field effects 4: a night of quiet beauty
friday, may 31, doors 8pm
964 natoma, sf, ca, usa
$6-10 sliding scale

The world makes music, remember to listen.

Field Effects 4 offers a night of field recording sound art performance. The fourth in an ongoing series of concerts showcasing sound artists who work with found and quiet sounds, Field Effects 4 offers a unique opportunity to hear delicate work performed in a comfortable environment. Come out for a night of communal deep listening!

Field Effects 4 features work by artists:

albert ortega & mitchell brown (la)

The focus of albert & mitchell's collaboration is exploring the acoustic effects of environmental sounds as they travel through different spaces and times. Chosen locations include a cave in the Mojave Desert, an abandoned watertower in Malibu, and a manmade tunnel in Mt. Washington. Our chosen tools: a chime and a monitor device that uses contact mics. The result is a circular coelescence of natural occurances (distant birds, footsteps, speech, monitor feedback) interacting with the resonant qualities of each location. Each location yields a harmonically different recording; implicit fluctuating intervals and beat patterns are examined by the live use of a low frequency oscillator.

Mitchell Brown creates intricate sound collages from pre-recorded materials integrated with real-time loop units, contact microphones, tone generators, etc. He hosts a weekly sound collage radio program. One of his current projects is AralinaPing, a trio showcasing the intuitive talents of two developmentally disabled children.

Albert Ortega uses his surroundings as an instrument to capture the sounds of his handbuilt creations, or is it the other way around? His recent LA River installation coerced some bystanders to pick up and hang trash on an amplified wire. He also performs in several experimental groups such as Consolidated Lint and Klaxon Hooves.

coelacanth (sf)

Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes actively pursue evocation, empathy, and transcendence through sound under the moniker Coelacanth. Initially, Coelacanth's quest may have been to engage the drone supreme; but the duo is distracted by the minutae of sound itself, the sudden revelation of the history of decay, the sublime beauty of nature... The drone goes on, but its course may be quite circuitous. Coelacanth has previously invoked creakingly creepy submariner ambience as if the oxidization process itself had been amplified within the realm of the audible. Spiked electrical surges and controlled feedback oscillations, a symphony of tiny whirring machines, gritty textual striations, blissful tone float of dense bell reverberations and oceanic washes of shortwave... Chasse and Haynes make concerted efforts to actively develop their performances into extrordinary visual displays, with elaborate sets of shattered Christmas bulbs, piles of rusted metal, surplus scientific gear, and massive piles of branches.

Coelacanth has performed extensively in the Bay Area and released the acclaimed "The Chronograph" on Jef Cantu's Partition label. Loren Chasse is a veteran of the "lowercase" school of quiet minimalism with a handful of poetically created solo albums of processed field recording, and makes contributions to Id Battery with Brandon LaBelle, and the hazy psychedelics with Thuja, The Blithe Sons, The Knit Separates, and The Child Readers.

Jim Haynes is an artist who describes his work through the phrase: "I rust things." He also writes for The Wire and happily toils at Aquarius Records in San Francisco.

http://www.23five.org/lchasse

dajuin yao (berkeley)

'I have been seriously recording that place since 1997 - not its natural environments at all, but the sounds of its people, culture - the humanistic. Sounds were captured at various important sites, from the 1200-year-old, once private and forbidden seplucher of a young princess 50 feet underground, to a modern metropolitan subway station where a blind woman sings... all in different architectural and acoustic spaces. Presented out of context, and without pages of transcription & footnotes, they might be appreciated as no more than "objet sonore"; yet to this listener at least, they are full of the pungent smells of history and culture, of people's lives, of tears and laughters... These then are my "inner sites."'

For this program, I have no interests in any prescribed mode of listening (e.g., the "reduced listening" mode a la Pierre Schaeffer, or the much needed cultural mode of listening), or even the MAX/MSPing of the sound files into artwork; I believe in the power and magic inherent in them, as is. My interest here is experimenting with multiple modes of listening, the possibilities in listening ..."

http://www.sinologic.com/yao

kaveh soofi (sf)

'Wayang Formations is a new piece based on recorded Balinese music and field recordings captured while honeymooning last year in Indonesia. Intended as an homage to Balinese visual and aural culture, this piece uses manipulated sound and video to expressing the sophistication of the Wayang Kulit, or shadow puppet performance. Bouncing between interactive montage and audio-tourism, Wayang Formations attempts to re-mediate a fraction of the visual delight of this ancient, compelling art form.

Kaveh Soofi is a visual artist working and studying in San Francisco.

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.

Field recordings are made out in the world, not the studio. Fair game: machines, animals, weather, vehicles, buskers, hawkers, hawks, preachers, telephones, taxis, and the mad. (Things have voices: do you hear?)

Seating mostly on futons to encourage comfortable deep listening.

Depending on weather, hot or cold drinks will be available. Baked delights by Diane Peter.

questions?