[ nov 30, 2017 ]
that big drum. that tiny pedal.
luggage store gallery
1007 market | sf | 8pm
$6-15 SLIDING SCALE

Following up on a hunch with Tim Perkis and performing a improvised duet using only two instruments: Tim’s hand-made, tone-generating pedal and my concert bass drum. It’s an experiment in one sounding as close as it can to the other, despite obvious differences in scale.

Expect really tiny things from the big thing, and really big things from the tiny thing.

The evening includes a set of duets from Kattt Atchley and her exquisite roster of collaborators: Susan Gervitz, Claudia La Rocco Phillip Greenlief, and Kenneth Atchley.

O! SORRY! DONE!
[ nov 2, 2017 ]
almost public / semi-exposed 4
artists' television access and sfSoundRadio
992 valencia | sf | also online
$FREE

I returned to the storefront window of Artists' Television Access to perform Vexations, the durational work by Erik Satie, with Rae Diamond. It was part of the Window Gallery's Almost-Public/Semi-Exposed 4, the fourth annual month-long series of installed performance art.

Vexations is merely four measures, repeated 840 times. Rae Diamond kept track using an ingenious system involving lima beans and two pint jars: one labeled "To Do" and the other labeled "Done." Rae would start on one side of the window storefront when I began one iteration on the craptastic Casio. She would remove one lima bean from the To Do jar. She'd cross, with great subtlety (unless there was a child banging on the window, in which case she was a friendly ghost), and deposit the bean in the Done jar just as I completed the last measure.Then she'd go back to the other side. I'd start again. Rae would start again.

If you came by, you can verify that around the nine hour mark I had an epiphany about why people rarely play piano continuously for hours like this. I was a little tense, one might say. My brain, one could mention, was not its normal self. I took my first break of the day to babble incoherently, eating Rae's protein bar, doing the math over and over and over and over until it was incontrovertible that we had ten more hours to go.

There was no need to confess to Rae, a superb musician, that in the 400 or so iterations I had already completed that I had never once played the piece correctly. I could say it was because of the way it's written, but honestly. I brought my own triumphant imperfection to it in that kind of balls out, criminal way that endears me to some, and infuriates others to the point where they simply don't speak to me anymore. Rae was keenly aware of all of this, which may have been at the heart of her gentle suggestion to finish the piece in a radical way: by singing it.

We sang it, but quickly realized we didn't actually know how it went. That's just how vexing Vexations is. We tried to listen to an in situ recording of the piece on headphones as a reference, but our gear was inadequate to split the feed. For a while Rae held the phone that recorded that iteration to her ear and kept pressing play, since we couldn't get it to loop. She paced back and forth looking like she was taking a very difficult call in the middle of our durational performance art show, which she would interrupt to take another call, which happened to have the same conversation going on in it. In that moment I was transfixed, and started to think of doing a show that involved being on the phone, and interrupting the conversation to start another identical one... but the thought vanished until this very moment, as I report it all to you.

Huh.

Where was I? O yeah. Rae was singing along to the phone with me walking alongside her looking at her intently, picking up the melody in that fraction of a second as one does, and forgetting the melody as soon as it came out my mouth. Seriously. No retention whatsoever. I found this strangely relaxing, and started to make stuff up to sing that seemed in the family of the thing Rae was desparately trying to sing. In the end I could only produce long tones, unable to ascertain if any of them were the tonic. Before long, or maybe after long, we ditched the pacing and sat down in the window, longtoning in lieu of singing that god damn fucking piece. One lima bean for the start of Rae's breath was handed to me as I joined in, which I put into the Done jar as my breath ran out.

This actually drew a crowd.

After the sun had set, according to the lima beans, we had performed 840 iterations of Vexation Variation and had helpfully re-oxygenated. Matt Ingalls figured out from my text message that I had stopped remoting our performance into sfSoundRadio, something that was actually noticed by Joe Kuta as he listened from some East Bay location. After finding our shoes and packing up, we thought about getting some food, but instead we ended up slipping into the stream of citizens celebrating Dia de Los Muertos that evening, getting on BART, shouting our debrief over the astonishing scream of the tracks, and parting ways at West Oakland station. When I got out at Fruitvale and started walking home, I realized I was crying. I just let it fall out my eyes.

The next day Rae sent me a picture of the lima bean stew she had made from the Done jar. It looked delicious.

O! SORRY! DONE AS WELL!
[ nov 17, 2017 ]
radioDinner: OMMOZOKA
sfSoundRadio
$FREE

The best kind of gig = the one you don’t need to drag yourself out of the house for, yes? I say this as a performer and an audient.

Adria Otte (OMMO minus one Julie Moon, as it happened) rolled up into New House of Zoka with her rig and joined me and Mysterious MZ (ZOKA) in a live tablecore performance. To this we added, kind of down by the end of the table on a tiny square not occupied by effects pedals, digital devices and cables, a chickpea stew, oven-warmed nan, not the greens I had prepared (forgot!), and slabs of dduk.

Our goal was to make music to accompany you in preparing, eating, and cleaning up your own damn dinner. How'd we do? As part of the performance, we got caught up on eachother's lives, discussed news of the day, and marveled at the cats, who apparently are totally fine with us playing under headphones as they stand in the middle of the gear like it's so much... nothing important or dangerous. No one can answer this question but I'll ask it anyway: what the hell is up with cats?

Expect the aircheck, and thanks again to Matt Ingalls for saying yes to these things and being generous with that sfSoundRadio pipe, which you should listen to all the time.

O! ERM! YES! JUST FINISHED!
[ nov 19, 2017 ]
ub Radio Salon #514
strangelet minus many
dfm.nu
$FREE

Revisited the definition of strangelet at Chakra Chimp Studios, the home office of Big City Orchestra's weekly broadcast on Amsterdam's terrestrial and online pirate radio station DFM.NU. Happy to report the definition of strangelet, as a hypothetical particle and as a sonic collective founded by Lucio Menegon, holds.

Mysterious Michael Zelner and I threw down two tablecore sets with legendary hosts Nina Pixie and dAS, beating the crap out of the theme Sweet Potato Awareness Month (which is probably not a thing, and I am totally to blame for suggesting it. Even the most casual online research reveals way too much information about the sweet potato, and the confusion that results when people call a sweet potato a yam. Yam is different. Nuff said.).

If you missed it, no worries. UbRadio is lovingly archived. Be sure to check out their cable television program Mysteries of Ub.