people who has donated or come to our concerts in the past, thank you!
What do you see as the challenges to running a concert series here and now?
LA presents some unique challenges for a concert series because of the size of the city and the fact that there’s always so much going on. You have to present a really compelling reason for people to come out, especially if they’re driving across town! But I think in the long run it’s actually helped us by pushing us to really finely hone what we do, both in terms of the quality of the music and in how we present it.
I have to say that I think LA is a really fantastic place for new music right now. I’ve seen so many great concerts in the past year, and I’ve missed so many more. I feel terrible every time I miss a concert I want to see, but it’s practically unavoidable.
This is a big question, but it often feels like electroacoustic music somehow gets separated from other genres in an almost unfair way. As in, symphonic or traditional concert music connoisseurs seem to see it as novelty, whereas listeners more familiar with popular electronic music tend to think of it as a separate, experimental thing. Do you perceive that at all? And if so, is it something that concerns you?
I don’t particularly see this kind of thing happening, at least not any more than with other kinds of new music. It may be that I’m just insulated from this kind of talk. But electronics have played such an important role in the development of new music, and so many great 20th and 21st century composers have at least dabbled in the medium, that I think most people who at least know about it don’t view it as a niche at all. It’s been with us almost a century, after all, so it’s not really a novelty at this point.
The exception to this might be those people who view classical music as some kind of final stronghold, the only place where “real” music is still made with “real” instruments. They might say that technology is slowly chipping away at that. But every musical instrument was new technology at some point. Or, to shamelessly quote Brian Eno, “technology is just the name we give to things that don’t work yet.”
I think that’s why PIE has been focused on pieces that just work, pieces that are aesthetically compelling regardless of the technology involved. That’s what’s really striking to me about those pieces by Lucier and Dodge. Whether or not they were technically innovative at the time they were composed, that’s not really why we programmed them or what you notice when you hear them. The technological medium almost melts away, and you’re just listening to a beautifully constructed piece of music.
I’m very curious about your take on electronic performance practice, especially since it says in your biography that you’re interested in how people interact with electronics. Let’s be blunt: watching people press buttons is pretty boring. Having the live pianist and visual elements helps immensely, but are you also pushing new modes of performance for the electronic portions of these concerts?
Well, performance with electronics can be frustrating to watch because it’s kind of a black box; the performance isn’t really visible in the same way it is with an expressive instrumentalist (despite the best efforts of head-bobbing DJs everywhere). It’s a kind of disembodied performance. I think putting live instrumentalists front and center helps, as you said. And when programming newer works, we try as much as possible to incorporate live electronics that react to what the performers are doing, so the electronics become a kind of extension of the instrument. The electronics in Shaun Naidoo’s piece that Aron is premiering, for example, are incredibly responsive to what Aron’s doing at the piano. It just looks and feels like a natural extension of his performance, and it’s really fun to watch.
I also think we can still learn a lot from Lucier, the oldest composer on the program. The lifting of the teapot lid is such a straightforward action, but you immediately understand what it means sonically; you know exactly what the performer is doing to manipulate the sound, and that’s one of the simple joys of experiencing that piece.
I can’t help but notice that People Inside Electronics only puts on one or two shows a year. I’m sure you and your partners are quite busy with other projects. As such, have you hit a happy frequency with that, or are you hoping to increase the number of shows you do?
Two per year (one in the fall and one in the spring) seemed ideal in the past, but lately we’ve had a hankering to do more, which is one of the reasons we asked Rafael to be a part of PIE. We actually have 3 concerts this season: the one with Eclipse Quartet last fall, the one coming up on February 11th, and the one on April 28th called “Misfits and Hooligans” that’s being co-presented with Catalysis Projects. And we already have something in the works for this fall that I’m very anxious to talk about when it’s finalized!
Find more information or purchase tickets to this weekend’s concert at peopleinsideelectronics.com/nothing-real-psychedelia-piano-and-electronics, and donate to the fundraising campaign at indiegogo.com/People-Inside-Electronics.