Saturdays
May 7, 14 & 21
3 PM - 10PM
Spaced Out
and
Unentitled
a two-part Sound Installation by Writer/Composer
Bruce Andrews
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with concert performances at 8 pm all three nights involving improvising musicians and experimental poetic language 'edited live'
Line-up for May 7:
Jim
Staley - trombone
David Weinstein - electronics, keyboards
Michael Lytle - bass clarinet
Dan Evans Farkas - electro-acoustic feedback
Seth Nehil - playback devices
Damon Holzborn - electronics
Bruce Andrews - language, edited live
New Line-up for May 14:
Shelley
Hirsch - vocals
Ikue Mori - electronics
Okkyung Lee - cello
David Watson - bagpipes, guitar
Judy Dunaway - tenor balloon
Damon Holzborn - electronics
Bruce Andrews - language, edited live
Line-up for May 21:
David
Watson - bagpipes
Mario de Vega - electronics
Michael Schumacher - piano
Damon Holzborn - electronics
Bruce Andrews - language, edited live
& special surprise guest
The installation in the front room, SPACED OUT, presents simultaneously the four versions of an hour-long poetic text (exploring the often strange and wacky semantics of off-kilter phrases and word atoms suggested by the nightlife of electronica). All four at once, spatialized: the spoken text, a processed version involving a cornucopia of multi-effects transformations, and two versions based on Max/MSP patches tailored to the text by Michael J. Schumacher.
In the back room, carrying voice 'language' outside semantics and recognizable words into the heritage of Sound Poetry, is UNENTITLED. This is Andrews's collaboration with Schumacher in an homage to M.S.'s 2005 piece 'Untitled'. It takes the several dozen Max/MSP patches Michael applied to a dizzyingly varied collection of short sound files (everything from ambient field recordings to solo instrumental noises) and applies them to over 700 short vocal recordings by Andrews which try to imitate, as closely as possible, the hundreds of samples from 'Untitled'.
Also on display, as an iPhoto loop, we premiere PREHAB, Andrews's typographical collaboration with designer Dirk Rowntree, who says "it is a cycle of seventy-six graphic interferences with the same number of text elements provided by Bruce -- to leave a mimic live trace, a control pallette gag stroke. Retinal grips blanket a cross platform accent. It's a gathering of expanded vectors and punchline microdots, tremendo content and custom layer misnomers. 'Prehab' is a mobile multi-undo vapor precision that supports giffy task capture for built-in doubt."
All this plus live performances at 8 pm each of the three evenings - with Andrews editing experimental poetry live, to add the textures and twisted sense of language to an instrumental mix of live improvisers (and likely, also, some of their live electronic processing or acoustic vocalizing of his language).
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BRUCE ANDREWS has maintained a consistently uncompromising position at the most radical extreme of the literary avant-garde. He is a central figure in what has become known as Language Writing, the major innovative movement in U.S. poetry in recent decades.
He has published poetry, performance scores and literary theory widely, and has been frequently anthologized and the subject of numerous critical articles in recent years (including a panel at the Modern Language Association convention, 'Bruce Andrews and the Social Politics of the Avant-Garde'). He co-edited the journal L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E and The L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Book with Charles Bernstein, which sought to emphasize the type of work that has made Andrews's own texts so distinctive: "a spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter." Andrews lives in New York City and is a professor of Political Science at Fordham University.
As Musical Director of Sally Silvers & Dancers, he has created compositions, collages and performance mixes of music and texts for over a decade and a half. Along with scores for improvisers and co-created multi-media theater works, some texts from these collaborations appear in Ex Why Zee, one of over two dozen of his published literary works Ñ most recent are Lip Service (a reworking of Dante's Paradiso) and The Millennium Project (several hundred pages online at: www.princeton.edu/eclipse). Northwestern Univ. Press published his collection of theoretical essays, Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Lots of stuff (on and by him) on his Electronic Poetry Center page: epc.buffalo.edu/authors/andrews Ñ for instance, video of a performance with Silvers from the Whitney Museum of American Art's 'Impulsive Behavior' series.
He has created collage materials (processing his instrumental playing) in the 1990s in a Residency at Harvestworks and deployed those materials as the sound for Silvers' choreography (and in instrumental mixing in performance with other improvisers). With language, he has worked with improvising musicians to present poetry 'edited live' in performance Ñ including 'Mistaken Identity' with Vernon Reid. Two years ago, his Fellowship/Residency at Engine 27, with Michael J. Schumacher as his engineer, orchestrated several digital transformations (via multi-effects processing and Max/SP of an hour-long poetic text, 'Spaced Out' Ñ the kernel for MayÕs Diapason installation.
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