AUDIOLETTER LIVE

A Short Overview of Performance Practices at Live!iXem 2011 & Feedback from the Public

by Granular/N.K.

A Short Overview of Performance Practices at Live!iXem 2011 Favignana and Palermo, Sicily/Italy

by Granular 1 Alex Mendizabal, “Camurria, pupi all'aria” On all four sides of one of the courtyards at the Ex-Stabilimento Florio delle Tonnare di Favignana e Formica (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ex-Stabilimento-Florio-della-tonnara-di-Favignana/14292449 9061549) Spanish artist Alex Mendizabal set up strings with balloons hanging from them, that featured small plastic pressurized air trumpets. Even though the work was announced as installation, the “live” element was at play, as the valves of the trumpets had to be opened to start blowing. As the artist walked along the walls of the courtyard clockwise, opening one by one, sound would gradually fill the space. People wandered around to experience reflections, shifting tones and intensity from various spots in the courtyard. When all trumpets finally played, the sound was loudest. It would then slowly recede while various audience stepped forward and joyfully squeezed the remaining air out of the deflating balloons. About a dozen of them was later stolen.

- (IMG_5560,) 201112_opensound_avhc_7825, 7852

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2 Xabier Erkizia, “Live quadraphonic concert”

Basque artist Xabier Erkizia presented a number of sound materials recorded with unusual microphones or transducers and partly heavily amplified (acoustic zoom). Some of the materials would provide insight into natural sound (hydrophonic recordings), while others would relate to electromagnetic radiation.

Together with Xavier Balderas and Iñigo Telletxea, Erkizia also presented some of the devices he used for gathering his sounds in a workshop on microphone, transducer and hydrophone building.

-workshop: 201112_opensound_avhc_7996, 201112_opensound_antitesi_3058 -concert: 201112_opensound_avhc_7881

3 Leon McCarthy + Giuseppe Torre, “Live Audio visual performance” [can’t say anything about this one - Marc] [I’ll ask giuseppe torre if he can give us few lines about it - Dom --thanks! Marc--] 4 J. A. Garavaglia + C. R. Angel, “Wooden Worlds” “Wooden Worlds” is an audio-visual performance with multimedia interaction in real-time (viola, video, photography and sound processing).

The attention of the audience is challenged by the piece’s sounds and visual elements, which are not recognizable at first sight in most of the cases. The viola acts as an element of accretion and mergence between the elements with musical passages, some of which are composed in detail and some others more of an improvised nature.

The real-time interaction (sound processing, viola controlling live-electronics and viola controlling real-time manipulation of the video) is produced by two laptop computers running Max/MSP/Jitter, connected with each other via Ethernet.

5 Marc Behrens, “Mutattnarcimm” [refer to “Attimmmuttummmittamutattnarcimm, A Compositional and Performative Process”, Marc Behrens] -201112_opensound_avhc_8253

6 Ryan Jordan, “Possession Trance” In an audio-visual setup with multiple stroboscopes, Ryan Jordan connects light sensors in a way that the strobe frequencies and their interferences generate loud audio pulses and create a perceptive feedback loop between sight and sound. During the performance Ryan controls the various speeds of the strobes. Depending on the spectator’s receptivity, the experience can elicit euphoria.

-201112_opensound_avhc_8295, 8330, 201112_opensound_576

7 Benoit Maubrey, “Feedback Fred” Benoit Maubrey had built an battery-operated amplifier with powerful car stereo speakers, a digital sampler and looper module into a leather jacket he wears, which makes him an autonomous performer). He performed twice in Palermo’s Chiesa di Vucciria (Instituto Cervantes), for 14 and 7 minutes, the second time recording a sound bite of himself pointedly exclaiming “I like Palermo – Palermo likes me”, which he then tweaked beyond recognition, venturing into the narrow street and into a food store.

-details jacket: 201112_opensound_avhc_8518, 8520

-performance: 201112_opensound_avhc_8092, (8097, 8104,) 8119, 8817

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8 Carlos Zingaro, “Agora/Nada” -201112_opensound_avhc_8617 [refer to “Solo or anti-solo, Acoustic versus electroacoustic real time processing or the importance of acoustically “interactive” spaces” by Carlos Zingaro about his setup and practice]

8 J Milo Taylor | SainSwn a.k.a. The Sound Assassin, Wajid Yaseen, [please doublecheck artist names; title of performance?]

The concert was a spontaneous, unrehearsed interaction between three artists. While J Milo Tayler and Joel Cahen played back a selection of field recordings, creating a few surprising turns in dynamics, Wajid Yaseen at first played a frequency generator, then used body movements to channel himself into a state of heightened awareness. Somewhere in the middle of the piece, he screamed towards the ceiling of the church, then left his chair to explore the actual space, screaming at various intervals and spots and into different directions around the audience.

-201112_opensound_avhc_8702, 8719

9 Julien Poidevin “Found objects-based performance” Using a microphone, Julien Poidevin amplified found objects which were handled, rubbed and banged, manipulated and excited as percussive instruments. The sounds created by the objects Julien then attempted to recreate vocally, improvising momentary oral sounds (onomatopées) in an attempt to enter into dialogue or create a tension between the sounds produced by the sonorisation of objects and by his retelling or mimicry of the object. Recording through a mixer, he arranged the mostly percussive sound bites in a Pure Data patch (Slice/Jockey developed by Katja Vetter) that created beat-based structures in real time, which he can still transform further with a Kaoss pad (see also Julien Poidevin’s article).

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10 “Cracklebox building, a tactile electronic instrument” workshop (Alex Pierotti) and concert (Live Cracklebox Orchestra: Stefano Zorzanello, Vincenzo Amari, Manuel Buscemi, Gloria Patti, Wajid Yaseen, Giuseppe “Tito” Castelli) Alex Pierotti conducted a workshop how to construct your own Cracklebox (originally invented

by Michael Waisvisz, http://crackle.org/CrackleBox.htm). Alex instructed the workshop participants of different experience levels over two half days to build his slightly modified version of the instrument. On the evening of the second day the Crackleboxes were then tried out in concert. To structure the performance, Alex conducted the group, and Carmelo Clemente worked on the mixing desk to dynamically spatialise the sounds. At the end of the performance, the players disconnected their Crackleboxes from the sound system and walked off into the space, playing through their devices’ miniature speakers. The audience was closely grouped

around the players.

-workshop: 201112_opensound_570, 593 -concert: 201112_opensound_646, 655

Photographs by Granular, N.K. (Aniana Heras Cosin), Solaris and AntiTesi.

Feedback from the Public

by N.K. The concerts were all well attended in all of the locations at the Festival. Although some of the concerts and workshops took place on Favignana, an island that was at a distance from the other activities in Palermo. The outdoor performative concert by Alex Mendizabal, “Camurria, pupi all’aria” due to its interactive nature engaged audiences of the most diverse age groups, which included children and elderly people, in addition to the normal concert audiences which tend to be made up of people in their twenties and thirties. All of the concert performances were of high quality with good technical support and sound equipment, PA systems. The acoustics of almost all of the spaces in which the concerts were hosted were also quite good.

Some of the concert locations due to the architecture of the room and its size were not ideal, namely the performance space in which the Xabier Erkizia, “Live quadraphonic concert” took place, due to the sheer size of the room and its reverberant qualities. In Palermo, Benoit Maubrey’s “Feedback Fred” began in a square near the Instituto Cervantes and continued indoors enticing some unsuspecting passersby to join in on the festival although they did not know of it beforehand.

Additionally the program included workshops, lectures and seminars on artistic practices and social political concerns and agendas in Sound Art. One of the talks dealing with social political context was presented by Arteleku in which the listeners were informed about the content of a particular field recording post listening giving an account to the listeners of its highly charged political content tied to the geographical location

of the recording. This was one example of developing public sound map archives.

The workshop and lecture participants and the public who were interviewed, all spoke enthusiastically about their experiences.

The workshop participants were often an equal mix of both genders, male and female, and had different levels of prior experience in the field of Sound Art. In all cases most participants left with a working instrument, or microphones and happy that they had experienced something which was new to them and had yielded good results.

The disciplines from which the participants came varied from dance, to engineering, to social studies and finally some electronic musicians were present as well, but they were not the predominant participants in these workshops.