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Northern California boasts a wide range of musical traditions ranging from psychedelia, garage-punk, hip-hop, bluegrass, reggae, classical, and more. How do these distinct aesthetic trajectories and California's ethnic diversity inform contemporary experimental electro-acoustic music? Embracing the notion of hybridity, Sounding Out California is a NEXMAP national competition. This CD features contemporary innovations in California.
Through its Call for Recorded Original Composition, "Sounding Out 07" invited five selected composers living and operating in California to master an existing pre-recorded acoustic, electronic, or electro-acoustic work ranging in duration from 5-20 minutes using state of the art post-production facilities. Juried by Linda Bouchard (Director, NEXMAP), Naut Humon (Co-Founder, Asphodel, Ltd., & Recombinant Media Labs - RML), French composer Francis Dhomont, Guillermo Galindo (Curator, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival), "sounding Out" features these cutting-edge innovative works.
- Night Ascends from the Ear like a Butterfly is inspired by the desert landscape
described in Haruo Shibuya’s poem, Collision in the Desert. Born in Japan and
currently based in Portola Hills, CA, Hideko Kawamoto has received awards
such as the Concorso Internazionale "Luigi Russolo" (1st Prize, Italy), Pierre
Schaeffer International Computer Music Competition (2nd Prize, Italy), Bourges
International Competition of Electroacoustic & Sonic Art (Mention Award,
France), Ear 01 International Electroacoustic Music Composing (Honorable
Mention, Hungary) and Sonic Circuits International Festival Electronic Music Art
(composition awards, USA).
- Sourced from an old Wurlitzer organ, a nylon string guitar, vinyl pops, drum
machines, gravel, branches and rocks, Currents consists of rhythmic phrases
that invoke a sense of anchorless, as if pummeled around in heavy surf. Based
in Oakland, CA, Kevin Shea Adams received an MFA from Mills College and an
undergraduate degree in philosophy from UC Berkeley where studied computer
programming and interactive musical systems at the Center for New Music and
Audio Technologies (CNMAT).
- Composed in response to the onset of Alzheimers renders the musician’s
father increasingly isolated and nonverbal, Aphasia meditates on the border
between language and preverbal emotional component of vocal sounds that
induces simultaneous feelings of terror and fascination. Based in Alameda,
CA, Damon Waitkus has received awards such as the Elizabeth Mills Crother
Award for excellence in Composition from Mills College where he received an
MA. Waitkus actively records and performs with his experimental folk group
Jack o’ the Clock and plays banjo and hammer dulcimer with singer/songwriter
Eli Wise. His instrumental works have been performed by pianist Regina
Schaffer, The Quartet San Francisco, The Presidio Ensemble, The Providence
Mandolin Orchesra, MIT Wind Ensemble, the bass clarinet duo Sqwonk, and
others.
- Uzumaki, the Japanese word for whirlpool or eddy, is a composition inspired
by and generated from spiral motions and vortices. Cheryl Leonard’s
compositions have been performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the
San Francisco Butoh Festival, the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival,
SoundCulture 96, the National Conference of the Society for Electro-Acoustic
Music, and featured on KQED TV's local arts program Spark and in Tim
Perkis's documentary film Noisy People. Based in San Francisco, Leonard
has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, ASCAP,
American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer, and residencies at the
Djerassi Program, Villa Montalvo, and Oberpfalzer Kunsterhaus.
- Sourced from a water harp, violin, sine waves, guitar, battery-powered
fountain, metal pans, rocks, and wind-blown twigs, Already Forming Lake is a
title taken from folklore about a glacier which has slowly retreated since the
last Ice Age, revealing a vast underlying lake. A classically-trained violinist
and pianist, Marielle V. Jakobsons performs regularly with many
collaborators, her bands "myrmyr" and "TrioMetrik", and her solo project
"darwinsbitch.” She receied the Elizabeth Mills Crawford award in
Composition, received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media
from Mills College, and before moving to Oakland, CA, spent a year in Paris,
France composing computer music with Iannis Xenakis' UPIC machine at the
CCMIX. www.mariplasma.com
Directed by composer Linda Bouchard, NEXMAP: New Experimental Music,
Art, Performance is a non-profit organization dedicated to the production and
appreciation of contemporary, experimental art. |
