Performance

Auto Mano

March 25, 2010
The Talbot Gallery (Dublin, Ireland)

An improvised electroacoustic set featuring Slavek Kwi, Anthony Kelly, and David Stalling, with Fergus Byrne responding to the soundscape via live drawing. The concert marked the opening of Auto Mano, an exhibition of drawings by Byrne and Joe Stanley at the Talbot Gallery in Dublin. This concert extended / revisited a series of similar improvisations between Byrne, Kwi, and myself from 2002, which resulted in the drawings that Fergus was showing in Auto Mano.

Ritual Flux / Moon

August 16, 2009
Spinners Townhouse Gallery (Birr, Ireland)

A structured improvisation with Russell Hart / economicthoughtprojects, played in response to a reel of 16mm Fluxus films (by Yoko Ono, John Cale and others) as part of Ritual Flux 51, an exhibition curated by Eilis Lavelle, Carl Giffney and Ruth Lyons at the Birr Theatre and Arts Centre.

The performance was recorded, mastered and released by economicthoughtprojects as a limited edition CDr entitled Fluxus / Moon (running time 49m12s).

A truly gorgeous 50 minute piece of shimmering electronica built around Alex North and Gerry Goldsmiths 1966 composition "Moon", the piece is based on a 40 second long intro to the score to who's afraid of virginia wolfe. The piece features Sven Anderson and Russell Hart (Scottish born and now residing in Galway). It's a wonderfully oscillating piece of mostly drone based sounds with lots of barely audible glitchy sound effects. Think of the sparse barren icy soundscapes of Biosphere meets the kind of digital scratchy detritus of Fennesz. It's one of those beautiful slow changing pieces that fans of the Kranky label will instantly fall in love with. It's definitely one of those rare beauties that's best appreciated on headphones, you will discover so much going on deep down in the mix this way.

Review from Road Records, Dublin

Live @ 8

May 20, 2009
Bar 8 (Galway, Ireland)

A three-and-a-half hour experiment in improvisation between Russell Hart / economicthoughtprojects and myself, set to a generative visual piece that I programmed an hour before the performance, blending photographs that Russell shot outside the performance space on the docks while I was programming. This concert focused on a wide range of audio sources set in motion through slowly shifting repetitive gestures, played back at high volume within the crowded atmosphere of Live @ 8, a monthly experimental art night set in Bar 8 on the docks in Galway.

Apply Within: Experience Essential

April 3, 2009
Ard Bia / Nimmo's (Galway, Ireland)

"The interior sounds of a restaurant are traces of a series of functions executed within a clearly defined architectural and social space. Using carefully placed microphones and an array of PA speakers, these traces are shifted from the interior of the restaurant to its exterior, amplifying and projecting a mixture of private conversations, the clatter of food being prepared, and the intimate sounds of eating itself outwards into the public space adjacent to the restaurant. This mediation partially displaces the restaurant within the context of its location, blurring its boundaries and forcing it to perform more actively within its surrounding environment."

"Sven Anderson and Russell Hart (economicthoughtprojects) performed an improvised set within the structure of this intervention. Anderson will process the sounds of the restaurant occurring in realtime, while Hart processed a mixture of treated field recordings captured during the previous week within the restaurant."

"Russell Hart has collected a series of field recordings from the restaurant over the previous week leading up to the event. These sounds will be used as the starting point for the development of a series of tones/drones and textures that he will then manipulate during the performance with Sven Anderson."

Text from www.jennieguy.com.

More information on the installation / intervention within the restaurant can be found on my Apply Within project page.

Travelers, There Are No Paths

August 22, 2004
Mor Festival / Charvleville Castle (Tullamore, Ireland)

I played a set in the interior of Charleville Castle for the Mor Festival, a small experimental music festival in Tullamore, Ireland, in 2004. This performance, entitled Travelers, There Are No Paths, occurred in conjunction with a sound installation (sharing the same title) that I constructed on the castle's exterior. More information on the installation can be found on my Travelers, There Are No Paths project page.

The performance utilized sound files generated by the installation the previous night. The source of all of the sound materials was a recording of the last composition written by the italian composer Luigi Nono, Hay que caminar" soņando (1989). Nono named a sequence of works after a medieval inscription on a monastery wall in San Francesco di Toledo that read Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar. (Travelers, there are no paths, but we must go on). Hay que caminar soņando is a violin duo in which the two violinists choose their own paths to navigate between six music stands containing fragments of a composition, distributed throughout a performance space. During my performance, I utilized a similar procedure, moving two simultaneous sound sources between six different software modules that processed the randomized sound files (clips of the original performance that had been previously processed and output by my sound installation) in different ways. The result was a dissonant cloud of strings in which the carefully constructed timbral nuances of the original composition were overlayed with one and other.

This set was recorded and broadcast on the experimental music / art radio station Resonance FM in London, in conjunction with a set by Philip Jeck which followed my performance.

Disintegration Process

September 3, 2004
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany)

A presentation of text and field recordings documenting a process of exploring vacant urban locations in Dublin. Joelle Bitton (a member of the superficiel.org net art collective) invited me to present a work that dealt with urban space alongside her and fellow superficiel collaborator Raphael Meyer at a special event at the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany. I chose to a exhibit a version of the Disintegration Process installation / performance. For more information please refer to my project page for Disintegration Process.

Click here to download a condensed version of the improvised performance of 8 x Disintegration Process, recorded at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The file is 13m15s, 18.2MB.

Convergence

April 28, 2004
Cultivate Centre (Dublin, Ireland)

The Soun.Din collective performed in the basement of the Cultivate Centre in Dublin during the Convergence Sustainable Living Festival in 2004. The performance explored the coexistence of a large ensemble of performers within a single setting, with various audio, visual, and performative gestures taking place simultaneously.

My approach to this situation was to experiment with peripheral, parasitic activity in relation to the performance. I set up in a hallway near the entrance to the performance space, arranging a small seating area around my computer and loudspeakers. When the performance began, I recorded one minute of the sound in the space from my peripheral location. For the remaining hour of the performance, I recycled these 60 seconds of audio through a very dense software setup, creating a cyclical activity that struggled to coexist with the dominant, linear progression of the other performers. During the performance, audience members moved from the main performance space into my side-show, sitting for a few moments before returning to the main space.

This performance helped me to consolidate my ideas about working with sound in space, and provided me with a platform to begin to explore sound installation in relation to physical and architectural space, and to shift away from collaborative performance.

Volume 1

March 15, 2004
Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (Dublin, Ireland)

For the first Volume exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Fergus Byrne and I presented a proposal for the Soun.Din ensemble to set up on different floors of the inner atrium space, and attempt to pass performance / sound gestures between adjacent floors. This space is defined by a series of oval openings between floors, resulting in an oval shaft cutting through the building, providing both performers and audience members with the ability to observe activity on different floors from a single location.

This slight structural element was intended to grant a degree of formalism to the completely open format of the situ.action performances (described below) that the ensemble had engaged in over the previous two years.

The performance was scheduled as the opening event for Volume, which has continued as an annual exhibition exploring contemporary sound art / sonic practice in Ireland.

The set-up for the performance was rather intricate, with many site-specific elements constructed within the stairwell. The notion of passing gestures between floors was maintained only momentarily, before the reverberant acoustics of the space and relatively large, mobile audience had a mobilizing / destabilizing effect on the performance, and the space was filled with a consistent sonic output emerging simultaneously from all floors.

Aoibheann O'Sullivan and Simon Hudson produced a short video documentary of this performance.

The Private Concert Series

Summer, 2003
Multiple Venues (Hollywood, USA)

Over a six month stay in Los Angeles, I performed a series of improvisations at multiple venues in the Hollywood area. The primary sounds used in these performances focused on ambient recordings captured inside of friends' apartments, in private, intimate spaces. The performances pushed these small sounds into dense soundscapes, to compete with the active (more public) spaces in which they were played (cafes, hostels, bars). Many thanks to Edward Mattiuzzi for organizing these concerts.

i & e

2003
The Printing House (Ireland)

I performed a half-hour solo set at one of the first Improvisation & Electronics (i & e) events organized by Dennis McNulty at the Printing House at Trinity College Dublin.

This set was a live mixture of three disparate elements:

1. A recording of a live improvisation / practice by Slavek Kwi and myself
2. A field recording made outside of Liverpool Street Station in London using two cheap tape recorders, one carried by myself, the other by my friend Simon Davis, walking on opposite sides of the street
3. Several short loops extracted from a Debussy string quartet

These three elements were mixed and subjected to an uneven distortion in a Pure Data patch, so that the output was shifted almost entirely to the right side of the performance space, to disorient the relationship between myself and the audience and create a tension between the sound sources.

situ.action Performance Series

2002 - 2005
Multiple Venues (Ireland)

A series of improvised performances within a very free, unstructured working environment (originally conceived by Slavek Kwi), exploring abstract forms of communication between various performers and diverse performance spaces (the working title of the series stemming from situation and action). These events were organized through the Soun.Din collective, and took place in uncommon venues including a prison and a psychiatric hospital, and also within various gallery spaces including the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), The National Concert Hall, and the Project Arts Centre.

Performers who participated in these events include: Sven Anderson, Karl Burke, Fergus Byrne, Rob Canning, Aoife Desmond, Slavek Kwi, Diarmuid MacDiarmada, Sean McCrum, Paul Murnaghan, Hugh O’Neil, Aiobheann O’Sullivan, Seoidin O’Sullivan, and Paul Roe.

For more information on Soun.Din, visit my Soun.Din page.

Rooftop Performance at Dawn

Summer, 2002
Broadstone Studios (Dublin, Ireland)

During 2002, I developed a system of improvisations with Fergus Byrne and Slavek Kwi, in which Byrne would move / draw in response to the sounds produced by myself and Kwi (Kwi producing electronic and acoustic sounds with a variety of objects, while I sampled and transformed these in realtime via a Pure Data patch running on a laptop).

We invited a small audience to watch and listen to us perform early one Friday morning on the roof of Broadstone Studios as the sun came up, looking out over North Dublin. The sound and activity of the performance was accompanied by a sense of the city waking up around us, as the sound of traffic gradually faded into the soundscape we were producing, and Byrne's movements eventually resulted in a drawing. Performing at such an early hour in such a unique setting offered a very satisfying start to the day.