Tag: GENERATE

Spotlight On: Gabrielle Herbst

Photo: Tom Saccenti courtesy New Sounds 

[RESIDENCY] Gabrielle Herbst: Vulnerability
Thursday, May 31, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I am a composer and vocalist currently living in Brooklyn. I went to Bard College in upstate New York and am originally from the Berkshires in Massachusetts.

I compose from a very intuitive place – not starting from a set of compositional rules, but rather from a place of openness, improvisation, and spontaneity. I’m interested in creating spatialized architectural sound that engulfs the listeners and transports them into a different state through color and texture. I compose for all instruments with the mindset of writing for the human voice: I imagine clarinets, cellos, and timpani singing. Vocal music has healing qualities that I think our culture is deeply in need of right now –returning to the source, the breath, the heartbeat. My music is very much seeking a return to the body – exploring sensuality and sensory perception, while clearing the busyness of the mind.

I am interested in experimenting with electronics and live processing in performance because I think it embodies our socio-technological environment, and I’m intrigued with digital sounds creating organic, beautiful sonic spaces.

I’ve been exploring two sides of my musical self – one as GABI and the other as Gabrielle Herbst. As GABI I compose short form songs for my own voice and small instrumental ensembles as well as electronics. Sometimes I perform solo, and much of GABI has been developed in the studio and taken on tour.

Under my full name, I compose operas and varied configurations of instrumental and vocal music in a more classical vein. The two intersect in many ways and influence each other, feeling like two characters of my personality – GABI being more raw and emotional, Gabrielle Herbst a little more orchestral, calculated and structured, utilizing standard notation. For GABI music, I often do not use standard notation and develop songs more on intuition, composing by ear and improvisation. In both projects, I am influenced by opera singing, vocal traditions from many world cultures, and pop singing, creating my own take on contemporary vocal and instrumental music.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

Written for two voices and two loop pedals, electronics, harp, violin, cello, flute, piano and clarinet, the opera I’m composing for this Roulette Residency explores themes of personal and collective vulnerability, anxiety, fear and struggle – investigating self-care and interpersonal relationships within our current sociopolitical climate. Progressing through dreamlike non-narrative tableaux, with close harmonization, textural rhythms, melismatic vocals, electronics and cross-genre pollination, this opera looks at inward struggles and connecting outwards. It will be performed by the Nouveau Classical Project, joined by Marilu Donovan on Harp as well as myself and Charlotte Mundy as the vocalists.

What is your first musical memory?

My dad singing. He is an amazing singer and used to sing to me as a baby.

How did you become involved with Roulette?

When I first moved to NYC after college in 2009 I set up a meeting with Jim and he was so incredibly supportive. I instantly become involved in the Roulette community, first as a sound intern, then working in the box office, and then as an artist. I’m forever grateful.

What is it like living and working in New York City?

Difficult but so fulfilling. I find the struggle of keeping up, both financially and artistically really beneficial to my work.

Describe your performance at Roulette in three words.

Vulnerable. Vocal. Raw.

Describe Roulette in three words.

Beautiful. Open. Unexpected.

Spotlight On: Ka Baird

Photo: Cameron Kelly courtesy ISSUE Project Room

[RESIDENCY] Ka Baird: centers: 4 channels
Sunday, May 13, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I am a composer and performer living and working in NYC. I am one of the founding and continuing members of the experimental outfit Spires That In The Sunset Rise, founded in Chicago in September 2001. Since relocating to NYC in November 2014, I have set off in numerous directions apart from Spires with new collaborations, as well as honing in on my solo work. My current work explores piano, electroacoustic interventions, extended vocal techniques, physical movement, and the electronic manipulation of the flute. I am interested specifically in performance  /sound as a means to break recurring thought patterns and create passages into pure energy potential. I also co-run the label and concert organizer Perfect Wave with Camilla Padgitt-Coles.

I have toured both nationally and internationally with performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), MoMA PS1 (Brooklyn), Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn), Fridman Gallery, Cafe OTO (London), and numerous festival appearances with Spires including TUSK (Newcastle, UK), Incubate (Tilburg, Netherlands), and Festival Of Endless Gratitude (Copenhagen, DK).

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

I will premiere Centers: 4 Channels, two new pieces incorporating 4-channel synthesis with spatialized light and movement.  The first piece is titled piano:vivification exercises and the second piece is titled voices: visceral illocality.

What is your first musical memory?

Listening to cicadas.

What is influencing your work right now?

Immediacy & energy, rhythm & breath.

What’s your absolute favorite place in the city to be and why?

On the top open deck of the ferry going under the bridges at full speed.

What artists are you interested in right now?

Carolee Schneemann, Julius Eastman, Cecil Taylor, Raul de Nieves, Alvin Lucier, Moor Mother, Jon Mueller, MSHR, Maryanne Amacher, Maya Angelou, Ursula Le Guin.

What are you really excited about right now?

Hieroglyphics, binaural beats, bioluminescence, emergent systems, polyrhythms, chladni patterns.

Spotlight On: Che Chen


Che Chen with Talice Lee and Patrick Holmes
Wednesday, May 9, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Interview with David Weinstein, Roulette Director of Special Projects

What is your first musical memory?

It’s not exactly musical, but when I was 7 or 8 I was waiting for the school bus one day and an older kid walked up munching on a cookie. He was chewing and breathing through his mouth at the same time and I could hear these hissing/crunching noises being filtered as his mouth changed shape. I didn’t  understand it then the way I just described it, but for some reason that really stuck with me and I tried making my own mouth sounds after that. Then I studied piano briefly and badly, but by the time I was 12 or so I’d saved up enough lawn mowing money to buy an electric bass out of the local paper’s classified section. I had a eureka moment when I discovered that instead of trying to learn the changes to my favorite songs, I could sound one of the open strings over and over again and make up stuff against it, which is basically what I still love doing the most: improvising against a drone.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

I wanted to go deeper into some ideas that we’ve touched upon in 75 Dollar Bill, my band with Rick Brown, but that haven’t been the main focus. Microtonality, sustained tones, extreme slowness, a more nuanced modal concept. I’ve been constructing my own tunings and modes for this piece. Indian music, Arabic Maqam, and Mauritanian music have always been fascinating and elusive to me and I’ve taken certain ideas from these traditions, but I’ve tried not to take too much of their “sound.” I’m more interested in the deep structural logic of how melodies and tunings are constructed. The piece will be performed by a trio with Patrick Holmes on clarinet, Talice Lee on violin and myself on bass recorder and electric organ. Everyone also sings. It has composed elements–melodic cells and unison lines–but most of the performance will be the musicians taking turns improvising on the modes while being supported by the other two players, with everything framed within these microtonal organ chords.

All the profiles of you mention the Mauritanian encounter. What is the whole story? How has that influenced you?

No way to put the whole story in words, but I went to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania (in West Africa) in 2013 and took guitar lessons with a phenomenal musician named Jeich ould Chigaly. I should really say I took lessons with his whole family, because I also got schooled by his wife, the incredible singer and ardin player, Noura mint Seymali, and even his then 5-year old son, Mohammed, as well as other relatives and friends passing thru their house. In the Moorish modal system there are five main modes, each with a “black” and “white” form. Jeich showed me one form each day so it couldn’t have been anything but the briefest introduction, but it still completely reconfigured my approach to playing guitar and really threw me into the deep end with a lot of the things I was thinking about. It was also incredibly eye opening just to be in that part of the world and to get a glimpse into how music functions in a society that is so different from America. I was there for less than two weeks but I am still digesting the experience.

Your use of electronics tends to be cassette players, radios, even toy instruments. Are you averse to high-tech or is there a special magic to the lo-fi tools?

In general I prefer the directness of instruments but when I use electronics that kind of physical relationship to the sound is still something that I look for. That’s what makes it musical to me. Magnetic tape is great for that. I think if I was a little younger it might be a different story, but I understand how to hack analog technologies in a way that I don’t with digital technology at all.

Talk about quarter-tone tuning, microtonal music, your interest in overtones. These clearly enter into your guitar and violin playing and even with sax and keyboards.

My first day in Mauritania my Jeich took me to a dirt floored workshop in Nouakchott where a guy refretted the cheap guitar I had brought with me in quarter-tones. He used a hack saw, a file, pliers, a pair of calipers that looked about 200 years old and some super glue. It took him less than an hour. The traditional Moorish instruments are all fretless for playing untempered intervals, so to make use of guitars, they put a new fret in between every two of the guitar’s normal frets. The result is a kind of 24-tone equal tempered fretboard (rather than the usual 12), but they use a lot of intervals related to the 11th harmonic, which are very close to quarter-tones, so it sort of works out. Going to Mauritania was great because I got to see the music in context. I think a lot of microtonal music here is very theoretical or academic but this was wedding music–people were partying to this stuff! That was another thing I took away from it. My interest in other kinds of tuning really just comes from listening to sounds, the harmonic series, etc. I don’t have a problem with equal temperament, on the contrary I think it made a whole new kind of music possible that was never possible before. But if you are playing melodically against a pedal tone, especially if you are playing slowly, equal temperament really becomes a handicap. It limits you to a small set of intervals, most of which are quite out of tune. When you start looking at untempered intervals there so many other colors, which are both more vivid and more harmonious.

Assess the current New York music scene, especially the newer projects that you have encountered. Who inspires you? Where do you go to find them? And don’t be shy to mention the downside or challenges that you’ve observed.

I’ve been in the city for about 15 years at this point and feel like I really grew up here musically. It’s great to see a lot the people that I’ve known for years really starting to crush it now. Some are more out in public while others are privately plugging away, but I feel like many of my peers are really starting to speak in their own voices now, which is inspiring. It’s a slow growth thing. It’s also incredible that people like Phill Niblock, Henry Flynt or Yoshi Wada are still around town going about their business, and they are pretty easy to find if you want to. Or that Mamady Kouyate runs a west African guitar band that plays every week in Brooklyn. As for difficulties, it seems harder than ever for non-institutional, underground music spaces to exist. Without places to experiment and incubate ideas, let alone just to congregate, the community can’t really stay viable. Despite a pretty hostile real estate environment, there are some real gems out there, like the Sunview Luncheonette in Greenpoint or the Outpost in Ridgewood, where I’ve been running a monthly series for the past year or so.  

Spotlight On: Cecilia Lopez


Cecilia Lopez: machinic fantasies
Tuesday, May 8, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I am a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’ve been living around. New York for the past three years, studying and working on different music and installation projects. My work often explores the physical and perceptual matters of sound through a variety of mediums like composition, objects, video or combinations of them. I also play piano and different synthesizers. I sometimes write songs. I sometimes sing. I used to play in a band, which is called Vigilante Margarita. I am the third of three siblings. I have a black cat named Igor that lives in Buenos Aires.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

The project is based on past explorations that I did around a revolving sound sculpture that functions as a live “mediation machine.” I think of it as a performative installation because it’s presented as a composed space where certain multichannel video and sound techniques are used to play with concepts like immersion, meditation and synchronicity, but it’s also a musical work composed to follow a timeline. The objects in question are like artisanal filter machines made with revolving oil drums. The barrels have a speaker inside that plays music or sound, which is filtered by their spinning as the sculpture is moved by hand. This explanation might sound very complicated but in fact the perceptual principles behind the piece are very simple. I am interested in questioning ideas of content, transmission and the oppositions between object/subject and form/structure. I would say that it’s sort of an industrial or lo-fi science fiction fantasy (à la Raymond Roussel) that plays with very primitive principles of sound an image.

What is your first musical memory?

I can’t really say what my first musical memory was, but I can say that I spent endless hours the first seven years of my life on a swing that my parents have installed in our house’s attic, listening to the radio and singing along with an old cassette player.

What is influencing your work right now?

I work a lot with processes for filtering either sound or visual content. In that way my work is very

permeable. Many things that have been influential for me have ended up becoming material for some of my works. That goes for music, sound recordings from specific places, literature, the world that surrounds me, etc. What is interesting to me about this way of working is that abstract ideas about our perception of sound can be put in conversation or in opposition with more narrative or conceptual ideas that I feel are important.

What is your favorite place to buy records?

Despite the current trend, I really don’t buy records. I don’t own a record player and

in the last few years, my nomadic life has caused me to avoid accumulating stuff… So I am totally out of the vinyl fetishist loop. That said, I can answer the question by describing my extremely modest record collection: Eliane Radigue, Feedback Works; Wendy Carlos, Switch-on Brandenburgs; Anthony Braxton Duets with Muhal Richard Abrams, and a Spanish-language soundtrack from the TV show “Speed Racer.”

What’s your absolute favorite place in the city to be and why?

Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia. You know, there is something about that place… also that was my first connection with New York since I met Phill before coming here. It’s been one of the most interesting, familiar and friendly places that I can think of in this hectic landscape.

Describe your performance at Roulette in three words.

Precarious augmented reality

 

 

Spotlight On: María Grand

María Grand: Revés/Rêves: Dreams of a Departed Maestra // Magdalena Album Release Show
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 @ 7:30 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I’m a professional liver. I live for a living. When I’m on stage playing music, when I’m rehearsing, teaching, practicing, composing, serving my own vision or someone else’s, I feel very much alive. I feel excited. Sometimes I want to pinch myself – am I really doing this for a living? Can life be this good? Some of my favorite moments on stage are listening to my colleagues. Whenever I hear music something happens inside me. I’ve always been very drawn to it, but recently it’s becoming pure joy and I’m very much excited about the prospect of dedicating this life to being a sound vehicle.

I love cats; I’m a pretty lovey dubby person. I’m really into my family and my friends, especially my mother; I like to hang out with people.

I study communication and take a course that’s called human validation; it’s basically like radical group therapy. I’m interested in everything that makes this world a better place and connects us to ourselves and each other. It’s amazing how much better you can understand other people when you learn about how we communicate. This is all tied into music, because music is just another language; another expression; another possibility to convey love and all the other emotions.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

My beloved dance teacher Noemí Lapzeson passed away a few weeks ago. She was my first female mentor. She was a master at her craft, and studying with her really made me understand how far you can go with an art form. I met her when I was a very young child, and I connected with her because she was an Argentinian woman living in Switzerland, and I was born in Switzerland from an Argentinian father. She was a treasure, a world of expression, just a gigantic jewel. When she died I was heartbroken and my vocalist friend Ganavya Doraiswamy started researching her art, trying to find ways to create meaning out of what was happening. She found a piece that’s entitled Combines, and that features Noemí, my teacher, and Celeste Dandekar, an Indian and British dancer. We both felt drawn to this. Then Ganavya had the idea to do a project around that piece, to pay homage to Noemi. I said yes; she gave me permission to use the idea for this commission at Roulette. So I started creating this multimedia work that’s loosely based on Noemí’s dancing, and that will be a musical tribute to her movement quest.

The people working with me are Ganavya Doraiswamy; Joel Ross, a vibraphonist; and Rajna Swaminathan, a mridangam artist. I’ve known them separately for many years, and now we get to express something together. With them I know I can go anywhere, they’ll follow me fearlessly. And so, we are expanding our art, to welcome the spirit of Noemí.

The second part of the evening will be my album release. The album is called Magdalena; it talks about the feminine, what was hidden during years of patriarchal dominance, and the beautiful mystery that remains under the layers of misunderstanding. This will feature my band DiaTribe, with David Bryant on piano, Rashaan Carter on bass, and Jeremy Dutton on drums. I am very excited to be bringing all these things out of my ears and into the world.

What is your first musical memory?

My father playing an Argentinian song called Tonada Del Viejo Amor, it made me cry so much. And then, singing with my parents at a concert on the lake in Geneva. I kept wondering why they repeated this one section of a bolero so many times; I’m sure it made sense, but at the time I couldn’t figure out why we were repeating it, and I was upset; it stuck with me because I really cared about music even at that early age, and I wanted to understand what was happening. One of my strongest early musical memories is playing in the street with my father. Music was everywhere. I used to ask my mother to play a Billie Holiday record to put me to sleep, and it made me cry sweet tears every time. Also, singing late in the night in my room, before going to sleep. When I stopped my father would come to the room and ask me to keep singing.

What is your favorite Roulette memory?

I took my crush, years ago, to hear Muhal Richard Abrahams. It was wonderful. The musicians were reading aloud from newspapers during the show. Everything was very new to me. I didn’t know you could write music like that.

What is the best way to spend an afternoon in New York City?

I like going to the Cloisters or to the Russian Baths. But there’s also the Met — the section on Egypt is my favorite, and behind the museum there’s an actual obelisk. You can go see it and feel it, it’s called Cleopatra’s Needle.

What is influencing your work right now?

These days I think a lot about the marriage of listening and playing; offense and defense; the inner and outer worlds. I’ve come to the conclusion (so far) that they’re all the same. When I speak and when I listen I’m basically doing the same thing because deep inside there’s the witness that sees it all. But then the witness has a lot of humor and so maybe it’s active? I’m not sure. I’m looking for an underlying principle that is beyond active and passive. That’s what I try to think about when I’m creating music because at some point I discovered that a lot of times I was lacking deep listening – and when I started listening to myself, quite a few times I didn’t like what I heard. When I put more energy on listening than playing while I’m actually producing sounds, I find that things come out better, because it brings me a kind of detachment that actually allows for things to flow.

What are you really excited about right now?

I’m really excited about so many things every day. Life is exciting. I love creating new projects and having the freedom to imagine things and making them real. Lately a very exciting thing in my life has been working with Alicia Hall Moran. Watching her creative process and participating in it is some of the most rewarding work I’ve done. I did a short run with her and the band Harriet Tubman, and I learned so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to learn from anyone who is more experienced than me and who has paved the way in this music for lots of other people to walk through. It’s a very special thing. So one thing that I’m really excited about is paying tribute to my elders; to my community; and of course, the very first elder Mother we all are in debt with is Mother Earth.

Maria Grand’s performance at Roulette is made possible by the Jerome Foundation and the Selvage Fund of the East Bay Community Foundation