field effects 15: field trips
friday, october 10, doors 8pm
964 natoma, sf, ca, usa
requested donation $6-10

The world makes music, remember to listen.

The Field Effects series showcase the use of found sound, found materials, and field recordings in media art, presented in a comfortable environment.

For FE15: Field Trips, we focus on work strongly rooted in field recordings proper — the original motivation for the series. With luck we'll be running a four-speaker main PA.

Field Effects 15 features Bay Area sound artists:

sean rooney

Sean Rooney is a Bay Area-based artist who works in a variety of media including live audio and video performance, installation and web art. His music combines noise, microtonal drone, plunder- phonia, hacked hardware circuit-twisting, digital ambience, field recordings and advanced homebrew DSP software into a whole which is by turns frenetic, textural, chill, and imagistic. Disquiet magazine has called his music 'cooly metamorphic.' John Bischoff called his performance 'some of the best electronic music I've heard in a long time,' and Field Effects alumni Kenneth Atchley called a recent performance 'one of the most beautiful electronic music shows I've ever heard.'

Roony has presented work at The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Whitney, OFFF '03 in Barcelona, and around the US. He is former curator of Detritus Night, an experimental electronic music series at The Luggage Store Gallery and artistic co-host of The LivingRoom. Roony is currently on the steering committee of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival.

For Field Effects, Rooney will be performing two recent multi- channel works, Slots and Pile Driver. Both pieces are performed using custom software written in the SuperCollider audio processing environment.

Slots combines two banks of samples. The first group are the sounds of the hidden interior of a PC — a motherboard as it performs processor-intensive graphics calculations and operating system files mutated into sound. The other group is a series of field recordings I made at Circus!Circus! casino in Reno as I walked around the slot machine area. Software and slot machines have more in common than is perhaps immediately apparent... the circus metaphor needs no explanation.

Pile Driver uses processed field recordings from a construction site at 8th and Townsend Streets in San Francisco. Sample playback is driven by a live analysis of the recording and controlled by the performer. No one has ever ballroom danced to Pile Driver. Ever.

http://www.ntet.net

jesse hammons

Bay Area Artist Jesse Hammons records experiences from our natural world. His personal sound library contains audio documents ranging from the urban core of the New York City Subway to the sparsely populated areas of California's Lost Coast.

In October, 2002 Jesse stepped out from his apartment in Potrero Hill and hiked anticlockwise around the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. Self-sufficient except for backpacking gear, a MiniDisc recorder, and $300 in cash, the expedition lasted 30 days and covered a distance of 300 miles.

The work Hammons will present at Field Effects, I Walk Around the Bay/FE, is a sonic summary of thirty hours of audio that he recorded to document the journey.

steve polta

Steve Polta has been a Bay Area resident for ten years, spending much of this time involved in various non-commercial and more-or-less under-the-radar film projects. His films have screened throughout the US and South Korea. Lately he's been producing recordings and audio performances dealing with distressed materials, tortured electronics and the misuse of dead technology. Polta likes the sound of wires, circuits and machines; the way recordings take on lives of their own, once the source material is forgotten; the way recording technology (the cheaper the better) can overwhelm what it captures.

For Field Effects, Polta will present boil, which was made with a couple of Radio Shack piezos in the kitchen one afternoon and recorded with a Sony TC-D5: again, tortured electronics, screaming from behind the surfaces of mundane events.

Polta participated in compilation releases on the Sounds from the Pocket label (more to come!). Sometimes he (over)builds masses of open-reel tape loop/microphone/radio/white noise amalgams, which can be hauled out for live performance — get in touch for details. He's trying to figure out what to do with the recordings he makes; if you have ideas send him email. He'll trade for just about anything. If you want to just make him a mix tape or even send someone's old answering machine tapes, he'll match you point for point. Mysteries in the mailbox. Get in touch!

The Field Effects series showcases artists who are interested in framing the hidden beauty of the everyday world: beauty on the surface, awaiting our attention. Beauty that must be delicately extracted. And beauty in potential, awaiting juxtaposition, collage, repetition and mutilation.

Seating mostly on futons to encourage comfortable deep listening and viewing. As I think we've bid farewell to our wonderful loaner beanbags (thanks again, Blasthaus!), you may want to bring a pillow...

Depending on weather, hot or cold drinks will be available on a donation-based honor system. With luck, someone will bake cookies.

This information is not for print distribution or advertising. This is a private event for friends, family, and our community.

questions?