Everyday Expression: Dimitri Chamblas & Kim Gordon on Movement, Sound and Performance / December 12, 2018 by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music blog contributor Trever Hagen

October 11, 2018
11.15am
Los Angeles

I pulled up to Dimitri's home-away-from-home a few minutes earlier than our scheduled meeting. I intended to be right on time for this interview and not let the Los Angeles traffic sabotage an ever-so intriguing opportunity: to have an hour of time with Dimitri Chamblas and Kim Gordon to discuss their upcoming performance for Liquid Music. Moreover to speak with people who have so boldly presented their voices was a chance to learn something. Dimitri and Kim—the former a decorated French dancer and choreographer who has just taken up the role as Dean of CalArts and the latter a house-hold name for anyone interested in rock music in the past thirty years—will perform an improvised movement and sound duet on March 4-5, 2019 at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis.

With ten minutes to spend before the interview, I took a short walk around his neighborhood in Silver Lake. The bio-diversity, seemingly-secret homes, hilled driveways are such a striking difference to Minneapolis's wide roads and prairie gentle slopes. Discoveries invigorate the imagination: what is the sunrise like in this cul-de-sac? What is daily life like on this street? The birdcalls betrayed their city living. The dark green palm canopies gave life to an adobe-colored city that has as much mystery as it has smog, both entities hiding in plain view. It is the kind of mystery that emerges in heated tropical pauses.

As my walk looped back to Dimitri’s spot, Kim had just pulled up. We walked in together to Dimitri's modest home. They greeted each other as if they hadn’t seen one another in some time. As Dimitri poured some tea, he spoke with enthusiasm about the dances from India he was studying and their engagement of the facial expressions – intriguing content of that form from that place. We stumbled into a chat about nutrition. Kim had just come from a weightlifting session while Dimitri spoke about the psychology of nutrition. It was a curious conversation – one where everyone was curious to know more about what each had to say about some tidbit of information about health – ancient medicines, super foods, new stretches. It seems the owner manual for the human body is a text that is passed down like this – through reflection on your body, mis-steps, risk management, prevention, cures. Through a reflection on your everyday routines.

Dimitri Chamblas: For nutrition you have to figure out what your day is going to be like, because it is not the same recurrence. Nutrition must be adapted to what your day is going to be. If you have a whole day of rehearsal you won't have the same meal as if you were just resting. You know? What is not often considered is the variety of your everyday life. So for like diets and nutrition "If you do this it is going to be great for this and that" – yes, but my Monday is not the same as your Monday. If you do a whole night or a whole week of some crazy physical activity or whatever it is how you adapt to your life. Not the opposite. Not adapting your life to something that is dictated that you should do.

From the start of our conversation it was clear that the boldness of any artistic voice must come from a boldness of the mind – that is, not adapting to external orders of the world but rather adapting that information to that which is internal. Although we share the singular great cosmic energy that makes up every organic material, it is all differentiated – nothing or no one is the same. We spoke together and for them it seemed to be one of the first times they too had reflected together on their rapport, their interaction, what is going on.

Trever Hagen: So how did you two meet? How did you start working together?

Kim Gordon: We met through our mutual friend Francesca Gabbiani, who has a studio here in Los Angeles.

TH: Did you start rehearsing together when you met? Was there something that brought you together?

DC: Because.... let's change direction. Because really what I enjoyed and what I think is making me think strong things [about this performance] — is that we don't really rehearse, which is totally unusual for a dancer. It was very organic and spontaneous. We have this friend, she had an exhibition and she kind of invited, or proposed [this duo with Kim]. So I thought: ‘What could be strong?’ And I wouldn't even say it was to collaborate but just to make something together.

Anyway we said yes. So Kim invited me to her place to make a kind of try of something, like informally in a living room. And then she was starting to plug in the things [guitars and cables] and I was warming up. I was like ‘Maybe she already started?’ But then very quickly we went into something much more physical, to kind of avoid the imagery of the “player playing and the dancer dancing” because what I also love from Kim is the body and the voice. The voice is a body. It is very enchanting – talking and singing. It is it’s own territory – choreographical territory. So I was very interested by that. Then we did some very physical stuff – but then after 20 minutes I was tired so I went to the kitchen to have a drink. When I came back she was unplugging the stuff. [Kim laughs]. Because as a dancer you start at 10am and end at 6pm. Long rehearsals. Then I said, ‘So for me it is great.’ I really loved that. Because it really re-questions what the work is, especially when the work is improvisation. In dance we have a tendency to prepare improvisation a lot so it is a start of a writing, in a way. What I liked with Kim and what she did, in way was meaning like: ‘If we are going to improvise we have to be scared, we have to be fragile.’ The biggest gift we can give to an audience is to be in front of them like that. It is going to be unique; it is going to be fragile, adventurous. This is improvisation. So I really loved that and since then I have been trying to keep that. We don't see each other a lot so we meet and do that. So it is still super fragile. I know some ways of Kim's body but I don't have a memory of the show. So we don't re-do the show. We meet and "do that thing" assuming that it can be fragile. That's my experience.

TH: Did you have any different take away for the first rehearsal than perhaps what you were expecting?

KG: Not really. We had talked about contact improvisation before because I had done a workshop with Steve Paxton when I first went to New York. One of the reasons I moved to New York wasn't just to do visual arts but also I used to get Dance Magazine, I read about Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Church group [Judson Dance Theater] and I was like how can dance be a phenomenon? That was all very interesting to me – interdisciplinary, the way they were working, and so I was always interested in that.

TH: Was Paxton a mutual reference for you both?

KG: We had talked about him, yes. I did one other collaboration with this visual artist Nick Mauss – he's a visual artist who is very into dance. He had done something with the Northern Ballet Company and asked me and Juliana Huxtable, a trans performance artist, to interact with the music. And I ended up moving into their space a bit so I got a sense of that and it was really fun.

TH: Have you been able to incorporate any of these aspects of balance, touch or momentum into musical worlds?

KG: I guess I have always done that. In Sonic Youth there was always a couple of songs, like “Expressway [to your skull]” where I would stand on the bass, I had a big one. The thing about electrical instruments is that they respond to movement, they are very visceral. You can affect the sound by the way you move. Playing guitar and those gestures. So I was very aware of that. And now, I have this duo – Body/Head, it is two guitars and all improvised. I have always liked to somehow take my guitar and interact with the structure of the space. You know like I'd love to make a film or do a performance under a freeway, you know with like using the cement like a guitar slide and playing with the architecture.

The Switch, an album by Body/Head on Spotify

TH: It was interesting to see your performance in such a small room, this gallery space - you have both performed on iconic stages all over the world. Each of these spaces seems to afford a different property. Is there anything you enjoy about these smaller spaces in contrast to larger stages? Or underneath a bridge?

KG: Well it is just different being surrounded by the audience, right? Being with them and not on a stage.

DC: These last two years in New York I did a lot of stage-based frontality. The first piece I did was a duet with Boris Charmatz we did this piece just after the conservatory. We did it to experiment because at conservatory you learn that a gesture has to be done for a direction, you learn that when you land from a jump the audience shouldn't hear any noise, if you are out of breath the audience shouldn't hear that, etc. etc. So this is one relation to an audience in traditional dance. But then we started to say – ‘No we have to assume that an arm has a weight and that weight makes noise. And we have to assume that a movement can be seen from there and also from there. And we have to assume the context changes the meaning of the movement.’ If you put your hand like this [out-stretched before your chest] and you are near an apple tree, it is to grab an apple. But if a door is there, it is to welcome someone. If it is after a competition then perhaps it is there to make a high-5. So the context is painting the dance. This is why I like these dances: it leaves a lot of room for people to tell themselves their story free of the body and gestures. Being so permeable to the context.

Regarding the gallery performance with Kim, I must say that I kind of liked being close to the audience. I really focused on Kim and the space she designs – herself with her moves and herself with the cables, that's the space for me. I don't really mind about 'Do I attribute a gesture to a direction?' – I am not this way at all. We are more like: ‘What kind of dance can also be the right reaction to what Kim is proposing?’ And for example when the dance is super clean and super designed and super clear, even like super technical – it creates something together which is much stronger than when I go into my own crazy gestures or whatever. Those are just from the experiences we had so far.

KG: Yeah you can't really think about the ends. It is hard to look at yourself because it can take you out of what you are doing. But in the past – playing music on a stage – it is fun to break that wall and go into the audience. They don't expect it. In a way, one thing I always thought was interesting was that the sound on stage is always different than the sound in front of the PA. So the audience never feels that same surround-thing that you do. But you are basically plugging into the technology of the club, and so that is kind of between you and the audience in some way. It is not exactly two different worlds, but it is two different experiences. [On stage] doesn't sound as perfect. Up front you have someone mixing the sound and on stage it is messier. Maybe you don't hear everything – it truly is more in your head or in your body.

DC: Of course it is music, but she is really a performer – with a very special way. She works with the body, with some experiences with different practices. So it is really a performance or a duet. I like that because we never had those questions. I co-teach a class with David Rosenboom and we have 12 composers, 12 dancers together in the room and we are questioning all of those relations between music and dance. How music can be the space for the dance. How music can be the color for the dance. How the dance can be so noisy you don't listen to the music anymore. All of those things. Which there are not those questions here [with Kim]. Because it is really like two performers together (there is the guitar and there is the voice), but really it is how you offer your partner balance. How she trusts you, how she reacts to that, how she takes the lead and brings you somewhere.

TH: It is very delicate negotiations it seems. Is there anything in the space or in realtime that is emerging – like a rule or a challenge – that you don't pursue?

DC: What really excites me about this project, about this duet, is when you dance with someone and you are surprised by their reaction you have proposed. For example I am doing this duet with Marie-Agnès Gillot – she is like the l'étoile dancer of the Paris Opera but kind of a crazy-amazing artist. And when I bring her into a direction she twists it into something else. [Kim and I] have the same – when I twist Kim sometimes – I don't know, a lift or going to the floor – she might follow but she might add something to it that transforms it. For having been dancing with many different partners – what I like here is the craziness of the reactions. The freeness. Like, I initiate something and then suddenly I have a mic there – it is complex, unpredictable and that's the best. That makes it a dance piece, a performance piece, for me.

TH: It is in that improvisational spirit of always supporting—

DC: —and also trusting someone you don't know. Because that's how you accept to give your weight to someone that puts you in danger. "Going out of balance", we say, is the beginning of the dance. Because going out of your balance will make you travel in that space with a temporality. Changing the space, so it is choreography. That's some stuff you can think of in the creation process – but it can take a very long time to be able to do so with your partner. To bring her into some directions that she really has to trust you with. But with us, it was really immediate.

TH: Indeed this rapport can be very difficult actually to establish with someone in a real way, not just performative.

KG: [Laughing] I have never danced with anyone – (except a noise piece I did with my niece). But what I wanted to ask you [Dimitri]: How do you teach performance? You can teach dance? How do you teach dancers to have a presence? Or projection?

Trisha Brown in 'Watermotor', by Babette Mangolte 1978

DC: For example, talking about the 'présence', when I arrived at CalArts, because of the teaching they had, the présence was like super focused on the outside. Kind of showing présence. It puts your body super up and in front. You know? And then I recruited this guy, who is a Trisha Brown dancer – and through body-work he changed the présence of the dancers. To make your body conscious of the weight of the body, of the fact that with arm – to go from here to there – you don't have use energy, just relax the weight will do the work. So then suddenly, these dancers started to be simpler, not playing anything. And then you have this space, you can make decisions. So this question of présence is really related to the body. The posture and the energy.

TH: Kim is there anything you've learned about présence?

KG: Well one thing that has surprised me… sometimes my lower back hurts – that was my trepidation – but the next day after our performance I felt great. And I find that when I just get to move around that is the best thing for my body.

TH: Was there something with movement creatively that you have found different than with other art forms or media. Was there an idea you were exploring in movement you couldn't find elsewhere?

KG: It was pretty much how I thought it would be. I mean it is hard to improv for like 30 minutes. Even for a musician. Bill [Nace] and I do all the time but sometimes it is harder to get past the 30-minute mark. There is just a lot that I have learned from playing with Bill that has been helpful in any improv situation. Also this [performance]. There are times when both of you don't have to be playing or not move... it is different from like ‘oh here is a solo’ – it is not that. It is part of the range of dynamics that can be used.

DC: What I love, when I think about it, is the way Kim is doing the things. Sometimes I am too over-invested. What I really like is very strong and related to the présence thing and to the energy – sometimes she is going to be with the guitar and then she will be over there... like, ‘Is she performing?’ She is totally into it, but with distance. So this kind of présence and energy is incredible. She is so strong. We have rehearsed once and performed once so it is still fresh and we don't know what it is. But it is great. I love that because it is totally unusual. Like in a living room or in front of people – same thing. Being super busy but not to show. Being busy, but only to do the stuff [the tasks of working with objects]. And that is super strong. And that is something I think about – how do you translate that into dance? That is something very particular that you [Kim] have.

TH: Are you thinking of anything in particular or just going in with your guitar?

KG: Well I am kind of thinking of two things – what is going on with the sound, what is going on physically. Sometimes I think maybe I should bring in some more sound but that is just very intuitive.

TH: How does it feel in the performance space when you put your guitar down?

KG: Yeah it is probably more awkward. Having the guitar and microphone, the sound part that I am responsible for, gives me a way to not feel self-concisous about ‘I am doing a dance.’ I always have to trick myself so as to not feel self-consicous.

DC: I do not feel it honestly that you are two different bodies. But listening to you, then, it is conscious to me that you have double the amount of work. Running the music and dancing. Sometimes I feel like we are together but you are busy doing something else – it is great, I love it. We are together but we are not really together. But we really are together.

KG: I don't think of the music as music but more like a texture or some other aspect, like an environment we are moving around in. And then trying to think spatially a little bit.

TH: Do you ever touch the guitar, Dimitri? How do you like working with an object like this?

DC: Same thing – I have no questions [like] ‘Does it change my stance?’ It is there. I was surprised because I didn't know how Kim was considering the guitar as 'her object'.

KG: I probably shouldn't be using my favorite guitar actually – because usually I know how far I can go with it without destroying it. I think I could be freer if it wasn't my favorite guitar. [laughs]

DC: You know sometimes it is great to go easily from one thing to the other on some points, which are really big questions in the art. In classes you could spend a semester studying how you appropriate an object which is not yours by being invited in this context. In this context, it is not. The nature of the guitar in our performance is really changing.. .sometimes it is your [Kim’s] instrument, sometimes it is an object that makes things more complicated, sometimes when you put it somewhere it opens a territory, it is kind of a set up for a new space.

KG: And the guitar is so loaded with gestures, like the heroic gestures that male rock guitarists do. I wrote a piece on that, I have a performance based on that. [laughs]

TH: For sure and when you see this object thrown on the ground, it is still loaded with these gestures, those discourses but in a vulnerable and almost useless way. Or disregarded.

KG: People obsess and fetish over guitars...

TH: So it sounds like everything that you are up to in spatialities, discourse, repertoire or things you've learned is kind of “out the window”?

KG: It is and it isn't. Just as I bring whatever I have learned through everything I've done, so does Dimitri. You have your vocabulary – things that you know.

DC: I think it is the one [performance] where I bring the most of my experience. If you don't then you can't just meet 20 minutes. You bring your whole culture, life and experience. That is something I couldn't do with anyone else. We bring a lot in a very short time. This project to me is very special. We have done it very few times. We could do it all the time – in Paris [for example] – but we don't. So it keeps it very very special. I have it in mind not every day but I think about Kim a lot and what is this thing – but we concretely do it very few times. She is the opposite of the shows that are touring that I dance with. I do 4 shows in New York and then fly here and forget about it. This is the opposite. The presénce of the show is in the everyday life but the reality of the show is kind of never.

And so we return to the quotidian: an investment in the richness of resources to be found in the “variety of your everyday life,” as Dimitri says. What might that return look like? It seems it would be to re-associate présence not necessarily with performativity nor even with habit or routine, but with how you adapt the outer world to your inner world in a way that effortlessly amplifies the power of gesture. The power of one’s voice, in other words. Présence in this everyday manner focuses and communicates your entire history into an expression, sound or movement – something that is undeniably yours, for which the only school to learn from is located within.

Dimitri Chamblas and Kim Gordon will perform for the second time their improvised dance duo at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. March 4-5 2019.

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Follow Kim Gordon & Dimitri Chamblas:
Kim Gordon
Instagram: @kimletgordon
Twitter: @KimletGordon

Dimitri Chamblas
Instagram: @dimitrichamblas
Website: https://www.dimitrichamblas.com/

Inclusion, Collaboration, Evolution: Vanessa Rose Interviews Jennifer Koh / December 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

by ACF President/CEO and LM blog contributor Vanessa Rose

A violin prodigy making her symphony debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11, Jennifer Koh has somehow exceeded expectations that follow the title. As a champion of classical and new music, Koh bridges the divide between traditional performance practice and radical innovation with projects like Bridge to Beethoven and her nonprofit arco collaborative. Koh makes her Liquid Music debut alongside pianist Vijay Iyer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey January 9 at Amsterdam Bar & Hall in St. Paul.

Vanessa Rose: What I appreciate about your advocacy for new music and composers is that you do not see it as an either/or choice with traditional, revered classical works, but rather embracing the and as well as the vibrancy and relevancy it brings to our current repertoire. Your projects include pairing all ten of Beethoven’s violin sonatas with new works and inviting composers to re-imagine the violin concerto. How do you approach this expansion of your repertoire and selecting the composers you work with?

Jennifer Koh: I’ve always seen contemporary music as a thread to the past. My experience with performing new music is that often audiences who have not experienced classical music can relate to contemporary music, which engages with contemporary sounds and creates a pathway to experiencing older music.

In selecting the composers, I do extensive research, which includes listening to composers online, asking for scores, and going to live performances of their work. This research requires a lot of traveling! I’ve found that I have to do more research to find women and composers of color because they aren’t given the same kinds of opportunities as others. Often I have to visit more alternative spaces to listen to their work because they aren’t presented by as many traditional spaces or orchestras.

VR: Last summer, you gave a moving speech to the delegates of the League of American Orchestras’ annual conference in your hometown of Chicago. You make a call to action to the orchestra field to reflect on their programming choices and selection of artists. How would you expand that awareness and intention to concertgoers and other active participants in our field?

JK: I believe in advocating for voices of the population, which include women and people of color, that have not been heard in classical music. Their stories are just as relevant as the history of classical music, and it would be our loss to not hear their voices. When we bring new voices into older forms of classical music, you are only enhancing those traditional forms.

Music has always been an essential form of expression for me, and at the same time I realize that I am often learning and performing music that has been written by white men in a different century. The gift of empathy that music can give us has led me to truly love this artform, and I believe that classical music can give all of us the space to understand experiences that are unlike our own.

VR: You emphasize the importance of collaboration with composers, like commissioning composer-performers to write duets for you through your Limitless project – of which the pieces by and with Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer are the centerpiece of your Liquid Music program. How do you make the case for the value of this process to performers, to composers?

JK: I always see classical music and music in general as a living and breathing art-form. For older music, it’s a process that was begun by the composer centuries long ago, interpreted by the performer, and ultimately finished by the listener.

When we engage with collaborations onstage, we bring forward all of that process to our audiences for a much more rewarding experience.

VR: Six years ago, you founded the non-profit, arco collaborative, “arco” being the combination of artist and composer, further illustrating this collaborative dialogue you believe in. They’ve commissioned many of the works we’ve discussed here, including Limitless. What was your motivation for creating this organization?

JK: I believe in artist-led projects, which empower artists and composers to engage with the topics relevant to our contemporary culture. Topics often unheard in the form of classical music that bring together contemporary ideas and voices with older musical structures. Arco creates a platform for this dialogue and incubates projects for a larger audience.

Vanessa Rose will be assuming the President & CEO position at the American Composers Forum in January, succeeding John Nuechterlein, who is retiring. She has led artist collectives including The Knights and International Contemporary Ensemble and as a fundraiser worked at the Lark Play Development Center, The Metropolitan Opera, and the League of American Orchestras. A violinist, Vanessa’s recent work as a composer advocate has been as Emerging Composers Consultant with the American Composers Orchestra and EarShot Orchestra Network, and with Jennifer Koh’s non-profit commissioning and program development foundation, arco collaborative.

Visit this link to purchase tickets for Jennifer Koh: Limitless with Vijay Iyer, and Tyshawn Sorey at Amsterdam Bar & Hall January 9.

Interview: Third Coast Percussion on Collaboration / November 9, 2018 by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music blog contributor Charlie Mogen

Third Coast Percussion returns to the SPCO’s Liquid Music Series December 9 with new work for the ensemble by musical icons Philip Glass and Devonté Hynes. After a career spanning almost five decades, Glass, a lifelong pianist, makes the move from ten fingers to four mallets with the composition of his first piece for percussion ensemble. Hynes, better known by his pop alias “Blood Orange,” is a Glass disciple and collaborator; and unsurprisingly makes an impressive classical debut.

Since Third Coast Percussion’s first Liquid Music engagement (with Glenn Kotche in 2014), the group has recorded and toured a bundle of collaborative and original works (highlights include Skidmore’s 2016 feat Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities and the group’s 2017 album Paddle to the Sea) and commissioned ten composers through their Emerging Composers Partnership. Simply put, the group has a strong draw towards group creation. Last week I was able to chat with the quartet about composition, growth, and the magnetism of collaboration.

Devonte Hynes Photo by Matthew Leifheit.jpg

CM: Do you feel that working with visionaries from multiple generations of music-making has opened TCP’s ability to adapt / learn new music differently?

TCP: Any time we collaborate with anyone, we learn a new way of thinking about music and problem solving. It seems to us that it has less to do with the generation of a composer as much as the individual. Each new project comes with its particular challenges and opportunities, and its own mode of collaboration between the performers and composer. Philip Glass has a whole team of people who help run his empire, and we’ve never worked with an artist who has that large of a machine operating around them. They were all great to work with, but there are a variety of communications that have to all go through different people to coordinate all the elements. Glass also put a moment in his piece for a cadenza that the performers create themselves, which is also a first for us. In the case of Devonté Hynes’ piece, we’ve never commissioned a work where we had such a large role in orchestrating a new piece being written by someone else. Dev gave us the opportunity to take the musical content that he created and decide for ourselves what instruments to put them on. It was a very collaborative process, and one which was informed not just by our previous commissions but also by our work as composers of our own works.

Anyone who has listened to their music knows that each composer has a very recognizable style; Glass has his slow-moving, minimalist pondering, Hynes his drum and bass-driven, Prince-like, Steely Dan-orchestrated pop works. How do these pieces fall into or divert from the expected compositional tropes?

Dev’s piece has that recognizable Blood Orange atmosphere, with synthesizer sounds and harmonies that put a warm velvety glow on everything. However, it’s also recognizably Third Coast Percussion because we were so involved in orchestration. Perhaps it’s a surprise, though, that there are almost no drums in any of the music Dev wrote for us! It’s primarily pitch-, texture-, and harmony-driven music which doesn’t have the same dance style as his work as Blood Orange. The Glass is perhaps the opposite. One might expect a very keyboard driven piece, but there is a lot of non-pitched percussion in this Perpetulum, especially more traditional orchestral instruments like wood blocks, tambourines, snare drum and bass drum. This percussion writing is similar to some of the way percussion is employed in his symphonies and operas, but doesn’t necessarily resemble the stereotypical Philip Glass sound from many of his earlier works.

TCP has dabbled in minimalist work in the past, winning a Grammy for your Reich album and performing sections from Glass’ “Águas da Amazônia” on your most recent album Paddle to the Sea. How do you feel this past experience in the genre has shaped your preparation of Perpetulum?

I’d say it’s more than dabbling. Minimalist works have always been a big part of TCP’s repertoire, and this music was a substantial part of our music education. We all played music by Steve Reich, John Adams, Terry Riley, and others throughout college and since TCP was founded. We developed specific musical skills from this repertoire, and have been deeply influenced in our own compositions by this style of music. In the case of Perpetulum, our long history with minimalism helped us know how to first approach the piece and discover the challenges and opportunities inherent in the repetitive structures of the music. It was particularly helpful in the cadenza which Glass allows the performers to create for themselves. I think our version really synthesizes Glass’s music with our own Glass-inspired musical aesthetics.

This is your second time performing on a Liquid Music Series concert (TCP with Glenn Kotche, Wild Sound, October 2014). How do you feel the group has grown/changed in the four years since?

How much time do you have? First, it’s worth noting that Wild Sound was the largest project that TCP had built up to that point, in terms of the number of moving parts and the level of production involved. That experience helped us learn how to take on other multi-media projects like our recent Paddle to the Sea project, or approach the presentation of our existing repertoire in different ways, integrating more amplification, electronic playback or processing, and cameras that give the audience a close look at what we’re doing. Wild Sound has also lived on since then; we’ve done at least a dozen more performances of the full piece since we played in Saint Paul (which was right after the premiere), and we arranged an excerpt of the piece for more standard percussion instruments, which we have played dozens of times, and which is now starting to be performed by collegiate percussion ensembles.

Third Coast Percussion is also a different organization since our last time here. It was just the four performing members of the ensemble running the whole organization back then. Now we have three amazing additional staff members who have greatly improved our ability to carry out the work we do, and have made our operation much more sustainable for the long-term. We’ve also crossed some items off our bucket list since then, including our first GRAMMY award in 2017 and our NPR Tiny Desk Concert earlier this year.

You have all composed works for the group in the past but in the last few years have explored the process of group-composition, most recently for your album Paddle to the Sea. What challenges/advantages did you face with this style of creating a new work? Do you think this experience changes anything fundamental about how you will commission or compose future pieces?

Having input from multiple voices, working together to create something, while not necessarily efficient, will almost always create a better result than any one of those folks working alone. It takes time, and it takes trust; everyone has to be ready to work hard on something and then let it go, and everyone has to be able to work out disagreements. In many ways, it’s an extension of the way we work together as an organization on non-artistic challenges, and it has without a doubt influenced the way we collaborate with other composers. The process of creating Paddle to the Sea helped to prepare us for our collaboration with Dev Hynes, for instance. It was a very similar process of creating outlines, experimenting with sound options, dividing tasks, and revising each other’s drafts. Of course, in the case of Dev’s music, he had already created the raw musical content and overall structure of the pieces, so we already had the central core of the music to build on and remain true to.

The quartet places an emphasis on in-person collaborative efforts, first with Augusta Read Thomas for Resounding Earth and more recently for your Emerging Composers Program. However, this marks one of the fun, rare times someone from “outside” the new music realm gets a glimpse into your world. What was your experience like working with Dev and his time at your studio?

We’ve definitely learned that direct collaboration is vital to the creation of new works, especially for percussion, and now we push every composer we commission to spend time with us in person while they’re writing a piece for us. In the case of our project with Dev Hynes, before he began writing the piece, he came to our studio in Chicago, where he heard us play a little bit, explored our vast array of instruments (some of which he was hearing for the first time), and saw us demonstrate some extended techniques or atypical sound that can be made on certain instruments. Aside from the information and experience shared in this session, we also built a personal relationship and trust that allowed continued back-and-forth with musical ideas and sounds over the coming months.

Most people know @devhynes for his brilliant work as #BloodOrange. But Dev has a whole other side to his creative life. He’s written music for artists ranging from @solangeknowles___ to @skyferreira to @carlyraejepsen. He composed the soundtrack for #paloaltomovie. He has performed alongside the legendary @philip.glass. We’re beyond excited to be premiering a big new piece by Dev this weekend for our project with @hubbardstreet. Sept 27, 29, 30 at @harristheaterchicago. Roll up and check out this great new music. 🙌🏼🔥🥁 . . . #thirdcoastpercussion #hubbardstreetdance #tcpcommissions #tcpcollaborations . . . @emmaportner @movementartis @jonboogz @lilbuckdalegend ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

A post shared by Third Coast Percussion (@thirdcoastpercussion) on September 25, 2018

TCP has joined the pantheon of DIY percussionists with instrument building, modding, and the like. What’s your favorite sound/instrument the group has implemented recently? What’s the strangest or least likely modification that has produced interesting results (good or bad!)?

There’s always something new! One recent highlight: we took a trick from Glenn Kotche—blowing into a piece of surgical tubing stuck in the side of a drum to bend the pitch—and showed it to composer Donnacha Dennehy who was writing a piece for us. Donnacha ended up asking us to outfit over a dozen specifically tuned tom-toms with these tubes so that we could create chords on drums, and glissando in and out of the chords while we’re playing. A few other cool ones: a squeaky toy run through electronic delay, electric toothbrushes vibrating against all sort of different instruments, and a hydrophone (underwater microphone) which allows us to capture all sorts of interesting sounds created by or modified by water.

Visit this link to purchase tickets for the December 9 Third Coast Percussion performance.

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2018.19 Liquid Music Artist Choice Playlist / October 24, 2018 by Liquid Music

In the spirit of encouraging musical exploration among our audience, we asked artists of the 2018.19 season to recommend music that they find meaningful. From Messiaen to Monáe, Tirzah to Ikeda – check out works that have inspired a very inspiring collection of creators on the Liquid Music 2018.19 Artist Picks Spotify playlist.

A playlist featuring The Master Musicians Of Jajouka, Olivier Messiaen, Photek, and others

Hanna Benn
The Master Musicians of Jajouka: El Medahey
Olivier Messiaen: Oraison

Deantoni Parks
Photek: The Hidden Camera

Eliza Bagg (ModernMedieval)
Kate Bush: Mother Stands for Comfort
SOPHIE: Is It Cold in the Water?

Angélica Negrón
Juana Molina: Un Día
Björk: Blissing Me

Ashwini Ramaswamy
Tinariwen: Nànnuflày and Sastanàqqàm
Janelle Monáe: Django Jane

James McVinnie
Tristan Perich: Surface Image
Claire M Singer: The Molendinar

Jennifer Koh
Vijay Iyer: Break Stuff
Missy Mazzoli: Come On All You

Julianna Barwick
Kllo: Downfall
Tirzah: Holding On

Eva Mohn
Frida Hyvönen: Sjön

Tyshawn Sorey
Julius Eastman: Evil Nigger
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mixtur

Dimitri Chamblas
Ryoji Ikeda: Supercodex Project
Otomo Yoshihide: Guitar Solo Pieces
Edgar Varèse: Amériques

Jace Clayton
Stella Chiweshe: Hongore-Hoye
DaniLeigh: Lil Bebe

Ben Frost
Bernard Hermann: The Bay
Suzanne Ciani: The First Wave - Birth Of Venus

David Skidmore (Third Coast Percussion)
Jlin: Nyakinyua Rise
Nik Bärtsch: Modul 29_14
Son Lux: The Fool You Need

Dustin O'Halloran
Johann Johannsson: Mandy Love Theme
Philip Glass: Opening (played by Vikingur Olafsson)

Vijay Iyer
Prince: When Doves Cry
Wadada Leo Smith: Divine Love
Nina Simone: I Loves You Porgy

Mike Lewis
Emmylou Harris: Where Will I Be
Donny Hathaway: You've Got A Friend

James Young & Aiden Whalley (Darkstar)
These New Puritans: Organ Eternal
Slow Thai: T N Biscuits
Yves Tumor: Honesty
Travis Scott: Sicko Mode

Fukiko Takase
Atoms for Peace: Ingenue
Rokia Traoré: Sabali
Luzmira Carpio: Wiphey Pachamama

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Deantoni Parks’ Technoself / September 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

By LM blog contributor Patrick Marschke

Drummer, composer and producer Deantoni Parks probably didn't initially intend to create a new instrument and a revolutionary way of creating music from the outset. His musical and technical facility as a drummer is revolutionary and innovative enough for artists like John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello, Omar Rodríguez-López (The Mars Volta) and Flying Lotus to seek him out. He could have easily ridden out the capital-D-Drummer-life, but behind the scenes, Parks has been looking for more: “For those of us that are trying to become better every day, reinvent every day and not get pigeonholed, it's important to be able to have new outlets and new ways to come up with unique results.” Concurrently, music technology and access to it has exponentially increased, as have the ways in which we can create ways to create music — instrumentalists now have an unprecedented opportunity to become instrument builders.

Thus Technoself was born. Technoself is both an instrument and musical philosophy developed by Parks that has become a core part of his artistic practice, including the upcoming project Liquid Music performance with Hanna Benn, Procession (read a recent interview with Benn about the project).

But what IS Technoself exactly?

Upon first glance, the project looks starkly minimal: Parks sits behind a bass drum, hi-hat, and snare with a seemingly insignificant addition of a two-octave mini midi keyboard. Parks dedicates his right hand to the keyboard, leaving rest of his limbs to oversee the drums. But with the sacrifice of this hand comes an infinite palette of sonic possibilities. Through sophisticated sampling techniques, Parks has access to nearly any sound possible, activated via the nuanced control and accuracy provided by piano-like keys.

In practice, Technoself isn’t so different than what has been expected of percussionists for decades, as Parks points out:

“I’ve been watching percussionists all my life: what they do is play multiple instruments all the time, especially in orchestra. That's the classical percussion setup, you have to literally play literally 20 different instruments. Treble clef, bass clef: you had to learn all the clefs. That's a tremendous glimpse into what is really happening — multitasking is already built into my instrument as the drums are individual instruments that we put together and now we are just adding other elements like samples. It’s always been multitasking, so it's really not that surprising or different.”

Sampling, depending on how you look at it, is probably as old as music itself, though we tend to think of it as being correlated with the advent of recorded sound. Some go so far as to say that everything is a remix, though here Parks is primarily referring to “the technique of digitally encoding music or sound and reusing it as part of a composition or recording” (Google). Sampling as a primary mode of musical creation can be traced back to the early tape experiments of Pierre Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich, where each composer was physically manipulating magnetic tape by slicing, looping, or some other form of mangling.

Perhaps more significantly, DJs discovered that with two turntables and identical records they could extend any section of a song by beat matching and crossfading between two record decks, manually “sampling” an 8 or 16 bar phrase indefinitely. Some of these “breaks” became so iconic that artists began to break them down even further, slicing out each individual drum sound so that they could rearrange to make a completely new groove, at times nearly indistinguishable from its source (see the “Amen Break” and “Funky Drummer”). This all culminated in one of the most significant inventions in modern music history: the Akai MPC, a digital sampler that allowed any sound to be triggered, manipulated and performed in incredibly nuanced and sophisticated ways. From Public Enemy to J Dilla to Arca, revolutionary samplists have paved the way for our current music culture, where there is hardly music that exists today without some component of sampling involved.

Parks taps into these legacies with his Technoself method. There are a few things that are quite revolutionary about the way that Parks has engineered his sampling process. Rather than the stiff “one-shot” pads of the MPC, Parks’ use of the midi piano gives him access to the expressive techniques that are standard on keyboard instruments and very limited in the realm of percussion: altering the duration of a note by holding down the key and conversely using pointillistic jabs so short as to obscure the samples past the point of recognition.

“[How you sample] is kind of the barometer of where you are in music today… I look at myself like a diamond cutter when it comes to sampling. It’s completely my identity. I’m cutting at a rate where I’m bringing in percussive techniques, but also engineering techniques that I have embedded in my body. I can stutter things, I can modulate rhythmically in any direction — to 32nd notes to 64th note subdivisions. Then it’s just up to what is in my head.”

Deantoni Maps Transients, "a high amplitude, short-duration sound at the beginning of a waveform that occurs in phenomena such as musical sounds, noises or speech." to his midi keyboard to molds and shape them on the fly.

The refined combination of these techniques and the inventiveness of Parks’ selection of source material makes for an unparalleled and distinctly original approach to music making. Parks takes any sound that inspires him and “maps” certain transients/microsamples to specific keys, essentially allowing his right hand to sculpt, remix, and weave a digital mosaic of sounds.

Parks has even come up with his own vernacular for his practice:

“I don’t call them pieces or songs, just to help mentally get in the right mindset. It’s more of the idea that I’m streaming information that comes out in this way at this time. “Streaming” opens my mind up so that there is no pressure to find the perfect rhythm or melodic idea or perfect arrangement. It’s about streaming all the knowledge you have acquired and letting the non-cognitive side of your brain and body work for you. When you hear something you react and it changes the composition and the arrangement at that moment. So it’s not about doing it in the fastest way, but it is about running as smoothly as possible. Our brains are so non-linear in the way that we process as compared to computers, so It’s better for us to act in the moment. I think that is why improvisation is so important: because it's the way we are built.”

We asked Parks to talk more about his creative process:

“The first thing is a sound. It’s all about mood, so it has to be a sound that pushes me in some direction. Lately, it's been my own old compositions that I’ve dug up from the grave that I just am not interested in anymore. I’m finding once I find the highest transients and break it apart beat by beat I’m finding ways to rearrange the notes into new compositions and find inspiration in what it sounds like. From there, once I have this particular sound broken apart on the keyboard with four different octaves of range, then it's just going through the sounds, almost combing the area and seeing if there is something there that hits me. Again, this is all about mood and inspiration and it happens quickly. And if it doesn’t you move on to another sound.
The set up is almost a more important part of the process because if it puts you in a certain mood you can get hundreds of thousands of results because you’ll always relate to those sounds and find melodies. That’s what gives you the fuel to find additional parts and structures. If you’re lucky all this happens very quickly and then as soon as you are ready you start recording. You don’t want to get too familiar because you want to leave time for the “moment.” The brain works best when you are making decisions on the fly, I like using that as a new way of composing.
Once you stream it and find it, you can always go back to it. That means that you’ve 'mapped it.' The Technoself method is kind of the fastest way to 'map' new areas: once you find it you’re there. A lot of what I’ve released or keep going back to are things that I’ve found while streaming and then I knew the references and where I was at the time, so it was easily mappable and I can go back and quote it if I want or change.
The Technoself method for me is a certain way of writing in real time that almost sounds like it was done in post. With the hybrid setup, you can kind of 'fool' the listener into thinking that it has been overdubbed, manipulated, or engineered to sound this way. But that's actually just the way it came out.”

On drums:

“The drum is one of the most communicative instruments, I feel like it is just a powerful weapon to use. You can literally make people vibrate while they are all together from the same source — I think deep things happen there. It’s like experiencing some kind of eclipse: you don’t know the direct effects but something happened, some information got passed that’s gonna show up later. I feel like it’s very high level, well beyond fiber optics. I think the drum is important, which is why I cannot exclude it from my process.
But I also want to hear sounds that I don’t have access to. I want to be able to hear whatever I’m thinking. That just opens up the pallette to having vocals at your fingertips; sounds of the world; sounds of the city — any sound: your old compositions that you are not even using. It’s definitely about reusable/renewable resources and finding new things in old things. This is something we need to practice as a society to save the planet, but it also works in art.”

On originality:

“I think that you can take any sound and the way that you filter it, meaning process it, I think that changes the DNA of the actual sound. That’s what I like doing: it's literally how you play it, how you repeat it that makes it. Warhol would take an image that we all knew and then completely, because of the way he 'played it' in rhythm and time, the way it was duplicated and slight differences in detail, that completely revalued the whole piece. That’s very inspiring to me. It still seems very modern and I think there is a lot more to get out of it. I’m mining for those kinds of experiences and effect.”

On Procession:

“[Procession] is really centered around mantra and trying to settle people down in this fast pace and over the top kind of society. The work is composed of pieces that give me the feeling of 'ahh, I’m Grounded, I don’t have to be connected to these devices that surround me.' I’m very excited about it.
Of course, Hanna is the leading inspiration behind this. Her works are very unique and necessary in this time period. I’m really excited to work with her on this.”

BUY TICKETS TO THE WORLD PREMIERE OF HANNA BENN & DEANTONI PARKS: PROCESSION SEPTEMBER 23 AT MACHINE SHOP, MINNEAPOLIS.

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Interview: Hanna Benn on "Procession" / September 5, 2018 by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music blog contributor Katie Hare

Atlanta-based composer/vocalist/collaborator Hanna Benn kicks off the 2018.19 Liquid Music season in collaboration with percussionist/composer/producer Deantoni Parks Sunday, September 23 at the Machine Shop in Minneapolis. Eagerly awaiting the premiere of their collaborative project Procession, we asked Benn to reflect on her background, influences and creative process.

Hanna Benn has collaborated with an array of artists, from modern electronic pop groups Son Lux and Boots to choral ensembles Chrysalis and The Esoterics. She has submerged boundaries with her multidisciplinary approach by incorporating dance, opera and theater in her work. Her choral background, angelic voice, and complex use of layers present what Stereogum fittingly pinpoints as a “unified army of voices that seem to beam down from heaven in service of Benn’s compelling vision.” In this collaboration with Parks, Benn offers new arrangements anchored by Parks’ kinetic rhythms that explore the spiritual and emotional core of ceremonial music in the form of a song cycle.

Tell us a bit about your background and exploration of music growing up.

I grew up singing in the church. From about ages 7-18 I was part of a choral program that is consistent with most Episcopal churches of America. I played piano, flute, and my father is a musician as well.

You’ve explored a wide array of musical genres and artistic disciplines such as R&B, classical, soul, opera, dance and theatre—are there any artists or experiences that you’ve found to be highly influential to your work?

Well, I think about the things that I liked as a kid. Which I still listen to for the most part. It still inspires me. The people who come to my mind today—and it could be more tomorrow—are Stevie Wonder and Igor Stravinsky. They are probably my top artist influences.

Your use of analogue, digital, acoustic, and synthetic sounds to create often an organic, cathedral-esque landscape is incredibly intriguing. Can you talk more about how technology plays a role in your work and where your interest in this sound process stemmed from?

I first started adding technology for my voice. Harmonizers and whatnot, just so I wouldn’t feel alone. Growing up in the choral tradition I feel most comfortable and I also enjoy singing with others. That is the biggest joy for me. When thinking about performing solo I was so used to this massive voice and I wanted that, so I was just trying to replicate that kind of choral sound instead of having a focused solo voice. It’s all about the feeling; the texture.

When did you and Deantoni Parks begin collaborating? What does he draw out of you musically and vice versa?

We started collaborating immediately when we first met because we were first assigned to be in a group together. We were hired to be in a band (Boots) and we met that way, which is really interesting. In the band we were both the rhythm—I was bass and keyboards and he was percussion and we had to create a certain kind of balance between each other and as a rhythm section. Then a couple years after that we started, I guess, experimenting. Part of Deantoni’s practice is that he he uses a plethora of things to sample, so he started using my voice and that’s sort of what we’re incorporating in this piece as well.

I’m curious to know more about the thought and creative process behind Procession—can you expand a bit more about how the project came about? What has been the most memorable or exciting part about building this project so far?

We first started making these short, little poetic pieces together that were very soothing—I’ve started calling them mantras—and from that I was thinking about a song cycle we could create that mimics a spiritual practice. Not one that is at all sacred but that explores how music can be so cleansing and also a spiritual experience. I wanted to focus on that and create a ceremony of music without the weight of religion. Then we looked a lot into ceremonial music and different traditions and kind of put it together in our own way.

What were your top “songs of summer” 2018?

I don’t even remember because I’ve been working too hard on music. Often I just put on the Top 40 radio just to balance the work but honestly I don’t really know what’s happening!

BUY TICKETS TO THE WORLD PREMIERE OF HANNA BENN & DEANTONI PARKS: PROCESSION SEPTEMBER 23 AT MACHINE SHOP, MINNEAPOLIS.

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Exploring the "Irrepressibly Subjective" with Teju Cole / May 29, 2018 by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music Blog Contributor Patrick Marschke

"Zürich, 2014" by Teju Cole from Blind Spot — *"Zürich*, 2014" by Teju Cole from *Blind Spot*

The idea of “multimedia” existed before the technology that it is usually associated with came into existence. Google defines its adjective form as: “using more than one medium of expression or communication.” If you dig down deep enough, it can be hard to think of an art form that doesn’t fall within this definition: a painting doesn’t exist without architecture and light, music doesn’t exist without performance and time, film/video never pretended to be anything other than an assemblage of mediums. In a way, multimedia work is the most intuitive and fulfilling things one can make — the medium serves as a conduit to an idea, a tool rather than a bin.

At the same time, words like these exist:
Photographer
Art Critic
Writer
Musician
Composer
Improvisor
Professor
Performer
Curator

But these concepts also came after. On the most neutral level they make things easier. Easier to talk about, easier to be excited about, and, of course, easier to sell.

And yet artists have perpetually pursued a genre-less, medium agnostic, non-commodifiable paths of seemingly insurmountable resistance. Why?

Teju Cole and Vijay Iyer both have built incredible careers that undeniably answer this question, and their most recent collaboration, Blind Spot, serves as the main argument for this path of most resistance. Its vitality is rooted in its unrelenting and “irrepressibly subjective” lens of emotional and intellectual vibrancy.

To prepare for the Midwest premiere of Blind Spot we spoke with Teju Cole about collaboration, improvisation, and his relationship with and dedication to the subjective.

[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity]

*photo via Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos.*

How did you meet Vijay Iyer and how did this collaboration come about?

Teju Cole: A few years ago we were both living in Manhattan near Columbia University and I used to run into him on the subway. This must have been in the early 2000s — I was in grad school at Columbia and he was already working as an artist living in that neighborhood. I think we really took note of each other when he noticed that “Oh, this guy that I keep running into on the subway is also the guy that is coming to my concerts.” I would run into him on the way to go see his show. I started out as more of a “fan.” I really appreciated his work — I got on the Vijay Iyer train very early. I liked the kind of thinking he was doing with his music. It was very visceral, incredibly intelligent but very emotionally resonant music. From there it eventually became a friendship.

A few years later when my first book was published in Nigeria in 2007 I gave Vijay a copy of it. The book actually mentions finding his work in Lagos. I think it is always an interesting thing between artists when both parties now [are established enough to] have something to show, something to present. A few years after that when Open City was published, my first published book in the US, Vijay reached out to me about doing a collaboration around that work. And that's how we properly started collaborating. I think we recognized in each other an interest in the complexity and flow of what it meant to be in this space. For us, America is not some simple straightforward thing. It's a space in which many different energies are functioning and I think we recognized that in each other.

So we did the Open City Suite, and we’ve done that a few times. In the past couple of years, the evolving Blind Spot project has become our most sustained collaboration. We’ve done it in a few places but what’s interesting is that it is not a written [or composed] suite. But it would also be inaccurate to call it improvised. It's a very advanced form of real-time composition — I think that’s a fair way to put it. What we are going to do in Minneapolis has never been heard before, but it couldn’t be further from what people call “free jazz,” in a sense. The text and images are kind of like the score that we are reading from.

For me, just to be working with somebody who is so advanced in his thinking, and yet also creates such beautiful work is such a thrill. I’m so happy about it.

...and Vijay is so studied in various forms of American improvisation: being able to study and work with AACM folks like George Lewis and Wadada Leo Smith — and that they were doing similar forms of multimedia work 40+ years ago…

Absolutely! So his profound knowledge of the American black music and improvised music traditions are definitely part of the extraordinary pleasures that one takes from his work. But I think it's also important to note that he’s never identified solely a jazz musician. He has always prioritized collaborations: he’s definitely the best band leader I’ve ever seen at work, just in the way in which he allows other player, parties, and energies to flow when they are working together. And he’s always had a very profound respect for the role of literature and the spoken word as part of the texture of acoustic experience. He’s done many projects of this kind — it's always been inherent in his work.

Can you talk a little bit about the inception of the work? Did the text come first?

It's actually really interesting: after we’d done Open City in 2013 he reached out to me in 2015 having been asked to curate a series of events at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He said that he wanted me to be a part of it and asked if I had any new material. I mention that I had been thinking a lot about images and text and what they do to next each other, and [thought:] “what if we added music as a third element?” At that point even I didn’t know what the project was, you know? I thought maybe it would lead to an exhibition, or a perhaps book to be published in Italy. I had no plans to publish it in the US. So really the first outing this material had was in the context of making music with Vijay.

So we worked out some of the images and text in a very raw form and presented it at the Met. We did maybe six sets over the course of the week. It was incredibly intense, very moving, very engaged in a very compact space, and I could see that people were having a very emotional experience with it. It changed my relationship to my own work as well. As a writer, we are often at some distance from what the effect the work is having on people. It’s quite different for musicians who can see the immediate emotional impact that the work is having their audience.

‘Brienzersee, June 2014’, Teju Cole — ‘Brienzersee, June 2014’, Teju Cole

It's different every time — I change which images are in it. I never know what form of acoustic attack that Vijay or the trio is gonna have so it keeps it really fresh. We’ve done a version of this at Jazz SF, at the Institute for Contemporary Art. It's been interesting: I’m a writer and photographer, he’s a musician, but it seems like the contemporary art museum context is where this thing really takes flight. The museums are the ones that are bold enough to program this and have faith in what it can be.

I also have to say: every time that we’ve done it not only has it been different but I think we find a deeper scene, we’ve whittled away some of the more obvious stuff and we go into a deeper place with it. The quality of listening just keeps improving.

It is very cool to hear that even the images and text are “improvised” as well.

Absolutely. Keeping the material fresh is so vital. Not having pre-prepared answers… for example, I’m having this interview with you, I don’t have a cheat sheet, you know? I’m thinking with you in real time. This idea of doing work in real time is what keeps a performer interested, and if they're interested then the audience also has a chance to be interested.

In a way improvisation is the most natural thing in the world — it is the first thing we do. At times society can make you feel like “play” is a bad thing, but improvisers like Vijay and this project are such a tremendous example of how complex, sophisticated, nuanced, and rich this medium can be.

This has been the great American contribution to music over the course of the 20th century. To really bring it to the mainstream that improvised music is in no sense inferior to notated/composed music. There are all kinds of inquiries we can make about “American Classical Music” and all kinds of arguments around the word “Jazz” itself, and yet there is something there: call it improvisation, real-time-composition, or flexible modes of music making — those things are not intellectually or musically inferior to Beethoven or Mahler.

You seem to be a fairly prolific creator of Spotify playlists, what inspired you to start making them and what role do they serve for you?

I’ve always been interested in presenting the music in my head to other people. Many years ago in college, I even dabbled in doing college radio. It was just fun: this idea of “and here is what I’m going to play you next,” you know? It’s interesting to think that you are not recommending an individual song to someone, you’re creating a listening experience, which has to do with more than one song. In the days that I was super active on Twitter, I used to make youtube playlist or just give lists of songs.

Creating playlists is one of my great joys — it is one important aspect of my work that’s not related to compensation, I’m not paid for it, it’s not part of my job description. It just gives me a lot of joy and I think it gives other people joy as well. It also enacts, hopefully in a straightforward and unobtrusive way, my belief that there is no hierarchy among genres — [the lists include] a lot of so-called jazz, hip-hop, classical, Nigerian dance music, a lot of so-called “world music” because ALL of it is interesting. This is how I’ve always lived my life, I think that is true of many many people as well. Though when you turn on the radio the experience you get is that people only tend to like one kind of music or that they think of music in these categories rather than in these emotional experiences, which is actually what music is.

Your work doesn’t seem to pay much attention to genre, hierarchies, or classification, a tendency that is truly at the heart of Liquid Music and Walker Performing Arts — which is certainly not the path of least resistance. How have you sustained such broad interests and output when it is so easy to be pegged solely as a critic, writer, photographer, etc.?

That categorization can be really tedious. But when you find a space that is responding to something other than the needs of the exigencies of the marketplace its a real pleasure because then some other thing can happen.

‘Rivaz, October 2014’ by Teju Cole from Blind Spot — *‘Rivaz, October 2014’* by Teju Cole from Blind Spot

For me, there is no dissonance in being a writer and photographer and anything else I am interested in pursuing at a given point in my life. It’s gonna sound weird but I know that if you are in a situation in your life where you can’t pay rent or you can’t eat enough food: that’s a desperate situation and that needs to be solved. But beyond those basic material needs of shelter, food, and clothing we actually have a lot more freedom than we think we do. Nobody owes you a huge income. You might luck out and stumble your way into a pretty decent income. But since I was quite young I told myself I would always prioritize the work I wanted to do as long as I found ways of making a basic living. It’s not a choice that everyone makes. Some people are like, “well I want to prioritize the work that interests me but I also have to make a lot of money doing it.” Hyper-Capitalist Neoliberal arrangements don’t always allow for that. A lot of it has to do with just surrendering and saying that “it is more important for me to do work that affirms my notion of what art is up to.” And if rewards come that then it's a really pleasant surprise.

But it was never a calculated agenda, that the money would follow. I’ve never believed that. There's been some money in this for me but I’ve never counted on it, and I still don’t because who knows whether the next thing I do will be considered too free to have a place in the market. Or the countless hours I’ve spent putting together playlists: that's time I could spend getting paid for something. One can over prioritize getting paid. There is an expression people use “You left money on the table,” meaning that in every situation you should try to maximize financial gain. I think that's a death kiss for art. In every situation, you should try to maximize your creative freedom. That should be the first variable that is put up when your negotiating. It’s a variable, it doesn’t mean you always have maximum artistic freedom. But if that is not being prioritized then its just product.

I’m not going to speak for Vijay, but I sense the same thinking is true for him. If you wanted to have the amazingly successful career he’s had, those are not the calculations you would make. That kind of music, with that kind of intensity, with that kind of focus, with that kind of moral and ethical and political commitment. Those particular sets of choices are more likely to give somebody a small but respectable reputation. Meanwhile, he’s got a huge reputation because sometimes your luck plays out in such a way that things end up being bigger than you planned them to be. But this stuff can’t be calculated so you might as well just honor your own freedom at every step of the way.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The earth was subjected to a punishment of profundities. After the conflagration, the invisible rains, the soil overturned, the hurricane of mud, the razors of the sun, the chichicaste nettle in the living flesh... a punishment of profundities for having made room for the first barbarian, not the last, for the first human beast, for the first executioner in my country forged of honey. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ from "Castigo de Profundidades," by Miguel Ángel Asturias ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

A post shared by Teju Cole (@_tejucole) on May 28, 2018 at 5:00pm PDT

Your writing and photography seem to simultaneously have a deeply rich emotional quality while leaving so much room for the viewer/reader to find a bit of themselves in the work(s). Can you speak to where this comes from? Should audiences expect a similar effect from Blind Spot?

I think so. I think that our intellect is one of our necessary conduits to the recollection of experience — we can’t check our brains at the door. The work has to be smart. And yet it can be smart and also emotionally real. My hope is that people will have an experience where they don’t feel like they checked their brains at the door, where they feel like their intellect is being challenged. But at the same time the psyche, the soul, the human part of ourselves is moved. And not in a general way, right? But in a very specific, highly individuated way. The material is fairly wide-ranging and the hope is that everybody finds an aspect that is like: “yes, that really speaks to ME, personally, in this place at this particular time, it feels like a message to me.” If we can achieve that, that's heaven for us as performers and presenters.

It seems like both writing and photography can easily err on the side of objectivity or documentation, while music, especially instrumental music, tends perpetually lean toward abstraction. But your work seems to find a place between those sides of the spectrum. How do all of these things coalesce in your mind and how you think about this performance?

I would never say that I’m trying to go for an abstract quality in the work. I would say that I’m trying to go for an irrepressibly subjective quality in the work. It has to be subjective because for me it is important to not be speaking from a place of authority, or from the assumed center of the discourse. I am coming to all of this as one person in my own life, speaking to you, in your own life. I’m not at the center of the discourse, I’m not a heterosexual white man who comes from a long line of artistic privilege or anything like that. I have experiences that are outsider-ish, I experience the world in a highly subjective way.

And then to realize that that subjectivity is actually worth transmitting, that it can be a gathering point. If I’m writing for photography criticism, if I’m writing fiction, or if I’m making an image: the burden of speaking in a neutral, objective, and permanent way, like a block of granite — I don’t have that burden. I can just testify to an intense, small, highly personal experience, and trust that because we all have intense, small, highly personal experiences it’s gonna meet someone out there.

It’s about trusting subjectivity as a mode of ethical discourse.

Buy tickets to the midwest premiere of VIJAY IYER & TEJU COLE: BLIND SPOT copresented by LIQUID MUSIC AND WALKER ART CENTER mAY 31 & JUNE 1, and keep an eye out for Teju's interview with Krista Tippett via On Being in the coming months.

Follow Teju Cole:
Website: http://www.tejucole.com/
Publisher: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/91688/teju-cole
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Teju-Cole-200401352198/
Instagram: @_tejucole

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

Stiff String Theory / May 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

by Liquid Music Blog Contributor Patrick Marschke

MUSIC

What images came to mind when you read that word? An asymmetrical row of black and white rectangles was probably not far from the first.

Still life on the piano ('CORT'), Picasso (1911) via wikiart.org — *Still life on the piano ('CORT')*, Picasso (1911) via wikiart.org

The piano carries with it an unparalleled burden of symbology, association, and ubiquity, perhaps even to the point of completely obscuring its origin and the elemental enchantment with the sound that codified its place in history.

Bartolomeo Cristofori’s pianoforte, invented sometime around 1700, solved a unique problem. While the human voice could easily and quickly jump from a whisper to a shout, claviers (harpsichord, clavichord, and other proto-pianos) had an incredibly limited dynamic range, restricting their expressive potential. The mechanism of a harpsichord is basically a simple plucking lever — no matter how hard you press the key the “pluck” produces essentially the same sound. Instrument builders came up with some clever solutions around these limitations: additional strings, “manuals”, and fancy mechanisms. Composers also dealt with the harpsichord’s lack of sustain by exploring increasingly complex ornamentations (see figure 1.).

Figure 1. Baroque Trill Instructions via Wikipedia Commons

Then comes the pianoforte, its name designating its solution: piano = quiet, forte = loud. The instrument was able to gracefully maneuver through quiet, loud, and all the places in between. Its mechanism literally throws a hammer at the strings, retaining and amplifying the velocity from the keystroke of the player. It is important to note that even though the mechanism of the piano looks very complicated, touch is integral to its workings — pianists obsess over every aspect of the relationship between their fingers, arms, and body to the keys. All that said, the velocity of the hammer and the “touch” of the pianist are only two of the variables that contribute to the sound of a piano: how hard or soft are the felt covered hammers? How do we deal with all the resonance of those newly unbridled strings? How do we tune all those strings? Even physicist Richard Feynman was enchanted by the alchemy of the instrument enough to write a letter to his piano tuner.

For a more detailed evolution of keyboard instruments with listening examples check out SPCO’s neighbor Schubert Club’s Evolution of the Piano — Twin Cities readers can even stop by the museum to see the instruments in person.

One might think that by 2018 we would have “figured out” the sound of a piano — after all it's just a few strings right? While we have made a tremendous amount of progress in the realm of digital piano synthesis and sampling, anyone that has spent time with a piano, from a spinet to a 10-foot grand, will acknowledge that there is something about the feel, sound, and aura of the acoustic piano that digital versions haven’t quite pinned down. That is not to say nothing has come of computers trying to be piano’s in their own ways: Dan Trueman’s bitKlavier exemplifies the incredible direction that digital instrument building is headed.

Etude #4 from Dan Trueman's Nostalgic Synchronic Etudes for prepared digital piano, performed by Adam Sliwinski.

With all this history come some baggage. Pianist Michael Mizrahi summed this up eloquently in the album notes “The Bright Motion” (New Amsterdam):

“For centuries the piano has been a popular sounding board for new compositional ideas and styles—the ingenious explorations of compositional technique in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the pathbreaking musical ideas set forth in Beethoven’s piano sonatas, the previously unimaginable feats of virtuosity achieved by Liszt, and the sonic and formal experiments of Schoenberg’s piano pieces. Much of this cherished repertoire has been central to my solo career as a classical pianist.

By the end of the twentieth century, the piano had lost some of its status—compositions for solo piano declined in prominence at the artistic vanguard, some composers citing the intimidating tradition of canonical piano works as a factor in their reluctance to write for solo piano. However, in the twenty-first century, many composers of my generation, including those featured here, have come to view the piano as an instrument particularly receptive to new music. With this album of recently composed works for solo piano, I showcase the continued vitality of an instrument that evokes an exceptionally rich musical heritage yet still is capable of expressing the most contemporary of musical ideas.”

Mizrahi, along with many previously featured Liquid Music artists like Vicky Chow, Nils Frahm, Hauschka, David Friend, Bryan Nichols, Emily Manzo, deVon Gray (to name a few) are each paving uniquely exhilarating contemporary explorations of piano, proving that piano isn’t going anywhere.

A survey of solo piano works from then to now in preparation for Grand Band's Liquid Music Series performance on Wednesday, May 16 at the Ordway in Saint Paul, Minnesota. More info at LiquidMusicSeries.org

← Listen to examples of the distance piano has gone in its three centuries with this curated survey of solo piano works.

Grand Band takes this exploration to its logical extreme, relishing in the unparalleled sonic experience of the soundboards, strings, hammers, and keys and multiplying it by six. There are few if not zero chances to hear what six pianos sound like on one stage together: don't miss this one.

Grand Band will perform at the Ordway Concert Hall on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 7:30pm. Purchase tickets here.

Grand Band: A Curious Synthesis / May 3, 2018 by Liquid Music

By Trever Hagen

Liquid Music brings the virtuoso piano sextet Grand Band to the Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul, Minnesota on May 16th. Its Twin Cities debut includes the world premiere of Three Fragile Systems by the composer Missy Mazzoli along with music by the late composer Julius Eastman, Bang on Can co-founder Michael Gordon, Paul Kerekes and Kate Moore. Grand Band’s performance will feature pianists Erika Dohi, David Friend, Paul Kerekes, Blair McMillen, Lisa Moore and Isabelle O’Connell.

The Unconventional Piano Sextet

Grand Band stage plot in the round_Lisa Moore.jpg

The mise en scène is delicate yet imposing — six grand pianos silently yin-yang together across center stage. Gentle sleeping giants. Their collective posture is perplexing – while one or two pianos on stage are a common sight, the snoozing huddle of ivories before a Grand Band performance indicates we have little a prior knowledge as to what we might hear. Then the flurry of 60 fingers across 528 keys commences. In a harmonic display of yet-before-unheard piano polyphony, Grand Band shows us they are a super-group not only because of their fluency of expression on the piano, but because of the extra-ordinary sound that only they can make.

This unconventional arrangement of music for six pianos sets Grand Band’s repertoire in its own universe – far outside any existing canon of work for piano. Grand Band’s instrumentation requires dedicated new compositions; commissioned pieces for this ensemble’s singular voice. Yet the audience does not know what to expect when seated for the performance. By eliminating expectation you do away with convention, one of the most reliable, known forms of how we communicate.

What makes 'new music' new?

One is reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s critique of the use of language from past realities to depict contemporary ones. The take away from the Austrian philosopher’s work in the context of ‘new music’ is that while a musical canon is a discourse that connects us with universal imaginations of humanity, there is still a wide gap in that discourse for pieces composed today that tune in the modern soul with old soul, while providing a compass for the future soul. Embracing new musical vocabularies of non-convention offers us sense-making devices for new realities — those particularities of the human condition in place and time.

Certainly synthesis is a path toward 'new' – or at least a step toward innovation. But with any form of innovation understood via genre, ‘newness’ comes only in relation to a display of the rules of past traditions alongside ideas that challenge it. With the new music presented at Grand Band’s performance this month, we see elements of a curious synthesis particularly brought to light by the composer Missy Mazzoli.

“Post-Millennial Mozart”

Missy Mazzoli has made a name for herself in numerous musical pathways – prestigious grants, academic positions, as well as forging innovative collaborations. For example, her band Victoire joined with Glen Kotche of Wilco to create the piece Vespers — a beautiful, haunting meditation on religion, magic and ritual, and spirituality. Mazzoli’s pieces rest on her curiosity to explore the depths of human experience and consciousness. This broad vision manifests itself in the complex timbres of her pieces, the intent of harmonic discovery, and the movement between symbolic rupture and settling.

To do this, Mazzoli places her work at the interface of humanity and technology — the constantly evolving process of how humans create and adapt to new technologies. This approach is most clearly seen in her blending of traditional chamber formats as violin-cello-piano along with electronics, distorted guitars and keyboards. But most importantly, Mazzoli is a story-teller. She uses these techniques less as a strategy and more as a natural way a composer invites instruments and motifs to guide the listener through an unfamiliar tale. Listening to Mazzoli’s work, you hear familiar narrative structures with fresh voices and new grammar. I find this appealing because we need new vocabularies to understand our historical moment – to influence it and to report on it. Mazzoli is articulating a near-future world in her music, asking us not to follow but to face the unfolding beauty of non-binary perception.

Read more about Mazzoli’s Three Fragile Systems in an interview with Ines Guanchez for Liquid Music.

Grand Band's Liquid Music Program

In addition to the world premiere of Three Fragile Systems, Grand Band will perform the work of four other composers.

Michael Gordon is a house-hold name amongst enthusiasts of exploratory composition. One of his recent pieces performed by Mantra Pecussion, Timber, was composed for six graduated, amplified, wooden Simantras. Played with mallets and fingertips, the composer showed his ingenuity with a bold use of texture and rhythm. No doubt Gordon’s pursuit of musical rhythmic innovation overlays with his interest in cities – those effervescent tide pools of rhythm and activity. Gordon has collaborated with film-maker Bill Morrison to create the city portraits such as Gotham (a mediation on the aura of New York City) and El Sol Caliente (a commission by the New World Symphony for Miami Beach’s centennial, Gordon’s hometown).

The New Yorker's Alex Ross described Gordon’s music as "the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism." That is an earful, but balanced in Gordon’s compositions. Grand Band will perform his piece Ode to La Bruja, Hanon, Czerny, Van Cliburn and little gold stars... (or, To Everyone Who Made My Life Miserable, Thank You).

City Walk (1999, 6') Film by Bill Morrison Music by Michael Gordon Words by Ben Katchor From the opera "The Carbon Copy Building", produced by Bang On A Can.

Additionally, Grand Band will perform wither by Paul Kerekes, one of co-founders of Grand Band. Kerekes’s work as a composer and performer is diverse. His work has been performed by a growing list including American Composers Orchestra, Da Capo Chamber Players, New Morse Code, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Real Loud, and Exceptet. Beyond performing and composing for Grand Band, he is also a member of the Invisbile Anatomy ensemble. IA is a group that draws on the experience of the human body as the ultimate source of music creation; the primal physicality of this approach is not lost in the edginess and jaggedness of their music. To carry out this intent, the group ties together multiple musical traditions as well as performance art and Fay Wang’s captivating poetry.

Album preview trailer for Invisible Anatomy's debut album "Dissections", out March 30 on New Amsterdam Records. Features composer/vocalist Fay Wang's piece "Facial Polygraph XVIA." Learn more here: https://www.newamrecords.com/albums/dissections

The prolific Australian-Dutch performer and composer Kate Moore was commissioned by Grand Band to create the piece Sensitive Spot. While Moore has received a collection of awards to pack her portfolio, she is quick to point out that as much as she works within and through institutions, she also dialogues with alternative music spaces and cultures. For this reason, Moore’s work stands side by side with other composers in seeking out new sounds wherever they may lie. In 2017, Moore broke through new establishment walls as the first woman to win the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize for her composition The Dam. Indeed, as the San Diego Union Tribune put it, “her intent seems to be to create a dream, an alternative reality.”

Finally Grand Band will perform an interpretation of Julius Eastman’s cascading 1979 piece Gay Guerrilla, originally composed for three pianos. Eastman died in 1990, homeless, and it is only in recent years that his work has been more widely championed and disseminated after nearly 26 years of posthumous rest. The inclusion of Gay Guerilla is another lens into a function of new music: to unearth forgotten melodies, reveal alternative musical spaces, and champion new sonic experiences.

Trever Hagen is a writer, researcher and trumpeter living in Minneapolis. His interests lie in memory studies, music therapy and acoustic ecology. Hagen's newest book, "Living in the Merry Ghetto: the music and politics of the Czech underground" will be out on Oxford University Press in 2019.

Grand Band will perform Three Fragile Systems at the Ordway Concert Hall on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 7:30pm. Purchase tickets here.

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

Follow Grand Band updates and announcements:
Official Website: www.grandbandnyc.com
Twitter: @GrandBandNYC (twitter.com/grandbandnyc)
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grand-Band

Interview: Missy Mazzoli on "Three Fragile Systems" / April 26, 2018 by Liquid Music

Liquid Music’s Ines Guanchez interviewed composer Missy Mazzoli in anticipation of the May 16 premiere of "Three Fragile Systems." Mazzoli's piece was commissioned by piano supergroup Grand Band, whose MN debut is part of the 2017.18 Liquid Music season.

Missy Mazzoli by Marylene Mey — *Missy Mazzoli* by Marylene Mey

The music of New York-based composer and pianist Missy Mazzoli has been performed in venues across the globe. Described by The New York Times as “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York,” Mazzoli is also a faculty member at Mannes College of Music and the founder of Victoire featured in the closing concert of Liquid Music’s 2014.15 season.

Some of Mazzoli’s more recent projects include Proving Up, an opera based on the short story by author Karen Russell, orchestral arrangements for Icelandic band Sigur Rós, and Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female composers ages 13 to 19 at the Kaufman Music Center, founded by Mazzoli and composer Ellen Reid.

Victoire by Marylene Mey — *Victoire* by Marylene Mey

Ines Guanchez: How would you describe Three Fragile Systems as a musical piece?

Missy Mazzoli: Three Fragile Systems is a work in three movements for six pianos. Each movement is based on a single melody that undergoes a series of transformations. My goal was to make music that felt fluid and organic, but was built on rigid mathematical systems. I also wanted to create music that could only be performed by six pianos; there are moments when the six player play massive chords that span the entire range of the instrument, and moments when six players try to play a melody in unison. I love the chaos and beautiful unpredictability that seems to be an inherent part of this instrumentation.

IG: Could you describe your creative process while composing Three Fragile Systems? Was there anybody or anything in particular that you drew inspiration from?

MM: I was influenced by the work of Irish composer Andrew Hamilton, the artist Sol LeWitt, and certainly by early minimalist compositions by Philip Glass and Steve Reich that are built on very clear processes and use a lot of math.

Mazzoli performing with Olivia De Prato, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by Victor Naine / I Hate Flash — Mazzoli performing with Olivia De Prato, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by Victor Naine / I Hate Flash

IG: Where do you think you are right now in your journey as a composer?

MM: I’m having the time of my life, and a lot of that joy comes from my collaborations with exceptional performers, directors, writers and visual artists. I’m tackling a lot of massive collaborative projects — operas, ballets, film scores as well as smaller chamber work, so life is very full and exciting!

IG: Given your familiarity with the piano — understanding the array of sounds and colors possible, knowing its power — how did you approached this composition for such unique ensemble?

MM: There were definitely things I’d always dreamt of hearing on a piano; what does it sound like when all, or almost all of the keys are depressed at once? What sounds can be made using the inside of the instrument? What does a unison melody sound like on six pianos? Also, I was very conscious that I was writing for these particular performers, all of whom are open, adventurous and virtuosic, so I felt free to try something very new and potentially difficult.

IG: You were presented by Liquid Music in 2014.15 with your ensemble Victoire, now you have composed a piece for Grand Band, and the SPCO will be playing one of your works during the Tapestry19 festival next season. You compose for a variety of musical genres and projects. As a successful 21st Century composer do you recommend the diversification of musical modes and styles to aspiring composers?

MM: To be clear, I actually feel that my style remains consistent, or consistent in its inconsistency, regardless of which instrumentation or ensemble I’m working with. But you’re right, I’m working with a lot of different groups and in a lot of different formats. I definitely feel it’s important, in life and art, to have a lot of diverse sources of happiness, community, and income, especially in these unpredictable times. Teaching, mentoring, curating, performing, writing theatrical work, writing for soloists these are all part of my life, and each outlet feeds and nourishes the other.

Grand Band will perform Three Fragile Systems at the Ordway Concert Hall on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 7:30pm. Purchase tickets here.

Follow Missy Mazzoli for updates and announcements:
Twitter: @MissyMazzoli (twitter.com/missymazzoli)
Official Website: www.missymazzoli.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/missy.mazzoli

'Come Through': A Visual Perspective / April 16, 2018 by Liquid Music

This week Liquid Music welcomes Bon Iver and TU Dance to the stage for a much-anticipated performance of their collaborative project 'Come Through' at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul. In this blog feature, writer Steve Marsh talks to the artists behind the visual aspects of the project, Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson.

*All gifs by Carlson/Anderson.*Photos by Graham Tolbert — *All gifs by Carlson/Anderson.
*Photos by Graham Tolbert

In the fall of 2016, I was working on a story on PEOPLE, a new creative network being formed at the Funkhaus Berlin, a hulking former East German radio complex on the banks of the River Spree. All the studios were assigned a number, and I kept getting drawn to Saal 6 for much of the week, where various members of the Minneapolis noise ensemble Marijuana Deathsquads were camped out. The hang was expectedly caliginous, so just imagine how high I was when the artist Eric Timothy Carlson handed me a copy of his new book, NYPLPCETC 01-04, a fat, red-covered, 400-page picture book of images he had culled from the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

Carlson and I had circulated in the same Minneapolis art scene for years, but I had only recently gotten to know him, this artist who always seemed to have a pencil in his hand, and a sketchbook in his lap, who grew up in Owatonna and attended MCAD before eventually moving to Brooklyn. I first met him at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, when Carlson was working with Vernon on creating a new Bon Iver aesthetic around the recording of 22, A Million. By the the fall of 2016, Carlson had become very involved in developing the semiotics for Vernon’s new social network, PEOPLE, overseeing the painting of a gigantic PEOPLE banner in the Funkhaus’ main hall. But when Carlson handed me his book in Saal 6, I remember sitting on a Bauhaus-appropriate German couch and leafing through image after curated image—photographs of people, people working as cops, people protesting, people lost in the ruins—and I remember the images numbing my brain, unfolding with a kind of punishing psychedelic effect, but I couldn’t stop looking, couldn’t stop turning the pages, and the images had this cumulative power, forcing me to re-see things I thought I’d seen before, cycling me through melancholy to disgust to astonishment.

TU Dance and Bon Iver invited Carlson and his artistic partner and Brooklyn studio-mate Aaron Anderson to collaborate on the visual component of Come Through. Anderson, also an MCAD alumnus, has been working closely with Carlson for years, since founding Hardland/Heartland (with fellow Minneapolis artist Crystal Quinn), a Minneapolis-based art collective, in 2006. Back then, Carlson and Anderson shared a penchant for collaborative performance with musicians, and a shared interest in esoteric text, ancient symbols, and experimental film—those interests persist in their work on Come Through. The two artists created hundreds of images for this performance and worked very closely with TU Dance and Bon Iver, sometimes remotely, sometimes on site at April Base, and finally during a week of intensive rehearsal last month at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Ahead of this weekend’s premiere, we discussed the roots of their partnership, how this project came to be, and their mode of working together leading up to their debut performance at the Palace Theater.

Steve Marsh: How did the two of you begin working together?

Eric Timothy Carlson: This pretty Minneapolis trippy guy, Derek Maxwell, used to host these drawing parties at his apartment, where all the tables would have paper taped onto them. People would show up and hang out and party and work on these collaborative communal drawings. Everyone was pretty good at drawing, but Aaron was really sick at drawing. We started talking about working on a comic book, and coming up with these bigger narrative ideas that quickly kind of like superseded any comic book idea. So it went straight into collaborating with Crystal. She was making costumes and fabric art, as well as being a really talented drawer and painter. The first Hardland/Heartland show was actually an installation at the Soap Factory with Derek Maxwell and Lazerbeak. We made these inflatable floating mountains, and made a mural like a giant title card, and Crystal made costumes for everybody. Derek Maxwell was in a band called the Gamut, and our setting for the show had Gamut as these wandering musicians searching for the tune from this ancient warrior, Lazerbeak. So it was this noise band with this art installation inside of an elevator shaft. And the Gamut partied and played music, and when they unlocked the key to this tomb, Lazerbeak emerged and DJed for the rest of the night.

Aaron Anderson: The blog was the only reason we were called Hardland/Heartland.

Eric Timothy Carlson: The blog was like a public journal, but the real work was these kind of events and parties and installations.

*'Never Better' album cover, designed by Eric Timothy Carlson.*

You went on to design the CD packaging for P.O.S.’ Never Better, and to design Gayngs’ iconic symbol.

ETC: Never Better was the biggest [album design project]. I had a number of projects with Building Better Bombs—those were the first ones. I was working with a friend of mine, Greg Hubacek, who was deeper into the hip hop realm. Did a mixtape with Plain Ol’ Bill. Fort Wilson Riot were friends of mine and I did some stuff with them. We’re all connected.

With this project, your imagery is so esoteric that it allows the person looking at it to come up with their own reference points and their own associations. So I don’t know if it’s fair to start with discussing process. You are obviously trying to protect whoever is seeing this imagery from having the images defined for them.

ETC: Well in a way I think talking about process avoids telling you what it is supposed to be in the end, as opposed to just telling you what it’s supposed to be in the end!

AA: Our desks are pretty close, as far as process is concerned.

When Justin Vernon invited you to do this, did he play music for you? Did you bring your own ideas because you’ve worked with him in the past?

ETC: Uri (Director of TU Dance) and Justin had been in touch and Justin had been talking about the project. And in their conversation, the 22, A Million lyric videos came up, just as an, “oh, it would be great to have this component present in the collaboration.” So it was brought up to us and just hearing about it was exciting. Something that no one involved had ever done before. [Uri and Justin] were able to get together for a session before we were able to be around for it. So we kind of got some videos of the dance’s progress and we were given kind of audio sketches. That’s what we were initially given. So at that phase of it, there was very little hard direction for us. So I was familiar with some of the songs, and some of the songs were new material. There were loose notes about how this thing could be. But it wasn’t until we got together, all of us in the same place, that we were able to see some of the dance take form in the space with the music being played live, and then we received an actual set of notes from the choreography. Uri has this vision of this whole thing in a way. He’s the one that has the whole dance in mind and knows what all the dancers are doing for the whole show. He has listened to all of the music and knows it inside out, as far as the outline of it is concerned. As far as what the performance on stage is, and how it relates to the music, he kind of has the conductor hat on. So getting notes from him proved to be really important.

So a quick digression: I would say a lot of your work reminds me, I don’t mean to sound trite, but of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi or Fricke’s Baraka or Jodorowky’s Holy Mountain, in that the images that you sample deliver more meaning cumulatively, rather than standing on their own. This one, in particular, while you’re watching it, you have shots of money, and then shots of ears, and then shots of an empty hall without an audience. It’s almost psychedelic in the fact that they’re images that we’ve all seen before, but when they’re recontextualized in the order they’re presented, and as the backdrop to a dance performance, then they have new meaning.

ETC: Totally.

So that kind of psychedelic, shamanistic vibe—the term Terence McKenna used is a “syncretic experience,” the merging of different cultural traditions in your brain. Is that the intent of your work?

ETC: I feel like all of that is totally on as far as the approach and what we’re open to and what we’re producing. I feel like once we start working on a project with a narrative where the subject is humanity, I think it works really well for that. I’m not super interested in making an explicit character-based narrative.

Why is that? Why intentionally be esoteric or obtuse? Why leave so much work to be done by the audience to actually provide meaning to the narrative?

AA: I don’t think it’s a lot of work. It’s just not the usual type of work that some people are asked to do. To me the visuals feel very specific at times. But esoteric to one person is a form of specificity to another person, and if you don’t share the same point of view with that person, that’s the opportunity to feel weird, or off-put, or mystified even. I think that personally, that’s the only thing I’m good at—doing it that way. Being confused about something is better than not caring about something. And in general, you’ll take more home with you later if you can get it that way. Whether or not you’re into it or not, whatever, that’s past my ultimate realm of concern, but really it’s more effective work that way.

ETC: It’s also speaking for a lot of different people, and to a lot of different people, a lot of different audiences. And a lot of it is about asking questions and there’s no solution.

The interesting thing that I thought about during this show, is that there are a lot more words than you usually find in your work, or maybe the words just stood out to me so much. Maybe it will feel different when I’m in the theater and am more focused on the dancers or the band. But the words stood out to me so much. And words have more of an authoritarian quality than imagery. Words actually connote more explicit meaning than say, a photograph of a blooming rose. You can be more specific with words. Was using more text intentional?

ETC: It definitely occurred. As part of the process, where again, the initial kind of conversation about our involvement was based on the [22, A Million] lyric videos. And there was no intent of making lyric videos for this performance, but we used a structure that was established in those lyric videos. Where every part of a movement in the song gets an introduction piece and that leads you through the performance as a whole. And then a way to continue organizing what will go into each section, was just kind of parsing the notes that we were receiving about the intent of the choreography for each section. And some of it is stated very explicitly: “This is what this means.” A lot of that stuff was really interesting. Where a viewer, especially a viewer unaccustomed to contemporary dance, sure some of these things would be picked up, but there are so many different things—are you looking at it formally, are you looking at it physically, are you looking at it conceptually, specifically about the dance in particular.

AA: But also coming at being really comfortable from the lyric videos. The way that that matched with the music up until that point, dance was the point of this. That’s the driver of the thing in a cool way. The dance.

You’re right, I think we grew up in similar scenes of music and visual art. I would say my ability to pick out references and to understand the language of visual art, or the references or language of popular music, is much more on point than my ability to do that with dance. I’m much more comfortable with the language of both of those mediums than I am with dance.

ETC: [One of the members of the band] BJ Burton was talking about seeing one of the guys in the front row [at MASS MoCA] looking at them during the whole performance and he was like, “why are you not watching the dancers? Watch something! We’re just standing here.”

But if you’re ignorant of the tradition and the nomenclature, like most people are when it comes to dance, you’re going to latch onto things in the room that they understand.

ETC: Totally. And see who they want to see.

AA: If you’re someone who goes to a TU Dance show, or something who would go see a Bon Iver show, you’re going to be puzzled when you leave. Either way. It will change your day, at least, in a good way.

I think being confused for an hour and 15 minutes could be a healthy thing. Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure of ourselves right now.

ETC: Yeah.

AA: Like I said, I don’t think that person will be confused the whole time, but there will be a period of acclimation. And it was interesting to see the rehearsal up close and then having to be positioned in the back of the theater. Because the system we made is more or less played along with the band. It’s not like we’re setting it up and walking away.

ETC: We’re currently pretty analog, playing through the video stuff. None of it is pre-set.

So you have control over the performance?

ETC: We have 200 videos and we have them organized and sequenced, but we can skip back in between things, and every intro of a new video piece is triggered by hand. So a lot of it isn’t necessarily falling on the beat, but it’s made to work in context of a beat.

So every performance will be slightly different?

ETC: Every performance will be very different! But it will be nuanced.

How many songs are in the performance?

AA: Like eight?

ETC: No it’s more than that now. It got to a certain point before we got to the final two weeks of building out the program. And so we had built out a program based on everything that we had known, and we got to April Base and by the time we left, it was pretty different. There were multiple working titles too—so we would call a song one thing, and the band might call it another, and the dancers might call it another. So there’s definitely a lot of fluid pieces in the way it works.

When somebody walks out of the theater after the show, and has an opportunity to ask you guys or any of the musicians, “what does NO VISUALS” mean? Or what about “BREATHE NOW AND ASCEND?” Will anybody give them a straight answer? Can anybody?

ETC: [Laughs] Well, I think the underlying premise of the whole thing is a message of hope and belief in humanity. The I WANT TO BELIEVE poster at April Base has deep resonance here. It all kind of comes to that push.

AA: I think you would get a straight answer out of most of the people involved. Some of the people might not ever give straight answer, but you’ll get honesty. And I think that’s what is cool about it. That it sort of allows for that kind of excitement. As a person who’s involved in that, it’s so rare to truly feel that.

ETC: I don’t know. Is it really confusing? It is a really mysterious vibe?

Yeah, I would say so. The kind of uplifting melancholy of Justin’s falsetto imbues the whole thing with a feeling I’m familiar with—hopeful sadness I guess. But then your imagery recalls Koyaanisqatsi, which is about an imbalance of nature and technology. Whenever you see flowers and rotting images of decay mixed with money and marching and neoclassical facades, again it can kind of look scary. I think it’s more the emotional content is on that line between being sad and also feeling the uplift that contemplating humanity gives you. It’s really big is what I’m trying to say.

ETC: Yeah. There are a lot of voices, and it’s a cacophony. And the project is a cacophony, but I feel like your read into that is also totally right. It is big. The conversation is big. And it is acknowledging this moment, that it’s a weird time, and the conversation of feeling that kind of tension in the air, and acknowledging that. The intent is to break through some of that and inspire or to ask and believe that something can be done. By us. Everybody. Us.

So would it be fair to me to ask, for instance, one of the most striking images in the entire thing is the flash zoom through all the faces. And it’s a motif that recurs. It’s really explicit, in the center of the piece, and then you flash back to it towards the end. So what idea is that coming from?

ETC: That was a direct response to a note from the choreography. “This could be a sequence of human faces.”

So how many faces are in that thing, and where did you get the faces? I know with your last book, Eric, you spent time culling images from the New York Public Library.

ETC: I don’t know, there’s 50 or 60. There might be more. 75, something like that. That was in the choreography notes for a specific moment. And that was kind of before we had gotten a bigger picture of the whole thing. So we only had a handful of things that we could really work on. So all of those were pulled from royalty free stock photography portrait galleries. So we were just trying to find a functional array of images that I could pull from that. There are certainly images throughout the whole thing that are just pulled from the Internet, and that I feel comfortable in using those from a Google image search. But when it comes to people’s faces, straight up people’s faces, it seemed important to make sure that we had whatever, royalty free free use images. But that section is also interspersed, or the faces are interspersed with the faces of the performers. So we got head shots of everybody in the performance as well, just to make it a little more personal.

AA: It flies a little too fast for anybody to recognize them.

What about the amanita muscaria mushroom—it’s one of the oldest shamanic totems of psychedelia. What was the note that you were responding to there?

ETC: That was growth. All of the growth stuff is less a specific note, but that was the tone. From the very start, knowing what this thing was addressing, this contemporary moment, this struggle that we feel is very real, and the desire to supersede that, without showing that as… I don’t know, people standing triumphantly raising some flag. The mushroom just acknowledges the growth and re-growth and cycles of nature blooming.

AA: And fungus growing is just as interesting as a flower. Even speaking to the complexity to the images in the project, that seemed to be important that that would be there. It’s not just flowers.

ETC: Flowers are too cute.

AA: Too happy. The problem is not solved. It’s just about having a better attitude to go forward.

ETC: And I love a mushroom as an end note. The deep kind of actual systems of mushrooms are a great parallel to humanity, like an unseen system that actually connects. And fungus and the connection of a lot of that material to decay, and that decay and things breaking down play a huge role in things being built again.

Maybe the most dramatic sonic moment in the show is when Justin is unaccompanied and he’s doing these sort of painful field hollers. Part of me was in awe of this white dude that’s singing such an ancient form of suffering, it’s a sound that’s strongly associated with slavery, and it’s accompanied by an image of an actual field, or brush, this kind of grey kind of ochre, muted kind of field plants. Where did you get that imagery from and what does that image mean?

ETC: So it’s in Central Park and there’s a grove of trees with a path going through it. And if you revisit the image there’s a clump of the leaves in the middle of it, and it forms this inexplicable, nearly unbelievable face. There’s like a head floating in this image. And when I walked by it, I saw it in the corner of my eye and it stopped me. It felt super surreal. But it’s a menacing headed tree, and it kind of follows you as you walk past it.

Thank you for indulging me. It does feel like cheating where you’re asking the artist to tell you what [stuff] means.

ETC: Yeah.

Everybody is going to become disoriented or confused at some point, so is there anything you would suggest to prepare for it?

AA: Bring an open mind. Sorry to have a lame answer. But a willingness to challenge your point of view.

ETC: Coming into it expecting a thing is the wrong way to do it. It’s an 90 minute thing, and it’s not a typical music show.

Maybe a warning is good: “This is not going to be normal.”

ETC: You could watch Holy Mountain and Koyaanisqatsi.

AA: Or you could watch some Bruce Conner films.

Steve Marsh is a writer interested in culture, extreme experience and performance. He’s the senior writer for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and has been published in The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Pitchfork, New York Magazine, and Grantland.

Eric and Aaron's work will be presented as part of TU Dance and Bon Iver's "Come Through" at the Palace Theater, commissioned by Liquid Music, on April 19, 20, and 21, 2018. Tickets to all four performances are SOLD OUT.

Follow Steve Marsh:
Twitter: @stephenhero

Follow Eric Timothy Carlson:
Twitter: @3TC3T3RA
Instagram: @erictimothycarlson
Website: www.erictimothycarlson.com

Follow Aaron Anderson:
Instagram: @aaron_anderson
YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/user/BeatDetectives

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Artist in Virtual Residence: Ashwini Ramaswamy, Entry #2 / April 11, 2018 by Liquid Music

Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy is one of Liquid Music Series' 2017.18 Artists in Virtual Residence. Known for her ability to "weave together both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine" (New York Times), Ramaswamy will be bringing her craft to the 2018.19 Liquid Music season in collaboration with DJ, composer, and author Jace Clayton (our other Artist in Virtual Residence) for a premiere of their new work. Here, in her second entry of the season, she discusses the inspiration behind her creative process, seeking a complimentary performance space for the project, and meeting up with Jace in North Carolina.

Blog Entry #2
By Ashwini Ramaswamy

In Marisha Pessl’s 2013 novel Night Film, the legendary director Stanislas Cordova’s cannon of classic films includes the title “At Night All Birds Are Black.” That title has stayed with me since I read the book several years ago. It is one of the inspirations behind my 2016 work Nocturne, which explores the night-worlds of humans and wildlife, and it has influenced my current Liquid Music commission.

To me, “At Night All Birds Are Black” is a striking image that combines unity with foreboding. I really gravitate towards that kind of opposition, which lends itself beautifully to art-making. This dichotomy is one of the reasons I became interested in crows and ravens as a potential theme for the Liquid Music piece that I am creating with Jace Clayton, aka dj/rupture. Myths have painted these birds as both harbingers of doom and divine messengers; their potent influence and cultural staying power is undeniable. Crows and humans are co-evolving species, and the historical, mythological, and philosophical connections between them brim with creative possibilities.

*Ashwini and LM Curator Kate Nordstrum explore possible performance spaces.*

Making a new work from scratch can take years – I have been ruminating on this project since 2015, and it will premiere in 2019 – and several elements need to come together. I’ve spend the past few months looking for the right performance space for the work, trying to find residency sites to provide space and time to create the work with Jace, and finding dancers that will elevate the work.

Since my plan for the dance aspect of this piece includes finding artists outside of my genre, I’ve spent the past few months posting and responding to audition notices, meeting with dancers, attending other company’s rehearsals, watching videos, and narrowing down the genre of dancer I might want to work with. I have one spectacular artist on board, and am still on the hunt for another – I’m looking for someone unexpected – to fill out the cast.

Finding the right site for a new piece is critical, and it can be tricky to balance ideal physical location, cost, and schedule when looking for the perfect home for a project. Liquid Music events are spot-on when it comes to location, and LM curator Kate Nordstrum and I have been looking at and discussing space options for the better part of a year. We are coming close to narrowing it down – stay tuned for an announcement of the exact date and location very soon!

In a few days I am heading to North Carolina, where Jace is the UNC Chapel Hill/Duke University Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor. This will be my second visit there to work with him on his project Sufi Plug-ins V.2, and I was very happy to bring with me my good friend and collaborator Rajna Swaminathan, an accomplished composer and mridangam (south Indian percussion) artist. This time together in a creative setting is very important as we continue to find our rhythm as collaborators. Here are a few photos from the last visit; more to come after this weekend’s work-in-progress showing in Durham!

Ashwini will continue to document her Artist in Virtual Residence journey on the Liquid Music blog throughout the year and will be featured as part of the 2018.19 Liquid Music Series season for a premiere performance of her collaborative work with Jace Clayton.

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

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"Come Through" by Bon Iver & TU Dance: Dancer Reflections at MASS MoCA / April 9, 2018 by Liquid Music

"Electrifying” (City Pages) TU Dance and “hyper-modern balladeering” (The Guardian) Bon Iver wrapped up a week-long residency at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts March 25 with two enthralling sneak peek performances of their Liquid Music-commissioned project “Come Through”. After months of collaboration and rehearsal, the final product will premiere April 19-21 at the Palace Theatre in downtown St. Paul as a part of the 2017.18 Liquid Music season. “Come Through” features new music by Justin Vernon as well as new choreography from TU Dance’s "polyrhythmic genius" (Star Tribune) Uri Sands. Here is a look at the MASS MoCA experience, featuring reflections from TU Dance company members on the residency and performance.

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“She had tears in her eyes as she thanked me and everyone involved in the project, saying she now had renewed energy to keep fighting for justice.”

Elayna Waxse: I’m a Twin Cities-based performer, choreographer, and educator currently in my sixth season with TU Dance. During our residency with Bon Iver at MASS MoCA, there were several times I had to pause and reflect on the special project that was unfolding before me. I heard some great responses from the audience, but I think my favorite was from a woman who stopped me outside the theater shortly after our Sunday matinee. She had tears in her eyes as she thanked me and everyone involved in the project, saying she now had renewed energy to keep fighting for justice. She professed (and I censored) “We’re not (expletive) alright, but one day we might be alright”. As an artist, this is all I can hope to convey.

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“It reassures me that we are moving in the right direction and all of our efforts to connect and impact with our message is successful.”

Christian Warner: This is my second season as a company member with TU Dance. The collaboration has been surreal to say the least but I believe my favorite moments are seeing the audiences members become overwhelmed with emotion or express their cathartic experiences as they view the piece. It reassures me that we are moving in the right direction and all of our efforts to connect and impact with our message is successful.

“Within a collaboration as unique as what Liquid Music has created, all of the collaborators involved have experienced opportunities to make honest personal connections through art.”

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Randall Riley: I’m a dancer with TU Dance, currently dancing my third season with the company. Within a collaboration as unique as what Liquid Music has curated, all of the collaborators involved have experienced opportunities to make honest personal connections through art. I cannot wait for everyone to hear the glorious score, but also get their lives from the projections that really help glue the piece for me!

TU Dance and Bon Iver will perform "Come Through" at the Palace Theater, commissioned by Liquid Music, on April 19, 20, and 21, 2018. Tickets to all four performances are SOLD OUT. Follow TU Dance and Bon Iver to keep an eye out for updates and announcements on the project as it continues to grow...

Follow TU Dance:
Website: http://www.tudance.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TU.Dance.MN/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/tudance

Follow Bon Iver:
Website: https://boniver.org/
Facebook: @boniverwi
Twitter: @boniver
Instagram: @boniver

Interview: Nathalie Joachim on "Fanm d’Ayiti" with Tim Munro / March 7, 2018 by Liquid Music

Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti celebrates the women of Haitian song and aims to explore their individual stories as they relate to Afro-Caribbean culture, society, history and music. Fellow flutist Tim Munro sat down with Joachim to reflect on the scope of the project, and how the process has changed her. Below is an edited transcript of Joachim’s words.

In Haiti, the women are badasses. You don’t want to mess with anyone’s Haitian mother. You’re going to definitely be on your best behavior.

I started to focus on three artists: Emerante Morse, Carole Demesmin, Toto Bissainthe. I felt connected to them. Going to Haiti, talking to these women, meeting their families, seeing where they’re from, hearing their deep commitment to Haiti. It felt inspiring. The three paint an interesting portrait. They’re each from pretty distinct eras, musically, but each influenced the other. Many consider these women revolutionaries.

The piece of the puzzle that made Fanm d’Ayiti come together was being in Haiti, recording a children’s choir. They were singing the music for a Catholic church service, accompanied by a drummer who was playing these very distinct voodoo drum patterns. It was two worlds colliding: this Catholic religion passed on through colonialism, and a musical practice that came all the way from Africa.

Fanm d’Ayiti is linked by the idea of strength and freedom and empowerment. It is made up of music woven together with some of the recorded testimony of the women I interviewed, and the field recording of the girls choir, and recordings off my grandmother. Half of the material is completely original, the other half are some arrangements of these three female artists.

My entire piece has a religious lens. So many of the songs in the show are Haitian voodoo songs. All of the text throughout the whole show is very deeply rooted in religion, whether it is African religion or Roman Catholic. I’ve learned about Voodoo as a practice. There is a stigma attached, but it’s akin to Native American religious practice. Voodoo as a practice is more about storytelling than anything else. Many of the gods are tied to nature.

Nathalie alongside Emerante Morse (July 2017)

I’m at the end of this project, but it also feels like the beginning. The show has helped me focus a new direction, to connect deeply to something that has been waiting to be tapped into.

For so long I have been attached to the, like, “I’m a classical flutist, and this is what I do.” This is what the world thinks is the most “validated” training. The thing I’m “supposed” to be doing. I have never stood solidly on my ability as a composer. I had been actively writing music, but was very selective about what I was sharing publicly. Censoring my own voice.

Also, in the past I have shied away from what I knew to be my vocal identity, to make myself fit somewhere. I’m definitely not an opera singer…at all. And I feel like people look at me and are like, “This is an African American female, so she’s going to sound like a soul singer,” and I don’t sound like that.

The practice of music in Haiti is very communal, very relaxed. It’s not about who’s been playing the longest, who’s the best, who’s the most trained, who’s recognized as X, Y or Z. It’s just people sharing a piece of themselves as honestly as they can. It’s a style of music that really lacks any pretension, which makes me a better performer. It takes away this need to be perfect.

I never recognized that the many hours singing with my grandmother were also music lessons. To me it was just “Oh, that’s just my time with my grandmother.” But the second I started this project, I realized she trained me so well in the practice of folk singing and folk music in Haiti.

In this project I’m writing and performing in a way that I would have been scared to do a decade ago. So much of my musical instinct and influence comes from being a kid growing up in Brooklyn, with electronic music and hip hop steeped in my ear. That, combined with my classical training, is of course a valid practice of studying music.

Vocally, this project is the most I’ve been myself. Making music in Haiti happens without abandon. The songs have such deep meaning, and you just give yourself to it. It has resulted in me finding a vocal quality that feels like the most natural.

All of these things are coming together with honesty. Putting myself out there in this way is super-vulnerable. But at the showing in St. Paul and the taping for “On Being,” it was maybe the least stage-fright I’ve ever had. It felt normal. And right.

Tim Munro is a Chicago-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. His diverse work as a flutist, speaker, writer and teacher is united by a single goal: to draw audiences into an engrossing and whimsical musical world.

Recognized for her versatile and innovative performing and composing, Nathalie Joachim is “an edgy multi-genre performance artist who has long been pushing boundaries with her flute.” (The Washington Post) Critics hail the Brooklyn born, Haitian-American artist for creating “a unique blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo-R&B stars like Erykah Badu.” (The Wall Street Journal) Ms. Joachim was recently appointed flutist of the four- time Grammy winning contemporary chamber ensemble, eighth blackbird. She is also co-founder of the critically acclaimed urban art pop duo, Flutronix, known for bringing their ingenuity and technical prowess to stages world-wide. Other performance experience showcases an impressive range, including featured appearances with Miguel Zenón, Vampire Weekend, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Richard Reed Parry and Dan Deacon. Ms. Joachim is a former faculty member of The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program (MAP) and is regularly engaged by elite educational institutions nationwide. This season, she joins the Perlman Music Program Summer Music School as Director of Contemporary Music. Notable commissions of her composition work include Land Bridge, an evening-length score for Helen Simoneau Danse (2016), Ulysses in 3, a collaboration with Ulysses Owens, Jr. as part of Park Avenue Armory’s Under Construction program (2015), as well as a piece for solo cello written for Amanda Gookin of PUBLIQuartet (2017). Ms. Joachim is the only person to have successfully completed the MAP, Pre-College, and College Division programs at The Juilliard School. She received her graduate degree education at The New School in audio production and sound design.

FOLLOW NATHALIE JOACHIM
Website: nathaliejoachim.com
Facebook: facebook.com/nathalie.joachim.39
Twitter: @flutronix (twitter.com/flutronix)
Instagram: @njoachim (instagram.com/njoachim)
Youtube: youtube.com/c/nathaliejoachi

FOLLOW TIMOTHY MUNRO
Website: timothymunro.com
Twitter: @lullysfoot (twitter.com/lullysfoot)
Instagram: @timothymunro (instagram.com/timothymunro)

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Shawnee, Ohio: An Essay by Brian Harnetty / March 5, 2018 by Liquid Music

On March 20, 2018, Liquid Music presents composer, sound artist and writer Brian Harnetty to perform his composition Shawnee, Ohio. Described by The Wire as "breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualising them", Shawnee Ohio evokes a historic time and place through the present act of sound archives, field recordings, and live musicians. In this essay, Harnetty reflects on his family background, the significance of Shawnee, and his process in creating the piece.

In 1872, my mother’s ancestors immigrated as Welsh coal miners to a town called Shawnee in Appalachian Ohio. Located in what is now the Wayne National Forest, my family experienced a series of booms and busts that resulted in labor strikes, underground mine fires, and the formation of the United Mine Workers. Shortly after my grandfather Mordecai Williams graduated from Shawnee High School in 1925, the whole family moved away, caught between a regional mining bust that would never recover and the Great Depression yet to come.

Almost a century and a half later, I continue to return to and evoke this region as the core subject of my work. Since 2010, I’ve been regularly visiting Shawnee. The streets are lined with two story buildings with upper porches and are being held up by the community of people that remains there after a century of economic decline. I’ve developed friendships with local residents, accompanied them on their jobs, and attended social events and festivals. I’ve also observed protests over the region’s most recent boom, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Much like the author bell hooks, I “return again and again” to the homes of my family, searching for ways to deeply understand and help protect the soundscape and its people.

My piece Shawnee, Ohio gets its musical and visual material from these visits. One day, I asked a local historian if there were any sound recordings. Rummaging through a closet in his office, he produced a box of about forty cassette tapes. They were mostly recorded by him in the 1980s. The tapes contain oral histories of a generation of people now gone.

On these tapes I hear memory, laughter, embarrassment, music, forgetting, sorrow, friendship. I hear about everyday events—births, work, loves, deaths—directly and without mediation. I hear Jim Bath describing Shawnee, building by building; an unknown boy interviewing his grandmother about men who died in the mines; and Neva Randolph, soulfully singing of hope and change, even while on her own death bed. These people speak and sing in their own voices, unrehearsed. They are not famous or wealthy. Their agenda is to share, to remember, to learn, and to find ways to move forward.

“In ‘Shawnee, Ohio’ and all of my work, I contend that the simple act of listening—to places, people, to their stories and their sonic pasts—can transform their futures.”

— Brian Harnetty

Now, after 80 years of environmental recovery, the region and the forest are once again under threat. New fracking leases on public lands are greatly expanding gas and oil extraction there. Needless to say, the region is deeply divided politically and socially over fracking and energy extraction. Residents find themselves caught between the promise of jobs—however temporary—and fighting to end centuries of environmental degradation.

I cannot lay claim to these places and people; I don’t pretend to be a spokesperson for them or the region, nor can I identify as Appalachian. However, in Shawnee, Ohio and all of my work, I contend that the simple act of listening—to places, people, to their stories and their sonic pasts—can transform their futures. In this way, the lament of Sigmund Kozma as he describes a 1930 mine disaster becomes a cautionary tale for today, and the sung protests of Jack Wright against fracking evokes a spirit of hope that has stubbornly persisted for generations. Through listening, this project asserts the key to social change here necessarily involves connections and discussions over this shared past, the land, and the forest: public lands that can be reclaimed through many different voices of dissent.

Harnetty will perform Shawnee, Ohio at Mairs Concert Hall at Macalester College on Tuesday, March 20, 2018 at 7:30pm. Purchase tickets here.

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

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Liquid Music Artist in Virtual Residence: Jace Clayton / February 28, 2018 by Liquid Music

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

Blog Entry #2
By Jace Clayton

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Brian Harnetty on "Shawnee Ohio" with Mark Mazullo / February 21, 2018 by Liquid Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poliça's Channy Leaneagh on the evolution of "Music for the Long Emergency" / February 13, 2018 by Liquid Music

By Katie Hare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Spectrum of Pop with Anna Meredith and Har-di-har / January 25, 2018 by Liquid Music

The beauty of living in a time when genre boundaries have mostly dissolved is discovering the infinite possibilities left in the void they left behind. These liminal spaces have been Liquid Music’s bread and butter since its conception — and for good reason: when genre is stripped away audiences are empowered to listen in new ways and have the chance to really take the time to discover themselves in something unfamiliar. Performers are given permission to fully self-actualize, to test the boundaries, and take risks. This genreless world also brings up some interesting and less than obvious questions. For example: what is “pop” music?

Is it a catchy tune?
Is it “popular?”
Is it an arbitrary list of 40 songs?
Does it have to have words?
Do you have to remember the words?
Does it have to have a beat?
Do I have to dance to it?
Would my mom like it???

The aforementioned beauty is: we don’t have to answer! Better yet, we can listen, see, and hear artists explore these questions with unparalleled nuance. Regarding “pop,” composer/performer/multi-instrumentalist Anna Meredith complicates the question. Meredith is in many ways the ideal Liquid Music artist — a trained, acclaimed and oft commissioned composer that dove headfirst into the world of electronic indie band-dom.

In preparation for her Liquid Music/Walker Art Center Midwest premiere, we wanted to find out more about how Meredith has so fluidly navigated her incredibly prolific and diverse career. To do so we asked local collage/art-pop duo Har-di-har (Julie and Andrew Thoreen), whose music similarly utilizes intricate instrumentation with incisive chamber aesthetics, to find out more about Meredith’s practice.

- Patrick Marschke, LM Blog Contributor

Har-di-har (Andrew and Julie Thoreen) photo: Taylor Donsky

[portions of this interview were edited for length and clarity]

Andrew Thoreen: Was there a specific thing that led you into pop, electronic and IDM music, in addition to doing traditional composition alongside that?

Anna Meredith: I wasn’t someone who was composing as a kid. I didn’t understand that composition was even a career I could do so I was actually performing and playing in bands and choirs, playing clarinet and drums and stuff way before I wrote any music. I went on to eventually study composition, it was a much more singular and kind of focused thing. Traditionally composition is a very isolated activity where you write on your own and you are expected to be a sort of genius who doesn’t interact with other people that much; you write an exquisite score on paper and you hand it to someone and that's kind of the end of your involvement. Quite often, the piece itself is only played once so it's all about this craftsmanship behind the scenes, and I think even though I was and do really enjoy that side of working, I also missed the performance and I missed some energy — even with a big orchestra, I wasn't getting quite enough power that sometimes I wanted. With electronics I can be in control from start to finish, everything from instrumentation to how its performed to performing a big part of the performance myself means that I'm not relying on anybody else. It’s kind of a control freak thing. I just had a desire to have a bit more control, have a bit more fun, to be able to really get into music that I was repeating and performing over and over again, rather than making brand new things for each show.

Andrew: Another thing you mentioned was the tragedy of putting so much time into one piece and only having it performed once.

Right. Traditionally I’ve spent six months, or even longer, writing a piece that's performed once and has no recordings — and that’s the idea. A lot of composers I know are really happy with that kind of equation: that the effort put in is equal to a single occasion. I just couldn’t live with it. Sometimes it felt that I was giving so much and then quite often the piece was being played to an audience of people who were just waiting to get to the Dvorak in the second half of the concert and get through your piece. That felt wrong, whereas there is a development and evolution to the electronic music I’m doing with the band but broadly, a lot of them are playing the same tracks in slightly different ways that we work on. It's a really lovely thing performing for people and watching them know the songs and sing along. That was a bit an eye-opener for me. Suddenly thinking: Oh, this is about familiarity and this is about making bits of music that you really love and believe in and then putting them out in the world to really exist. Classical music often doesn't “exist.” If you write the score on paper and if there’s no recording all it is is one experience, this single moment in time, whereas here there is this physical object, this album, you can hold this thing and pick it up and you can listen to it day or night… being able to make something that exists in the world, it’s quite cool.

Andrew: Right, the “Album as a form” is wonderful and really not that different from the idea of a Concerto or Symphony especially in its development in pop music. It has infinite possibilities within, it's just a constraint of time.

And we don’t even need that constraint! We could easily have an album that is 100 hours long streamed online.

I wonder if it will change because now, certainly people don't like symphonies in quite the same way. I wonder if our idea of a 12 track album will be gone in 20 years. It's a reflection of what we expect. But for now, it feels nice. It feels like you're sort of saying, okay, I've got 40 minutes to an hour to play with and create an amazing shape or journey through this time. I’m in control of this experience... Well, you say you are in control but obviously with streaming people are jumping around tracks and playing the favorite ones and skipping the ones they don't like but you at least can try.

Julie: I was actually watching the BBC Proms piece, “Hands Free,” and I was just thinking the whole time how it was written and how it was directed and then conducted in the moment. It made me just think about “play.” It was like a big playground.

It was a commission for a big Youth Orchestra, 160 kids, massive, they’re amazing, they're the sort of best youth orchestra in the UK. The commission was initially about trying to celebrate or highlight skills that you have as a musician that aren't about playing your instrument — communication and rhythm and precision and intricacy and performance ability — but that aren't about picking up your cello. They asked me initially to write a clapping piece, but I eventually realized that just clapping is pretty painful and, to me, not that interesting to listen to — so that's why I started to bring in all the beatboxing and body percussion and I worked with a choreographer to kind of highlight it all. It was a really interesting experience — some of the kids were quite reluctant at first. Classical players like to have something to look at even if it’s not telling them anything, even if their paper is just saying “TACET,” don't play this movement, it’s a security thing about projecting and performing to the audience.

I really wanted to make sure there was no sheet music. I have a graphic score for reference but I don't give it to the performers because I thought they would clutch onto this paper as if it was the Holy Grail. To a certain degree it's about just saying: “This is what material is.” You wouldn't question it if I asked you to turn your bow over and tap it with the wood or stick this whatever in your trumpet. You just say, “This is what the piece is: put down your instrument, turn away your music stand, stand up. Do this sequence and these movements and.” To have them make the connection that getting the movement quality right, getting your arm straight or your elbows high is as important for that piece as getting the right phrasing or notes for playing your solo violin piece. It was a big challenge for them to work on. It’s developed a lot since it was first premiered because each new group can check out previous performances.

I really like it because there's a certain self-sufficiency to the piece. You don't need any special training, you don't even need to own any instruments. And there is an equality to that — typically in an orchestra, there is a lot of hierarchy: the lead violin is “more important” and so on. With this piece everyone has to work equally otherwise it fails.

Andrew: I am curious about your experience as a multi-instrumentalist: How do you balance all that goes into being a touring/performing instrumentalist and singer with your compositional practice?

My instrumental skills are so much worse than everybody else's in the band! So everything that I do I’ve designed around my own limits. I play the clarinet but I’m nowhere near the band skill-wise, they are all total professionals. I’m not an amazing singer but I love singing so the songs I sing on are ones that work around where my little squeaky five-year-old voice can work. The idea is sort of “warts and all” — this is who I am and what I do. I would feel weird to have an amazing singer or a brilliant clarinet player. I wanted to sing, I want to play my clarinet, I wanted to smash the shit out of some drums. Keeping up technique is not something I do as much as I should, partly because I have the others making me look good. But the balance thing I do find quite difficult because I’m trying to juggle this balance of touring and big new commissions and a film soundtrack — it's very difficult to do.

In the past I would write a bit of music for months and that would be all I would do. Now I have to keep breaking it up to go on tour. I’ve definitely been at points where taken far too much on and I've ended up in the tour bus frantically trying to write, laptop bumping over the road as I try and get through it, so it's a tough balance and I'm kind of I'm kind of working on it.

Julie: Do you typically compose at the computer?

I do. For me, the most important thing is the pacing and the shape and the drama. I'm not a very good pianist and I don’t think improvising helps me make strong decisive music that has a really good shape. So the first thing I do is get a blank paper and I draw timeline across it and then I draw these very graphic shapes which are the kind of drama of the music.

Julie: Before you have even written a note?

Yeah! It’s like pacing a story, controlling the shape of the thing. It’s quite often these big angular build-ups. It helps me really control the narrative. And then I work backward from these timelines.

I draw these shapes and then I have to make the music work around these shapes to make them the clearest and strongest version of themselves. Strength is something I’m always really looking for in music. I want to strip away things. I don’t want to make music that is just layers of sound, or that the identity is created solely through texture.

(Enticing sketches) v excited about doing Hum @ #SoundUnbound2017 today @BarbicanCentre -the Jnr @guildhallschool performers are AMAZING🌀🌀🌀 pic.twitter.com/LOaGhviVLD
— Anna Meredith (@AnnaHMeredith) April 30, 2017

Julie: How do you take these pieces/songs constructed in the studio and translate them to a live setting?

Not everything is played live — some stuff is backing tracks and some is sampled. It's all still very electronic.

I’ve taken the album version and made space in the arrangements for the players. It’s a combination of machines and humans. A battle for supremacy. I’m not someone that feels that everything must be made by humans. I get that there is a real purity that comes from that but it would be impossible with this music. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

From the album side, I then create a version that’s the live version that cuts things out so that the space for real instruments to be with electronic instruments and then I make slightly different arrangements to make it fun/practical for the musicians.

Andrew: I’m curious about how you decide where and when to use acoustic instruments vs. live instruments in the live setting.

Production is definitely not my forte. I’m not the type of person that would be excited to find an amazing old analog synth and write a piece for it. In fact, the whole production side of things tends to scare me a bit. So after I do my graphic-y shape I will then go into Sibelius [music notation software], and write most of the music on that, which has terrible sounds, terrible midi…

Andrew: And really bad feel...

...terrible and depressing feel. I find that its a good way to test the bones of the material: if I can make things that sound exciting using shit MIDI sounds then I know that the actual building blocks are good. I try not to jump straight to the production side and to finding the right synth. So when I’m making this mock-up on Sibelius, I’ll have piano sound and a brass sound, it gets some sort of element of color that I like, and then I’ll go into Ableton and I’ll extract all of the MIDI out of Sibelius into Ableton [digital production software]. It's also that I’ve been working in Sibelius much longer than Ableton, so it’s really about making things work for your own skill set.

Andrew: How do you go about finding the digital sounds you end up using?

When initially I started getting into electronics I opened up Ableton and looked at a million different synths and thought, “oh this is amazing!” and started improvising away. It was all really fun but it didn’t sound like me at all, it was all very layer-y and amorphous and lacking direction. I’ve had take a lot of time to evolve this painstaking and (a bit weird) process of graphic score to notated music extracted into the production software. From there, I’m actually not too precise about synth sounds. I have a general idea about color. I generally start with a preset and then muck about with it until I get what I want, but I don’t feel like that’s the strength of the music — the particular sound of the synth, it just sort of gives the right function, the right color.

In terms of where to include acoustic instruments I think I normally have an idea earlier on about where the acoustic instruments will go.

Julie: What do you hope for the future of classical music and music education?

I’m not someone who sees genres at all. I think we’re living in a quite healthy time. It feels like there’s loads of really interesting music that is a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit Classical, a bit pop, a bit jazz, a bit minimal. I think it’s understandable that people want to place things into certain genres and pigeonhole because it’s familiarity: “I get what this music is, it’s this" or "it sounds a lot like this,” or “she’s clearly listened to tons of this.” I really understand that desire to categorize but I don’t find it helpful at all. I don’t think about genre at all when I’m writing.

The way that I write the strongest stuff is almost like a denial — I don’t think about whether something is groundbreaking or different or if anybody has done it before. I just try to make a thing to the best of my ability and in the strongest possible way. If that then happens to be a bit different than what people have done before, great, but it’s not something I’m setting out to do. I’m not trying to break rules or do anything new. I think if I set out to do that, I’d write worse music. It would prioritize the rule-breaking instead of the quality or integrity to myself which is important. To do stuff I am proud of. For that reason, I don’t listen to much music, mostly out of security. If I listen to someone else’s music I think, "Wow that’s great, I should try to do that" and then I write just a crap version of it. I just trained myself to be in this little hermit cave where I’m not thinking too much about what other kinds of music are out there. I’m just doing my own thing.

Julie: It sounds like your main driving force is integrity to yourself as opposed to following the established systems.

Right. Similar to the “warts and all” approach to performing: honesty is the only way I can think to do it. To present yourself — this is how I sing, it’s a bit squeaky and weak, but who cares. This is me and this is my voice. Trying to be honest to myself.

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A post shared by Har-di-Har (@hardiharmusic) on Jan 21, 2018 at 10:41am PST

Special thanks to Julie and Andrew from Har-di-har for taking the time to interview Anna! You can find out more about there music and upcoming performances here. Follow them on facebook/instagram

Follow Anna Meredith
Website: http://www.annameredith.com/
Twitter: @AnnaHMeredith
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annahmeredith/
Instagram: @AnnaMeredith

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO (twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
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Liquid Music CONNECTS: Students Visit "Virtually" with Artists in Residence Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton aka DJ Rupture / January 16, 2018 by Liquid Music

By SPCO Education Manager Eleanor Owens GrandPre

Building on the momentum established during last year's debut, 2017.18 marks the second year of CONNECTion Virtual Visits between The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's CONNECT program and Liquid Music. Serving over 5,500 students, the CONNECT program engages students in grades 1-5 in twelve partnering Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools. The program is completely free of charge for these schools and provides supplementary music education resources to students with curriculum and support for teachers. The educational resources are paired with SPCO musician visits to each of the participating schools and culminates with a live orchestra concert, curated specifically to bring to life the year's curriculum and theme. The feedback from the schools in our annual evaluations increasingly indicates that teachers are looking for more performances for their students. CONNECTion Virtual Visits provide a special way to introduce students to living artists while engaging them with performances right in their own classroom.

This year’s collaboration features Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer/choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy and composer/DJ/author Jace Clayton. Ramaswamy is celebrated for her ability to “[weave] together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine” (New York Times), and Clayton has been described as a “pan-global, post-everything superhero” (Wire). Ramaswamy and Clayton are this season’s Virtual Artists in Residence for Liquid Music and the students and teachers in the CONNECT program are thrilled to be virtually introduced and captivated by their art.

Using a shared love of literature and interest in artistically exploring social memory, the two artists will develop an original work for its World Premiere in Liquid Music's 2018.19 season. This type of collaboration is a first for both of them. Students in CONNECT’s twelve participating schools will be introduced to these artists through a video introduction made by the artists themselves. Liquid Music audiences will be able to follow their creative process on the Liquid Music blog as Ramaswamy and Clayton share behind-the-scenes insight into their collaboration.

The “selfie-style” video introduction offers a personal look at the artists, early on in their collaborative process. The videos are accessible and give CONNECT students unique insight into the initial stages of creating new work.

After viewing the introduction videos, students and teachers will collect questions and submit them to the artists via their own “selfie” videos. This shared video exchange is a special part of this CONNECTion Virtual Visits. Part of the charm of the interaction is that students have the chance to be curious and experience music they might not normally hear by artists previously unknown to them.

Finally, completing the circle, the artists will record a video, answering selected questions that were posed by the elementary aged students. Each full school watches the final question and answer video – the students whose questions were picked to be answered by the artists get a chance in the spotlight! (See last year's final video by 2016.17 Artist in Virtual Residence Nathalie Joachim.)

The limits faced in the schools with complex scheduling and limited funds are real, but this program works to engage students and expose them to new music and art in an effective, yet efficient way. With just a laptop and bit of time, the CONNECTion Virtual Visit provides a unique and transformative experience for students and teachers, fostering discovery and interest in contemporary music and multidisciplinary approaches to art.

Keep up with Liquid Music Artists in Virtual Residence Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton through journal entries and updates on the LM blog:
Artist in Virtual Residence: Ashwini Ramaswamy
Artist in Virtual Residence: Jace Clayton/DJ Rupture

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

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

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

Liquid Music

Everyday Expression: Dimitri Chamblas & Kim Gordon on Movement, Sound and Performance / December 12, 2018 by Liquid Music

Inclusion, Collaboration, Evolution: Vanessa Rose Interviews Jennifer Koh / December 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

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Interview: Third Coast Percussion on Collaboration / November 9, 2018 by Liquid Music

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2018.19 Liquid Music Artist Choice Playlist / October 24, 2018 by Liquid Music

Deantoni Parks’ Technoself / September 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

But what IS Technoself exactly?

BUY TICKETS TO THE WORLD PREMIERE OF HANNA BENN & DEANTONI PARKS: PROCESSION SEPTEMBER 23 AT MACHINE SHOP, MINNEAPOLIS.

Interview: Hanna Benn on "Procession" / September 5, 2018 by Liquid Music

Exploring the "Irrepressibly Subjective" with Teju Cole / May 29, 2018 by Liquid Music

Buy tickets to the midwest premiere of VIJAY IYER & TEJU COLE: BLIND SPOT copresented by LIQUID MUSIC AND WALKER ART CENTER mAY 31 & JUNE 1, and keep an eye out for Teju's interview with Krista Tippett via On Being in the coming months.

Stiff String Theory / May 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

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Read more:
Grand Band: A Curious Synthesis
Interview: Missy Mazzoli on "Three Fragile Systems"

Grand Band: A Curious Synthesis / May 3, 2018 by Liquid Music

Interview: Missy Mazzoli on "Three Fragile Systems" / April 26, 2018 by Liquid Music

'Come Through': A Visual Perspective / April 16, 2018 by Liquid Music

Artist in Virtual Residence: Ashwini Ramaswamy, Entry #2 / April 11, 2018 by Liquid Music

"Come Through" by Bon Iver & TU Dance: Dancer Reflections at MASS MoCA / April 9, 2018 by Liquid Music

Interview: Nathalie Joachim on "Fanm d’Ayiti" with Tim Munro / March 7, 2018 by Liquid Music

Shawnee, Ohio: An Essay by Brian Harnetty / March 5, 2018 by Liquid Music

Liquid Music Artist in Virtual Residence: Jace Clayton / February 28, 2018 by Liquid Music

Interview: Brian Harnetty on "Shawnee Ohio" with Mark Mazullo / February 21, 2018 by Liquid Music

Poliça's Channy Leaneagh on the evolution of "Music for the Long Emergency" / February 13, 2018 by Liquid Music

On the Spectrum of Pop with Anna Meredith and Har-di-har / January 25, 2018 by Liquid Music

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Follow Anna Meredith
Website: http://www.annameredith.com/
Twitter: @AnnaHMeredith
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annahmeredith/
Instagram: @AnnaMeredith

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

Liquid Music CONNECTS: Students Visit "Virtually" with Artists in Residence Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton aka DJ Rupture / January 16, 2018 by Liquid Music

RECENT POSTS

Archive

Everyday Expression: Dimitri Chamblas & Kim Gordon on Movement, Sound and Performance / December 12, 2018 by Liquid Music

Inclusion, Collaboration, Evolution: Vanessa Rose Interviews Jennifer Koh / December 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

Follow Jennifer Koh:

Follow Vijay Iyer:

Follow Tyshawn Sorey:

FOLLOW LIQUID MUSIC FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Interview: Third Coast Percussion on Collaboration / November 9, 2018 by Liquid Music

Follow Third Coast Percussion:

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:

2018.19 Liquid Music Artist Choice Playlist / October 24, 2018 by Liquid Music

Deantoni Parks’ Technoself / September 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

But what IS Technoself exactly?

BUY TICKETS TO THE WORLD PREMIERE OF HANNA BENN & DEANTONI PARKS: PROCESSION SEPTEMBER 23 AT MACHINE SHOP, MINNEAPOLIS.

Interview: Hanna Benn on "Procession" / September 5, 2018 by Liquid Music

Exploring the "Irrepressibly Subjective" with Teju Cole / May 29, 2018 by Liquid Music

Buy tickets to the midwest premiere of VIJAY IYER & TEJU COLE: BLIND SPOT copresented by LIQUID MUSIC AND WALKER ART CENTER mAY 31 & JUNE 1, and keep an eye out for Teju's interview with Krista Tippett via On Being in the coming months.

Stiff String Theory / May 10, 2018 by Liquid Music

MUSIC

Read more:Grand Band: A Curious SynthesisInterview: Missy Mazzoli on "Three Fragile Systems"

Grand Band: A Curious Synthesis / May 3, 2018 by Liquid Music

Interview: Missy Mazzoli on "Three Fragile Systems" / April 26, 2018 by Liquid Music

'Come Through': A Visual Perspective / April 16, 2018 by Liquid Music

Artist in Virtual Residence: Ashwini Ramaswamy, Entry #2 / April 11, 2018 by Liquid Music

"Come Through" by Bon Iver & TU Dance: Dancer Reflections at MASS MoCA / April 9, 2018 by Liquid Music

Interview: Nathalie Joachim on "Fanm d’Ayiti" with Tim Munro / March 7, 2018 by Liquid Music

Shawnee, Ohio: An Essay by Brian Harnetty / March 5, 2018 by Liquid Music

Liquid Music Artist in Virtual Residence: Jace Clayton / February 28, 2018 by Liquid Music

Interview: Brian Harnetty on "Shawnee Ohio" with Mark Mazullo / February 21, 2018 by Liquid Music

Poliça's Channy Leaneagh on the evolution of "Music for the Long Emergency" / February 13, 2018 by Liquid Music

On the Spectrum of Pop with Anna Meredith and Har-di-har / January 25, 2018 by Liquid Music

BUY TICKETS TO THE FEB 7th PERFORMANCE

Follow Anna MeredithWebsite: http://www.annameredith.com/ Twitter: @AnnaHMeredithFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/annahmeredith/ Instagram: @AnnaMeredith

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

Liquid Music CONNECTS: Students Visit "Virtually" with Artists in Residence Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton aka DJ Rupture / January 16, 2018 by Liquid Music

Read more:
Grand Band: A Curious Synthesis
Interview: Missy Mazzoli on "Three Fragile Systems"

Follow Anna Meredith
Website: http://www.annameredith.com/
Twitter: @AnnaHMeredith
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annahmeredith/
Instagram: @AnnaMeredith

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