Carole Kim's BURROW

 

"BURROW"

CAROLE KIM site-specific performance-based installation

THERESA WONG voice, cello

PHIL CURTIS electronics

SHEL WAGNER RASCH dance

LYN HORTON drawings

You are invited to the conclusion of a month-long residency at Lehrer Architects in Silverlake.  

These performances will be both indoors and outdoors so please come dressed in layers.

DECEMBER 3+4 @ 7:30 PM

LEHRER ARCHITECTS

2140 Hyperion Avenue

Los Angeles, CA  90027-4708

Google map

$10 suggested voluntary donation

ARTIST BIOS

Carole Kim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on live video performance and performance-based video installation. She explores video for its most tactile, expressive and responsive potential as a live medium. She seeks an integration of media where moving image, sound, dance and space are on equal planes engaging in a dynamic reciprocating and mutually supportive dialogue. Kim's installations are hybrid spaces in which the illusory and actual (i.e. mediated and live) merge together in an "other worldly" environment. Her work has been supported by the Irvine Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Durfee Foundation, REDCAT, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), The Getty Center, The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS), Newtown, Turbulence.org, California Institute of the Arts, and The Center for Experiments in Art, Information, and Technology.

Theresa Wong is a cellist, vocalist, composer and improviser whose training in classical music and design fused during a fellowship at Fabrica Center in Treviso, Italy where she recognized the possibility of transformation in performance through improvisation and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Her current projects include: O Sleep, an improvised opera which explores the conundrum of sleep and dream life and The Unlearning, a collection of songs for cello, violin and two voices inspired by Goya's Disasters of War etchings to be released on Tzadik Records in September 2011. Wong has collaborated with such artists as Fred Frith, Luciano Chessa, Joelle Leandre, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Carla Kihlstedt, Ellen Fullman and dance pioneer Anna Halprin. Her performances have been included at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Stone in New York City, Festival Internacional de Puebla, Mexico, Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria and Radio France broadcast, A L'improviste.   

Phil Curtis works at the intersection of music composition, sound design, and performance. Whether improvising with musicians, working in dance, opera or theater, or creating interactive music-visual instruments in software, he seeks to make hybrid forms that defy categorization. His work has been featured in a variety of venues for new and experimental art and music. Performances of his music have been given by the Nieuw Ensemble, the New Century Players, and the New York New Music Ensemble, and he has performed laptop electronics with Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, Anthony Davis, Vinny Golia, Earl Howard, Wadada Leo Smith, the Loos Ensemble, and the New York City Opera. He is a member of the soNu ensemble, and appears on soNu's Sounds from the Source CD (Nine Winds Records, 2004), on Gustavo Aguilar'sUnsettled on an Old Sense of Place (Henceforth Records, 2007), as well as his own Slutskya (Acoustic Levitation, 2002). Current projects include musical sound design for Anne LeBaron's hyperopera, Crescent City, to be premiered in Los Angeles in April 2012 by the experimental music-theatre company The Industry.  

Shel Wagner Rasch is a Contact Improv dancer, performer, producer, and teacher.  Her Contact Improv scores and choreographic works have been well received both locally and internationally.  She teaches at UCLA and is a recipient of the Lester Horton Award for Excellence in Choreography.  Shel has a private practice as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Alexander Technique teacher and Pilates instructor and she collaborates with her husband, animator Justin Rasch, making stop motion animated short films and raising their three continual motion kids.

Born in Washington, DC, in 1950, Lyn Horton graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in 1971 and an MFA in 1974. She has studied with the late Douglas Huebler, the late Paul Brach, the late George Miller, Gerald Ferguson, Stephan von Huene and was Executive Assistant to Edwin Schlossberg for ten years. She has exhibited her work in California, New York and Washington, DC. Since 1970, her art has been in numerous solo exhibits, most recently at the Oresman Gallery of Smith College in Northampton, MA. Her work is in The Sol LeWitt Collection and others throughout the country. She is represented by CBS Art Collections. Horton is also a writer. Her writing focuses on creative improvised music and some mainstream jazz. Her writing has been published in Downbeat and regularly finds itself at JazzTimes.com and on her blog, The Paradigm of Beauty. Her work is archived on Jazzreview.com and AllAboutJazz.com.  

The Art Group Behind Last Night’s OWS Light Projection | In the Air: Art+Auction's Gossip Column | ARTINFO.com

The Art Group Behind Last Night’s OWS Light Projection | In the Air: Art+Auction's Gossip Column | ARTINFO.com

Top Ten, 2011

1. Joe McPhee and Michael Zerang, Creole Gardens: A New Orleans Suite, NoBusiness;
2. Matthew Shipp and Matthew Shipp Trio, Art of the Improviser, Thirsty Ear;
3. Wadada Leo Smith's Organic, Heart's Reflections, Cuneiform;
4. William Parker, Crumbling In The Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake, Centering;
5. Daniel Levin Quartet, Organic Modernism, Clean Feed;
6. Mary Halvorsen and Jessica Pavone, Departure of Reason, Thirsty Ear;
7. Darius Jones Trio, Big Gurl, AUM Fidelity;
8.The Rempis Percussion Quartet, Montreal Parade, 482 Music;
9.Spanish Donkey, XYX, Northern Spy;
10.Klang, Other Doors, Allos Documents.

All Time Entries from Jazzreview.com, JazzTimes.com and AllAboutJazz.com

http://jazzreview.com/component/k2/itemlist/user/72-lynhorton.html

http://jazztimes.com/contributors/17952-lyn-horton

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/contrib.php?id=2825



All the articles I have written are listed at these links. For the third, searching my name will give more.

Thanks to all.

A Way Out: No, I'm Already In

In some ways, I am just so stuck. Stuck inside my box, which is a fairly large box, if one considers its contents: both metaphorically and ideologically.

Those who discuss the distinction between "inside" and "outside" the box are attempting to convey the difference between status quo and revolutionary, or between mediocrity, conformism, largely acceptable and edgy, non-conformist, individualistic, and rarely understood without explanation. Ambition is not primarily a factor in either although it somehow subliminally drives the activity of both.

But the association of ambition with the latter out-on-a-limb-ness (yet another metaphor for the innovative) deprives it of its honesty and beauty. Rather motivation and incentive and necessity trigger the formation of that which is next but never realized until it presents itself through the creative process.

The creative process is an overused phrase. What it means. What it means is an undefinable, ineluctable, formless span of time. I certainly cannot understand it on the level of brain science. But I know when it is happening. It takes me over and simply lets me go where I want to go. My emotions are relegated to a back seat. Thinking in the language I am working with flows. I intend less to make a statement. But, then, the process winds down and I become conscious and, only then, can I begin to mold what I am doing and truly make a statement.

The vocabulary of the creative process changes from one language to the next. Take your pick: music, visual art, writing, performance, film, photography, acting. I do not want to open the door to any argument of what is and what does not take claim of the creative process. We pursue it all the time whether we like it or not. It is the means to move from one task to the next. Some of us are more organized about it than others. It is a product of the heart and mind. And I am not the first person to say that. Nor am I the first person to write on the gist of these words.

Another element that propels the creative process is desire. The desire to latch onto the transmitting of a congealing of chemistry in the universe. I have to believe that everything impales on everything else as influence. No escape is possible, because we are living. At least I am now. And whatever has been left by the living, now departed, can be deep within us. It is more the 'however' we need to heed. How we harness  the energy that penetrates us with past discovery and the reign of the spirit over a slice of humanity.

Successful (in terms of fulfillment) artists never really know what they are doing. And if they start to analyze what they are doing, they catch themselves, and stop. Analysis of what artists do is for the observers, the listeners. Analysis means examining whys and researching the past as opposed to describing how and inherent impact on the future. Analysis has nothing to do with investigating feelings, only picking out the mechanics. The capacity for awareness stemming from both within and without is far different from the capacity to analyze and impose views down from some morass of supposed knowledge.

Someone once told me that if I feel pain, it means something is happening. That same person told me that he sheds tears when he reaches enlightenment. There is no logic to the juxtaposition of the quick stories of that insight and instance. But I can say that spinning wildly away from them is meaning, endless meaning that has no verbal approximation. Does the sun shine? Does the human being live or move from day to day senselessly?

Because I am an artist, my sources for how I work and what the result becomes arise from assimilation of living. Growth in the art depends on the deepening of experience and filling the cracks as the art is expressed. The culminations of every stage of experiencing life within the art infuse the imagination with fireworks, opening doors, exuberance, deeper feeling, deeper self-understanding in relation to everything. Not only to the art making tools, or the musical instruments or typewriter, but how the hell to use them in the appropriate configurations.

And when I am at that stage, my elation scatters wide over the terrain of possibility. I have the terrain to stand on. That is where I begin. Its constituents are language, love, confidence and having the right-sized shoes.

Photo:
Before The Storm, August 27, 2011
copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Broken Partials, Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris, Not Two Records, 2011

In the beginning was an African ritual in which the ring shout and the innate rhythm elicited by the stomping of feet represented a cue for a communal gathering of spirits. Throughout history, the purity of the ring shout has changed to evoke and provoke more than was ever intended. A music evolved most often associated with the blues. The blues became “jazz” and “jazz” has so many offshoots that they sometimes have no name except “sound.”  

Broken Partials is a duet between longtime collaborators, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Joe Morris.  The recording’s salient focus is how the sound develops from “Broken Partials, One” to “Broken Partials, Eight.” The redundancy of the title describes both the improvised steps that constitute the whole and the infinitely brief hiatuses between and within those steps.

Concision of motion on their instruments clarifies the process that the musicians go through to tell their story, the outcome of which is unknown until the resilient pizzicato on the bass simply ends the recording. The subject of the story that they are both telling is how they play their instruments. Chords counteract sensible sequences of notes that transform from one to another through tremolos, runs, walking lines, arpeggios, ostinatos; snapped, pounded and repeated single notes; and the rare indications of melody.

The tempos may be laid back occasionally but the tempos only become important if it cannot be understood that they are part and parcel of the reason that the music falls into shapes that intersect, run parallel, blend, or split. Tempos and pitch, chord, key, phrase, interaction, separation and understated, underlying rhythm indivisibly define the improvisation. No matter how abstractly the music is explained verbally, words can never equal the abstract beauty of the music as it lends itself to the passing of time.  

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Awakening, Nicole Mitchell, Delmark, 2011

Touted as the country’s best ‘jazz’ flutist, Nicole Mitchell has really got it going on. In Awakening, she collaborates with her group to give a sprightly, endlessly energetic and sensitive take on her own compositions. She works with Chicago musicians: guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Harrison Bankhead and drummer Avreeayl Ra.

Mitchell believes in melody, harking back to traditional forms, but she also wants improvisation to infuse her music with freshness. That fact reveals her playfulness and interest in molding mood.

Her fellow players hook right up to her lines. Parker not only strums, but also launches himself into solos that are not foreign appendages to the whole unit’s exploration. He never explodes on his electric guitar; he moves around mellifluously between pizzicatos and chords, a soft, thorough and utter complement to Mitchell’s metallic struts, leaps, flutters, and voice-like 'brrrrrrs' and sirenic 'oooohs.'

Bankhead is a model bassist, holding onto and maximizing harmony with Mitchell's strikingly melodic sequences of high-pitched tones. In fact, the harmonic spaces between the flute, guitar and bass are perfectly poised. After a non-scattered intro, “Journey on a Thread” seems to exemplify the most exploratory of the tracks, highlighted with Bankhead’s popping the strings on his bass in a lengthy well-grounded solo.

“More Than I Can Say” features Parker playing a carefully plotted pizzicato that sets the tide for this slow tempo Latin-inspired piece. Mitchell spins the sound of the flute in the background and Ra interjects rolls on the toms with a persistent cymbal sibilance. Mitchell eventually takes the tune, laden with romanticism, supported in part by the way in which Ra teases the way for Parker’s re-emergence.  Once Parker resumes his fingered line, one can imagine Mitchell listening, off to the side clutching her flute in her arms like a baby until she and Parker come together at the end for the close.

Photo by Lauren Deutsch

Nicole Mitchell married Calvin Gannt in July of 2011. She left Chicago for Long Beach, California. On her September 1, 2011, Facebook page, she wrote this note:

Dear Chicago,

You will always be my home! You've been so generous, so loving, and even kicked my butt when I needed it! I've been squeezed by the heat, the passion and the storms into who I am. You'll always be at my core. I loved being invisible, swallowed up by the crowds full of dreams like myself, and I loved submerging into the sounds of hope and determination that makes Chicago cutting edge. The Iron and concrete, the spirit lake of serenity and aqua blue meditations. The parks and most of all the beautiful people. I've been called away to California. I'm looking forward to more growth and more challenges with my new life. But I hope to always be present and rooted in some way to you, Chi.

Love Nicole

In the title cut of her album, "Awakening," which also concludes the disc, it seems that she projects a feeling through her playing that she is eventually going to broadcast that she will leave her hometown; for at the end of a soft, moderately paced, sometimes melancholy flute song, the flute's sound simply drifts away in a descending slur.

                         

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton


Track listing: Curly Top; Journey on a Thread; Center of the Earth; Snowflakes; Momentum; More Than I Can Say; There; F.O.C.; Awakening.