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Sorry for the month lapse in posting. We and I've been very busy especially with music. Shores have two SF shows planned 2/19 at LiPo Lounge w' The Thralls and Al Qaeda and 3/6 at Bluesix with The Lickets and Marmalade Mountain. More details about those when each gets closer. In other news we started making "Refraction" and have studio time recording coming up, more on those in a bit too. A group of friends musicians DJs etc also got together at Dalva last weekend and traded best music of 2009 CDs. I'll be making a best of SF 09 soon too, and another couple disks of new music I loved from last year, which was an amazing year for music. In the meantime, here's the playlist for the Best of 09 album I made last week. A zip drive with the material is included below that. Talk to you soon!
I was driving our drummer Sean home from the KFJC 50th Anniversary Party concert at the Cafe du Nord tonight, where we'd listened to our bassist Will and his drummer Laura from his other band The Thralls make a guest appearance with the band Al Qaeda. Good show.
Dropping Sean off, I had to run up to his place to grab my bag (which I had left there earlier in the evening) and experienced a moment of déjà-vu. About a year ago I had dropped Sean off after another show and didn't come up, but in tonight's episode I experienced that first instance again as if I had.
Sean and I started talking about the phenomenon and reflecting on the refraction of déjà-vu, the whole thing suddenly came to me.
As announced in our last blog, Project Soundwave accepted our proposal for their Green Sound festival next summer. In its Green Sound manifestation, this performance won't be taking place in the form of a show on a local shoreline, as conceived in that proposal, but we have still been intending on incorporating some form of the visual prinicple of the original proposal.
In our original proposal, to explore the visual aspect of sound and environmentalism for Green Sound, we projected visiting two Bay Area shorelines, one which has been well preserved and then another which has been environmentally devastated. We wanted to record these visits in some form of a visual documentary, recording our interactions both with these two forms of landscapes and with each other as a band mates.
In déjà-vu, our unconscious minds simultaneously enact a moment of observation from within the space of the mind and a moment of preservation of the environment outside. You are both within and without, observing and preserving, but these processes, which are concomitantly empirical (i.e. of the conscious mind) and transcendental (as are all advents of the unconscious), these oxymoronically deconstruct each other.
Another aspect of the visual element of our Green Sound proposal was this. Alex (our didj player) filmed two short films in a visit to Sequioa National Park. In both films, he pointed his camera straight down towards the water and the shallow river bed beneath it. In “Reflection” (the first), he had the camera above the water, recording the reflections of sunlight upon the surface of the water. In ”Refraction” (the second), in the same location and at the same angle, he immersed his (waterproof) camera in the water, and recorded the refraction of that same sunlight within the water, its refraction onto the smooth sandstone floor of that river bed.
Reflection:
Refraction:
The idea is that the light and water and environment are all the same---even the orientation of perception and the representational means for framing that shore, that liminal space-- even these are all the same. But for both our eyes and for the natural as well as the unconscious elements of that empirical experience, for these the image and the sound are correspondingly different, yet the antithetically the same. This came out in both the visuals of the films and in the audios of those two same-different spaces.
Reflaction, refrection: (the 2 below aren't our videos, but they illustrate the principle we're after)
Our idea was we wanted the songs to be based on this relationship, this interchange, in the several literal as well as metaphorical meanings of this word and its roots. We already wrote and recorded a full demo of "Reflection" (hear it on our Myspace page), one of our best recordings, and it was done in one take watching Alex's first video. The sound for this song is very smooth, streamed, organic, mirroring. It sounds like an experienced environment, how we subliminally perceive and participate in that natural setting, as any one hiking through it would.
But then, in anticipation of part two, the second song Refraction, anticipating the 2nd film's footage inside the water and refracted light, it ends with a sample taken from part one of Kit Clayton's album Lateral Forces. I ran this sample, which is already an experiment in static sound and electricality, through a series of filters to make it "refract" the sound of the keynote sample which composes the rest of the composition, and this effect will likewise be replicated and further refracted in the version of "Refraction" which I will be writing over this Christmas break.
The Reflection and the Refraction form and interweave the intersecting interstitching yet deconstructing diffracting electroacoustic environments, that of the natural shoreline setting, and that of the psychosomatic experience of that shoreline.
This, finally, extends to my new (re)vision of the film and documentary component of this project. When we played our first show in the Mirror room, Chris Gray projected his experimental film upon us and upon the mirrors of the room, immersing us in a visual sea of refracted light, refracted light which was being reflected off the walls of mirrors composing the performance space. Jaakko Vilpponen, in turn, filmed this environment of sound and light around us,
(Other videos of this show by Jaakko can be found here)
Chris reflected, Jaakko refracted; in interchanging their visuals both with our sound and with the performance space, the two together composed the total audio visual, electroacoustic environment to contain our art in, for the audience at the show and for the audience of the videos of that show. and for us performing then building on our sound off those recordings in our initial phase of rehearsals as a band. conscious made unconscious and unconsciousness making consciousness.
So, an idea for the film that could serve as footage both for the documentary and for the visual projections to (write or actually) score the songs would be this: Jaakko films the raw footage of our visits to these two shorelines: our visit to and reflection the preserved shoreline (that initial moment of déjà-vu) and then our visit to and refraction of the environmentally devastated shoreline. In our immediate experiences of these environments we are in direct reflection. As filmed, the first preserved shoreline is the reflection of a reflection: our original "nature" within nature, how we feel participating as part of that environment. Also as filmed, our experience of the second, observed shoreline constitutes a reflection on a refraction (the shoreline has been refracted--"broken" by industrial incursion--but we are still directly experiencing in it-----and as part of the (in)human nature which broke it, we are reflected in that refraction).
(Jaakko would record not us as a band observing at the shoreline, but through our eyes, his eyes & the camera lens as a kind of 6th pair of eyes & third eye for the band.) Jaakko's raw footage of the preserved shoreline would serve as the first part of the documentary and the projections for our live performance of Reflection.
Then, Chris, would collaborate with Jaakko to take the footage of the second observed, environmentally-devastated shoreline, and edit and manipulate it, refract it. This would then form the film that would compose second part of the documentary and the projections used during the live performance of "Refraction".
Déjà-vu enacts and arrests the aporia between these two spaces, by curving unconscious reflection into conscious refraction and by raising our consciousness (our reflection) of how humanity has unconsciously or unconscientiously refracted, broke down and damaged, that environment.
Now, after that, the question is how do we traverse that aporia, cross its boundaries, unite the natural shoreline with the liminal space of the self. Transcendence is of course part of this, but in what form, through what manner of engagement (oxymoronic of transcendence), this is still to be determined. But that is a matter to work out in "Coda", the third and final movement of this series. Much work to do by Green Sound next summer.....
Project Soundwave accepted our proposal for their Green Sound Festival next summer! It won't be the exact show format presented in the proposal, but we will be playing at the Lab in SF together with a lineup of great experimental artists that Project Soundwave customarily features. Stay tuned from more details soon.
In addition to preparing new music and visuals for the festival, Shores have been working really hard as of late. We wrote yet another new song, working title "Comet Tail", and finalized most of the instrumentation for the song score for Jaakko's 16mm short. Our good friend Stephen Cavoretto from Dora Flood and Memories Mystic will be making a guest appearance on this song, playing trumpet to accompany Alex's trombone-doo (dij circular breathing through the trombone). Sean also has been practicing the saw more, which he is incorporating into both new songs. Meanwhile I've had my hands full learning my new gear, the APC 40, which is basically a mixing and control board for the Ableton live, which is really cool because it give me the ability to control and effect the tracks more real time. I've also been practicing mixing and EQ'ing. We've been recording all our practices this month as a way to explore the evolution of new material and develop more of a structure in how we perform their material. Mixing all the tracks afterwards has enabled me to listen to all the individual parts more closely and play them for the guys as we communicate about where we want to take the songs. All of this is translating into a more cohering aesthetic for our sound overall, which is great experience and satisfying artistically, though at the same time all the work is wearing me out! That's alright, sleep when dead as they say. A much needed vacation coming up in December before the real work begins next year, recording our album, preparing for the Project Sound>wave Green Sound Festival, and starting to play shows more regularly. fun fun...
Our good friend Jaakko Vilpponen, a student at the SF Academy of Art, is making a 16mm music video for Shores! He came up with a basic story and collaborated with me on sets and props, and Shores are writing a new song called "Conver" to perform to his storyboard.
We'll be using The Undertakers' performance space in the Richmond, recyling some of the sets from their recent Haunted House and building a couple new ones to boot. We're in the process of rehearsing the song, and will be recording it in a couple weeks. Filming is this weekend and the storyline is mesmerizing.
The basic idea is that the main character, played by me is a kind of musical monster alien who's been commissioned by an unnamed protector to rescue four office workers from their drab mundane lives and use music to convert them also into monsters. A lot of friends and fellow artists are collaborating on the filming, sets, and projections; below are some shots of a couple of the sets, from photos of the Haunted House. Stay tuned soon for more on this exciting project!
Our friends the Undertakers will be putting on their 8th annual Haunted House this Saturday, Halloween, 10/31 from 6 to 9 p.m. Their theme this year is "Feary Tales" and it looks to be a very fantastical and scary undertaking. and it's free even. Corner of 22nd Avenue and California, here's their page on Facebook.
