The only-in-Altadena Folly Bowl, the outdoor amphitheater at the home of Sue Dadd and James Griffith at 1601 E. Loma Alta, promises a Labor Day weekend of unusual artistry by artists in very different fields.
Long-time collaborators Carole Kim (live video) and Jesse Gilbert (designer/programmer) will be "stepping out" with Gilbert's new audio/visual interface, SPECTRAL, joined by different artists in performances on Sat., Sept. 4, and Sun., Sept. 5.
On Saturday, Eve Luckring will present poetry and short videos, with Anne Le Baron (harp) and Michael Dessen (trombone, electronics). On Sun., Kim, Gilbert, and Luckring will be joined by Motoko Honda (electronics) and Carmina Escobar (trombone, electronics).
Both performances start at 7:30 PM, $10 ($5 children). You are invited to bring your own picnic, refreshments, cushions or blankets, and all trash must leave the premises.
Bios of the artists after the jump.
ANNE LE BARON’s compositions
embrace an exotic array of subjects encompassing vast reaches of space
and time, ranging from the mysterious Singing Dune of Kazakhstan, to
probes into physical and cultural forms of extinction, to legendary
figures such as Pope Joan, Eurydice, Marie Laveau, and the American
Housewife. Widely recognized for her work in instrumental, electronic,
and performance realms, she has earned numerous awards and prizes,
including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Alpert Award in the
Arts, a Fulbright Full Fellowship, an award from the Rockefeller MAP
Fund for her opera, Sucktion, and a 2009-2010 Cultural Exchange International Grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for The Silent Steppe Cantata.
Also an accomplished harpist, LeBaron is renowned for her pioneering
methods of developing and implementing extended harp techniques,
electronic enhancements, and notation in compositional and
improvisational contexts. She currently teaches composition and related
subjects, such as Concert Theater and HyperOpera, at the California
Institute of the Arts. Her new 2-CD recording of solo, duo, quartet, and
trio improvisations, "1, 2, 4, 3" will be released on INNOVA this fall.
MICHAEL DESSEN is
a composer-improviser who performs on the slide trombone and computer.
Active in a variety of ensembles as leader or collaborator, he creates
music for improvisers and engages new technologies of telepresence and
digital networking. His music can be heard on labels such as Clean Feed,
Cuneiform, and Circumvention, and current projects include his own
electro-acoustic trio, the collective quartet Cosmologic, and telematic
collaborations with Mark Dresser, Myra Melford and others. Dessen's
teachers include Yusef Lateef, George Lewis, and Anthony Davis, and he
has also been schooled through extensive freelance experiences ranging
from salsa bands to avant-garde new music ensembles. He has published
writings on music and culture, and is a graduate of the Eastman School
of Music, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the University
of California, San Diego, from which he received a Ph.D. in Critical
Studies and Experimental Practices (Music). In 2006, he joined the music
faculty of the University of California, Irvine, where he recently
co-founded a new MFA emphasis in Integrated Composition, Improvisation
and Technology (ICIT).
MOTOKO HONDA, pianist/composer,
marries classical, jazz, avant-garde and Pacific-Rim textures with
21st-century technology and emerges with musical soundscapes as profound
as they are all-encompassing. Whether solo or in collaboration, live or
in-studio, a Honda “comprovisation” is sound- and shape-shifting at its
most thrilling and immediate. Honda's musical virtuosity, coupled with a
firm grasp of the multimedia arts, has taken her to European concert
halls as well as jazz clubs, museums, and underground music venues in
all over the United Sates and Japan.
CARMINA ESCOBAR is
a singer and multimedia artist from Mexico City that has collaborated
in many different projects which explore a diversity of sonorous
languages such as medieval music, opera, contemporary music, folk music,
electronic music and experimental trends involving interdisciplinary
collaborations and multimedia. As a soloist she has performed concerts
of contemporary repertoire for solo voice, the premieres of works by
young composers and performances of her own compositions. She has
appeared in diverse forums and festivals all around the Mexican Republic
as well as USA, collaborating with artists of diverse disciplines. She
is an active improviser, as much in a solo context as in a group
context, in which she involves, as part of her sonorous vocabulary,
real-time processing of her voice and the use of concrète elements
through electronic media. At the moment she resides in Los Angeles, CA.
EVE LUCKRING’s work
takes form in video, sound, photography, poetry, and installation. It
questions the assumptions-- and experiments with the boundaries -- that
define place, body, and habit. Her recent work translates traditional
Japanese poetic forms into the visual realm to investigate how the
psychological intersects with what is perceived to be external to the
self. Luckring’s videos and installations have been exhibited
internationally in traditional art venues (RedCat and the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Lance Fung Gallery, New York; European
Media Arts Festival, Germany; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, Surrey
Art Gallery, Vancouver) as well as in public spaces (Ekaterinburg,
Russia; Sante Fe, New Mexico; Shanghai, China). Site-specific projects
have addressed the social mechanisms at play in places such as porn
shops, institutional community rooms, elevators, and nightclubs.
CAROLE KIM’s work
in time-based performance/installations combines digital technologies
and the sensitivity of the improvisational live performer. From many
different angles, Kim has explored how to make video a live, malleable,
responsive medium and how to spatially integrate the live presence of
performers and viewers alike within these environments. The seamless
cinematic distance of pre-edited film viewing is ruptured by the
awareness that the moving image is being constructed in the moment. The
performances are immersive environments that support a reciprocal
hybrid exchange between sound, image, movement, space. Presenting
venues include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of
Contemporary Art-Los Angeles, REDCAT/Disney Hall, the Getty Center,
Springwave Festival/LIG Performing Arts Hall (Seoul, Korea), Decibel
Festival/Seattle, Trampoline: Platform for New Media Art (Nottingham,
England), the Stanford Jazz Festival, Issue Project Room and Engine 27
(New York), Arizona State University-West Interdisciplinary Arts &
Performance Program (Phoenix, AZ), the Knitting Factory (LA), ArtSonje
Center (Seoul, Korea) plus numerous festivals and performance series.
Kim was in residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga and a Master
Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL. This fall
she will be an artist-in-residence at the Holter Museum in Montana.
(Please see www.carolekim.com)
JESSE GILBERT works
in sound and software design, creating flexible tools that are
activated in live performance, via network interaction, or in
installation settings. His work has recently focused on multi-channel
immersive environments, composing for film and video, and real-time
electronic sound using custom sampling software. His engagement with the
software design process centers around the deconstruction of rational
processes, usually resulting in variable interfaces that emphasize
intuitive, fluid modes of human/computer interaction. Gilbert's work has
been shown widely in the US and abroad; venues include Engine27 (New
York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the New Museum (New
York), net.congestion (Amsterdam), Ars Electronica (Austria), CEAIT
Festival (Los Angeles), Kunstradio's Recycling the Future (Austria), and
PORT (MIT, Boston). His work has received support from the National
Endowment for the Arts, Eyebeam Atelier, the National Performance
Network, turbulence.org <http://turbulence.org>
, the Studio for Creative Inquiry (Carnegie Mellon), the Jerome
Foundation, Creative Capital, the Markle Foundation, the Beall Center
for Art & Technology (UC Irvine), the Banff Centre for the Arts, and
the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT).
*SPECTRAL is a
visual instrument that employs an interactive software system to
generate real-time 3D animation in response to live or recorded sound.
Employing a number of computational analytical tools, including Fourier
analysis and oscilloscope-style waveform deformation, Spectral reveals
the deep structure of sound in a visual language that is both
intuitively and aesthetically linked to our emotional experience of
music. Spectral's interface gives the performer the means to generate
highly dynamic 3D scenes that place the observer in a visual
relationship that both enhances and reflects on the process of
listening. In addition, Spectral's ability to overlay digital media
onto its 3D surface expands upon traditional notions of presentation of
the moving image, and of the relationship between sound and image.
