Tumbleweed

A collaborative performance installation for prepared electric guitars, theremin and projections

David Means with Cyrus Pireh and Anthony Ptak

Tumbleweed combines archival images from the American dust bowl with interactions and improvisations of musicians and live electronics.

David Means was born on the day the sound barrier was broken. He studied architecture at the University of Illinois, attending the design workshops of R. Buckminster Fuller and participating in John Cage’s original “Musicircus” event. After military service in Vietnam he returned to Illinois to study composition with Ben Johnston, Herbert Brun and Salvatore Martirano. He is best known for his two-and three-dimensional graphic music and sculptural scores, and collaborative intermedia performance installations using live electronics in site-specific gallery and environmental settings. His scores and installations have been presented in a variety of including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; New Music America Festivals in Minneapolis, Hartford, and Houston; the Institut de le Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique (I.R.C.A.M.), Paris; Het Stroomhuis, The Netherlands; LOGOS Center for New Music Production, Ghent; and Documenta 9, in Kassel, Germany. He is an associate professor of experimental music and intermedia arts at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, where he produces the Strange Attractors Festivals of Experimental Intermedia Art.

“What he has created is an extraordinary 2 pieces of junk-noise amp blow w/ constructed lines of gradation – giving this music a certain sense of personal consideration which, at times, and this is well one of those times, is a right-on move.” – Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth