[May 7] CTW: 8-channel Ambisonic Performance

Experience 8 channel Ambisonic sound compositions by  Raphaele Shirley/David Watson/Kevin Shea/Peter Zummo, Hans Tammen, Shelley Hirsch and Matthew Gantt. Produced by Harvestworks in partnership with the Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. 
LOCATION: Hunter College
Black Box 5th floor, Hunter North Building
Enter at 69th Street between Lexington & Park Avenues
May 7th 2018 – TIME  7 pm
Produced by Harvestworks in partnership with the Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College.
A satellite event of Creative Tech Week 2018
  1. Matthew Gantt: Isomorph and Plastics
  2. Hans Tammen: Conflict Of Interest
  3. Shelley Hirsch: Tohuwabohu
  4. Shelley Hirsch & Hans Tammen
  5. Short Pause
  6. Raphaele Shirley, David Watson, Peter Zummo and Kevin Shea: /e-media-c

Photo by Raphaele Shirley

Minimalism plus a whole lot more
P. Zummo resonance, response, reflection.  
In a new collaborative work titled /e-media-c\,  artists, Raphaele Shirley,Kevin Shea, David Watson and Peter Zummo, perform with the physicality of sound, light and time. The live work is set in the bracketed space of two mirrored parabolic disks. The large rotating parabolics function as set and sculpture as well as lo-fi speakers and projectors. With the parabolics as the fulcrum and the artist’s respective instruments as levers, Shirley, Watson, Shea and Zummo move space with percussive light and looping harmonics that leap across the performance hall. They shift sound and light in thick resonance within an economy of means. Each artist performs with basic tools: bagpipes for David Watson, a trombone for Peter Zummo and light for Raphaele Shirley. Using analogue approaches to media and in the lineage of La Monte Young, John Cage, Robert Irwin and Elaine Summers, the artists seek experimentation and unpredictability in this work. 
Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sitting back to watch the movements unfold. He is presenting “Conflict of Interest”, generating sound from his own genetic analysis, data that in turn controls sonic processing as well as 8-channel spatialization in realtime. Tammen’s performance is constantly interrupted when variations representing “identity” (as a largely arbitrary, socially and historically constructed concept) are coming up. 
Shelley Hirsch’s Tohuwabohu is a “choral” piece originally created as a 5.1 surround sound piece for an installation with Ursula Scherrer called Alga at the Minoritan Church in Krems Austria and then adapted for KunstRadio /Radio ORF in Vienna, now extended to 8 channels for Harvestworks. Tohuwabohu is a Biblical Hebrew phrase found in the Book of Genesis. It is usually translated “waste and void,” “formless and empty,” or some variation of the same. It describes the condition of the earth before God said, “Let there be light”. In German it implies chaos/void, in French: commotion.
Matthew Gantt: Eight-channel performance and iteration of Isomorph and Plastics, two suites of procedural electronic composition first released with Oxtail and Orange Milk Recordings, respectively.

BIOS

Raphaele Shirley (born 1969) is a french/american visual artist working in NYC. Employing diverse mediums such as neon, LED, laser, water – mist, sound, and occasional pyrotechnics as well as more traditional materials such as wood, metal and paint she creates sculptures and site specific environments which play on the tension between ephemerality and permanence, and explore the power of simple direct communication devoid of artifice or staging, letting the materials themselves be the carrier of meaning. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. She has received several grants from the Norwegian Arts Council and was artist in residence at Harvestworks 2016 with the collaborative project 3by3by3 (with collaborators Rhys Chatham and Gh Hovagimyan) as well as the Arctic Circle (2009 and 2010)
David Watson(born 1960) Originally from New Zealand, David Watson is an experimental musician who has lived in New York since 1987. He generally performs as a guitarist, or as a highland bagpiper. Watson has a long-standing project with Lee Ranaldo, he has recorded with Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Chris Mann, John Zorn and many others. He has released work on XI, Avant, Tzadik, Braille, Doctor Jim’s, Le Station Radar, FMR, Three Lobed, Circulasione, Grapefruit and the Cafe Oto label. He has scored music for dance (recently for Moriah Evans), for films (Martin Lucas “Hiroshima Bound”,) directed music-theater (“The Inquisitive Musician” at The Stedlijk Museum) and has an ongoing project using the procession tradition. Watson also curates the experimental music series WOrK ØØ.
Kevin Shea is an innovative and free-minded drummer, who has always imbued his playing with a humor and flexibility that few in the jazz world have been able to match. While perhaps best known for his work with the band Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Shea has played on a host of other projects in the Avant-Garde, Jazz, and other genres, including works by Rhys Chatham, People (with Mary Halvorson), Peter Evans Quartet, Alan Wilkinson, and the group Talibam.
 Peter Zummo (born 1948) is an American composer and trombonist. He has been described as “an important exponent of the American contemporary classical tradition.” Meanwhile, he has been quoted as describing his own work as “Minimalism plus a whole lot more.” Since 1967, Zummo’s compositions exploring the rock, jazz, new- and electronic-music, disco, punk, and world-music idioms have been presented in venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, among many others in New York City, as well as in numerous additional spaces worldwide. The website of the music magazine Pitchfork called Zummo’s music “the sound of sublimity…that sends shivers down the nervous system,” and in an interview with The Quietus, Scottish deejay JD Twitch (Keith McIvor) characterized Zummo’s work as “sheer bliss.
Hans Tammen  uses textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. Whether richly processed guitar sounds from his hybrid interactive guitar/software instrument Endangered Guitar, traditionally notated material for his Third Eye Chamber Orchestra, or graphically notated elements for the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, his music flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).Numerous projects include site-specific performances and collaborative efforts with dance, light, video, and theater, having used technology from planetarium projectors and guitar robots to disklavier pianos and chaos-synths.His works have been presented on festivals in the US, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, India, Israel, South Africa and all over Europe. He recorded on labels such as Clang, Innova, ESP-DISK, Nur/Nicht/Nur, Gold Bolus, Creative Sources, Leo Records, Potlatch and Outnow. Hans Tammen received grants and composer commissions from NewMusicUSA, MAPFund, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, American Music Center, Lucas Artists Residencies Montalvo, New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA), New York Foundation For The Arts (NYFA), American Composers Forum w/ Jerome Foundation, New York State Music Fund, Goethe Institute w/ Foreign Affairs Office, among others.
Shelley Hirsch is an award winning, critically acclaimed vocalist, composer, and storyteller whose mostly solo compositions, staged multimedia works, improvisations, radio plays, installations and collaborations have been produced and presented in concert halls, clubs, festivals, theaters, museums, galleries and on radio, film and television on 5 continents. 

Matthew D. Gantt is a composer and conceptualist based in Brooklyn, NY. His practice focuses on procedural systems and the idiosyncrasies of the technology that facilitate them, as well as the overlap between production and consumption of digitized culture. Recent projects include tape releases for Orange Milk and Oxtail Recordings, an eight by eleven foot graphic score for interdisciplinary performance, and a series of VR environments containing procedural motion and spatial sound. While living in New York, Gantt has performed or presented work at a range of spaces, including Pioneer Works, Roulette, Issue Project Room, New Museum, the Stone, and internationally at the IRCAM Academy in Paris, France. He received an M.M. in composition from CUNY Brooklyn College, teaches music technology at Sarah Lawrence, Kaufman Center and Harvestworks, and worked as a studio assistant to electronics pioneer Morton Subotnick from ’16 – ’18.

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