This RTV episode explores Frankie Mann’s performances of I Land and The Brown Mountain Lights.
With bass vocalist Eric Barsness, Mann performs I Land, a splendid tongue-in-cheek duet about a certain kind of couple relationship with its lyrics by Mary Griffin. The Brown Mountain Lights is a live electronic performance featuring the voices of real witnesses relating, in poetically-tinged and eerie language, legends and speculations about a mysterious local North Carolina phenomena. In her interview, Mann describes the circumstances surrounding the building of her first synthesizer from a magazine article (eg. getting it to work by throwing it across the room) and shares other fascinating stories related to her work.
Aired on rTV: 2000
Performance date: 04/30/2000
Episode digital release date: 04/28/2010
Host: Phoebe Legere
Noted for the humorous social commentaries of her live electronic and computer music (eg. “I Was a Hero” from “The Mayan Debutante Revue”, and “How To Be Very Very Popular”), Frankie Mann is also a skilled programmer who has built her own electronic performance instruments since high school in North Carolina (where she had her first orchestral composition performed when she was only eleven years old). Mann has performed throughout Europe and the United States and has received many grants including a Fulbright/Hayes Fellowship for Computer Music Research at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht, Netherlands.