Here are the notes of a recent brekekekexkoaxkoax performance in Austin, Texas: The site was my new apartment, completely empty of all furniture and other items. I arranged various items and activities in each room. In the living room, a tape player sounded a 1995 tape collage piece I had recently remixed. I was in the dining room with a large sheet of mylar paper, aluminum foil, and an African rattle. John Grzinich (jgrzinich) was asked to make noise in the kitchen. In the downstairs bathroom, I put a tape player with a recent electronic drone piece I am working on. In the downstairs bedroom, jgrzinich set up a 4-speaker installation (two driven from his Powerbook, and two driven from a minidisk player) using pulsing/cut up electronic noises. My plan was to have my second tape player in the walk-in closet, but John�s installation was too loud, so it was placed in the bathroom and the closet was left empty. With the closet door closed, John�s installation could still be heard, albeit muffled. I could not get a set of powered speakers to work, so I did not! use a recording sent to me from Joseph Zitt, and I could not get cellist Jason Pierce to come, but these problems, although troubling to me at the time, but once things got going, these sound sources were not missed. People coming to the performance were greeted by Gary P. Jones and Kim Van Winkle, who blindfolded each person. The blindfolded were randomly escorted to each room, including the �silent� bedroom closet. At one point Kim came up to me and whispered �Gary has three people in the closet!� I helped usher people around, and placed in the hands of some a wooden apple I was awarded when I worked at a fruit-themed computer company. About halfway through my wife brought bags of ice and drinks, and John and I made a lot of noise pouring the ice into a metal tub. Most people, who were all close friends of mine, stayed where they were placed. ECFA saxophonist Carl Smith would have none of this, and wildly thrashed his arms about and wandered (stumbled!) through the apartment, bumping into people, yelling things, and trying to find objects to grab. I was forced to bind his hands with an extra blindfold at one point, not because his actions were �wrong,� but because I knew he would enjoy being tied up and let�s face it, I enjoyed it too. Afterwards, Kim and Gary had said that they told a few of the people to �stay here� when they were ushered into a room, so maybe people thought that they couldn�t move about, which it wasn�t my intention to limit people�s movement. The piece ended with the 7 blindfolded people being ushered into the living room, where my tape collage had ended and a woman�s voice reading a passage from a Thomas Bernhard novel was playing. The tape was abruptly cut and John, Kim, Gary and I began to ring chimes around/in-between the people (these chimes are hard to describe: I think they are an instructional aid. Each chime is a hollow aluminum bar, notched open on one end like a tuning fork. Each bar has a small mallet attached to it so that when you hold the bar in your hand and flick your wrist, the mallet hits the notched end, producing a very loud pure tone. I have a suitcase of 24 of these devices), walking around producing a mesmerizing field of combination tones. The four of us left the room and waited in the kitchen, leaving the blindfolded in silence in the living room. The total length of the piece was about 28 minutes. All in all a very successful (and reportedly very enjoyable) experiement. -Josh Ronsen http://www.nd.org/jronsen ------------------------------------------------------------ --== Sent via Deja.com ==-- http://www.deja.com/
