Performances Presented in 2006

Radio without electricity! Well, almost. About once every second day the Drake Hotel will unexpectedly turn off the music in the restaurant, cafe or other locations and transform itself into an Avant Garde Irish Pub with singers, acoustic musicians, and battery powered radio artists curated and directed by John Oswald. Hang around the Drake and re-live the unexpected perks of the 2003 blackout!

The AMBiENT PiNG and Deep Wireless collaborate for the fifth year in a row to offer Ambient and experimental artists the challenge of creating work that uses radio as a starting point or source material for sound exploration. This year's edition begins with Indian percussionist and sound artist Debashis Sinha with world musician Ben Grossman in a set that uses the radio as a sound source and mixed with various percussion instruments to create ambient music. Also, Deep Wireless artist in residence Kathy Kennedy will perform a solo set of electroacoustic vocal compositions.

Kathy Kennedy will apply her skills in sonic choreography and public guerilla sound art to the Toronto urban soundscape with transmission arts performances in parks, street corners, and other sites of dense concentration of Torontonians.

The Ambient Ping and Deep Wireless collaborate to present NOINO, a newly formed group featuring highly regarded AMBiENT PiNG regulars James Bailey, Matthew Poulakakis & Jamie Todd.

Kathy Kennedy will apply her skills in sonic choreography and public guerilla sound art to the Toronto urban soundscape with transmission arts performances in parks, street corners, and other sites of dense concentration of Torontonians.

Drake’s variety night brings you experimental music, comedy, performance and video art!

This month, Gareth Long curates “What’s Up With Yale?” : videos by the crème de la crème of Yale’s art program. Featuring video works by Sarah Dorner, JJ PEET, Derek Larson, Chris Moukarbel, Samantha Moyer and more. Long is currently pursuing his MFA at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut after receiving his Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in 2003. He is the recipient of the Vtape Emerging Artist Award, 2003 and is represented by Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto.

The Drake TV Video Vault features hilarious selections from our video library. This month: “Lennon + Dylan get tree top high (on video)” and “Yorkville Isn’t Gentrified”.

As part of the Deep Wireless Residency, Drake A.I.Rs Kathy Kennedy, John Oswald and Trevor Wishart will perform sonic selections!

Radio Theatre is a Deep Wireless creation whereby an eclectic group of multi-talented radio artists are assembled together in order to perform live radiophonic pieces for the stage. This year's ensemble consisting of sound artists Anna Friz and Richard Windeyer, sound designer & actor Richard Lee, and vocalist Christine Duncan will perform a two-part (one part on each night) radio work by US radio and performance artist Gregory Whitehead. Also included will be radio works commissioned for CBC radio's Outfront by Christian Nicolay, Micheline Roi, Debashis Sinha, and Damiano Pietropaulo.

The Radio theatre will be followed by shows that feature a solo voice performance by Kathy Kennedy on May 26 and San Francisco plunderphonic pioneers The Evolution Control Committee on May 27.

Sonic Choreographies are multi-track pieces for 5.1 surround sound composed almost entirely of the composer's voice, creating an immersive and deeply personal environment. Kennedy will also improvise live over some of the soundscapes. From lilting melodies to haunting auralities, the concert hall is transformed into a space within the human voice.

The ECC brings from San Francisco a newly revised version of their classic Thimbletron performances featuring normal kitchen appliances (toaster, blender, microwave, etc.) that are circuit-bent to change and twist your popular media appetite.

For this live-to-air closing night show, John Oswald and Mark Gunderson will bring together a "band" of Toronto celebrities from all walks of life (politics, food, literature, music, you name it..) to take audience requests for their musical favourites and throw these into a sound mix rich in discussion and debate.

If one person could ever symbolize the meeting point between the trajectories of music, architecture and acoustics it would be Iannis Xenakis. Among his complex and varied life as an engineer, a mathematician, an architect, and a composer, Xenakis also created electroacoustic music that influenced or anticipated the thinking behind some of Canada's leading artists in that field, namely Barry Truax and Paul Dolden.

In the spirit of Xenakis' work with Le Corbusier on the Philips Pavillion for the Brussels World Fair in 1959, New Adventures in Sound Art will unveil for the public for the first time a new spatialization system designed by its artistic director Darren Copeland.

This new system will expand from the automated 8-channel system NAISA has used since 1998 to a 16 channel system that will include a sensor controller for real time physical control of how the sound moves in space, spatialization automatation and sequencing software, and a loudspeaker support structure from which speakers will be mounted around and above the audience.

The concert program will be presented in partnership with Contact Contemporary Music and will feature members of its ensemble performing a new commissioned work by Wende Bartley, along with loud and thunderous performances of Michael Gordon's Industry and Xenakis's percussion work Psappha. New Adventures in Sound Art will round out the program with Barry Truax's recent work Shaman's Ascent and Paul Dolden's seminal work Below the Walls of Jericho. After the concert there will be a late night screening of Xenakis's architectural and electroacoustic work Legard D'Eer, which was created for the opening of the Pompedieu Centre in Paris.

Guerilla Sound Events are short 'spontaneous' performance art pieces that draw attention to the contemporary urban soundscape. While often humorous in nature, they also bring attention to both the noise and recognizable 'soundmarks' of urban life, calling for a more active role in shaping our urban soundscapes. Sound Travels 2006 will feature Guerilla Sound Events by Peter Hatch and four Toronto emerging artists.

A musical interplay between sound and silence and darkness and light using the extremes of sonic and visual perception, the Friday night Sound Travels concert will include the multi-media work beshadowed by Bernhard Gal for Flute, cello, light and sound projection as well as the world premiere of Darren Copeland's Let Me Out. This concert will be followed by an artist Q&A with Peter Hatch, Darren Copeland and Bernhard Gal.

Note: this reception is open only to the Sound Travels artists and to weekend pass-holders.

A wine and cheese reception for the artists and weekend pass-holders where artists get the chance to meet each other and share their perspectives and interests.

This multi-channel concert will explore the beautiful natural acoustics of St. Andrew-by-the-Lake Church with a new 12-channel surround system designed by artistic director Darren Copeland that features the physical control over the movement of sound above and around the audience. Works featured include Masques et Parades by Stéphane Roy, Denis Smalley's Wind Chimes, John Young's Virtual, a selection from Clear Dawn for tape and Japanese Shoh performed by Toronto-based sound artist Sarah Peebles, the soundscape work "Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches" by Francisco López and brief candle by the software programmer of the new system Ben Thigpen.

Tree in The Middle is a performance about music in motion. Set around a tree on Toronto Island, the audience joins the musicians on a playful journey through an exploration of moving music and sound.

The Bay area's Wet Gate, opens the weekend events with their unique all 16mm. projector band. Wetgate ( quicktime excerpt )

Wet Gate is a 16mm projector ensemble from the San Francisco Bay Area, made up of Peter Conheim (also known from the bands Mono Pause and Negativland), Steve Dye (Epic and Santo Subito) and Owen O'Toole. For their performances, they use 16mm projectors, loops and simple electronic processes. The film material, that is made up of found footage, their own shots and loops with abstract images (treated by hand on the film material), is fanned onto the screen using mirrors they made themselves.

Below is an excerpt from
"Genie in a Bottle: Wet Gate conjures up magic sounds with its all-projector orchestra"
By David Cook SF weekly Oct 2000

"Steve [Dye] and I were watching some friends of ours in a band, who could almost resolutely be defined as an industrial band," says Peter Conheim, "and Steve just leaned over and said, 'I wonder what a band of all movie projectionists would be like.' And we just looked at each other and this bulb went off in our heads." ... Their idea was as simple as it was strange: to use actual film in place of music, and 16mm projectors instead of instruments, casting images and sound on the eyes and ears of audiences in a grouplike format... It took about a year for Dye to make his idea a reality: Wet Gate, which also includes filmmaker and longtime college radio programmer Owen O'Toole, delivered its first performance at the Film Arts Foundation Festival in late 1995... Each group member runs loops from about 10 to 20 seconds in duration through a 16mm projector, with each loop just long enough to capture some evocative gesture or movement -- snow falling, a flower opening, a plane taking off, a landslide. Meanwhile, each projector is outfitted with a sampler that grabs audio bits from the optical soundtrack of the film, slowing text down or speeding it up, isolating and repeating it even as the images repeat and overlap, thus "slowly ripping the stitching out from between the soundtrack and image coupled in the film material" as Wet Gate's manifesto claims. The trio also occasionally treats the audio track with scratches and adhesive to create totally new sounds.

The crowning jewel of the German silent cinema, Fritz Lang's Metropolis depicts a city starkly divided into those who labour for scant reward, and those who own, control and manipulate the conditions of life itself. Both because of the enduring relevance of its central themes, and also because of their masterful elaboration in the hands of Lang and his collaborators, the film has deservedly acquired an iconic status. Its various images and devices have been and continue to be plundered by film- and image-makers ever since its 1927 premiere. Metropolis remains a film that – here and now just as much as in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic – speaks deeply to the present. Toronto composer and electronic sound artist David Ogborn's new music for the film deploys a virtuosic ensemble of 5 musicians – violin, soprano, trombone, percussion and live electronics – who react to and interact with each other and with the film, continuing the open and improvisatory traditions of silent film accompaniment. Tonight's performance will feature an excerpt from the middle of this new score – in which the workers descend into a subterranean cavern to listen to a revolutionary sermon, unaware that they are being surveilled by the city's ruler, Joh Fredersen, and his arch-rival, the mad scientist Rotwang.

Also includes "Artist's Loft" installation by Luis Jacob, a re-creation of Brion Gysin's Dream Machine installed in the main space.

Phh!k is the name that electronic composers Peter Hannan and Henry Kucharzyk have given their pop-music project, which is pop in the sense that it employs recognizable beats, relatively simple chord structures, and singable melodies. Beyond that, the pieces are constructed with an undeniably scientific attitude toward the creation of sound: using a pair of Buchla Lightning hand-held audio controllers, Hannan adjusts the parameters of his sampled sequences with the precision of a chemist filling a test tube, while Kucharzyk, seated behind a bank of filters and synth modules, twists dials as if zooming in on signals from outer space. (excerpted from "Phh!k" in "Straight" by Alexander Varty, March 24, 2005).

composite image by Jamie Todd

LOUIS DUFORT

Included in this evening performances will be both electroacoustic and videomusic pieces diffused in the space by Louis Dufort. More TBA

Also includes "Artist's Loft" installation by Luis Jacob, a re-creation of Brion Gysin's Dream Machine installed in the main space.

On Sunday at 1pm Pleasure Dome presents Flicker Films, a programme organized around Tony Conrad’s landmark 1966 film, The Flicker, in which a strobe tempo created from black and clear film leader induces states of optical difficulty and altered consciousness. The Flicker superseded earlier analogies between structure and psychology (Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, 1958-60 and Ed Emshwiller’s Thanatopsis, 1962 ) by dissolving differentiations between internal sensation and external perception. Conrad’s close associate, Paul Sharits, made several mandalic films in the 1960s (Piece Mandala/End War, Ray Gun Virus, Word Movie/Flux Film 29, T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G.) that added layers of sound, language, text and representation to the flicker premise, shearing from modern society’s mountains of random information crystalline patterns of time and image. In the context of Conrad and Sharits, Michael Snow’s Standard Time, 1967, can be freshly appreciated for its attention to the meter of edited time and motion through the nondescript space of the artist’s New York studio. Snow recently revived his interest in flicker with his collaborative masterpiece Triage, 2000, created with filmmaker Carl Brown and composer John Kamevaar.

A discussion follows the screening, with Tony Conrad, Michael Snow, Marcus Boon, a professor at York University specializing in altered consciousness, and moderated by John Geiger, a Toronto journalist and writer who recently published the authoritative biography of Brion Gysin (Nothing Is True—Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, 2005).

Also includes "Artist's Loft" installation by Luis Jacob, a re-creation of Brion Gysin's Dream Machine installed in the main space