With Shells, Bells, Steps and Silences, roden has finally made the logical leap from film to video — where his films have been previously exhibited or included as components of installations, they have been transferred to video. The qualitative differences with the earlier celluloid works is therefore negligible, although the absence of hand-painting and other material modifications is immediately noticeable. Certainly Roden’s emphatically DIY philosophy remains uncompromised.
Upon entering the darkened gallery, visitors are immediately confronted with a large-scale rear-projected looped image of the artist’s hand repeatedly opening and closing, roughly edited so that different small objects — seashells, rocks, jewelry, etc — appear each time the hand opens. everything she left behind that fits in my hand, 2012, is a powerfully poetic opening salvo, a beating prestidigital heart offering an endless array of intimate objects that hearken back to the earliest handheld artifacts in our species’ cultural history. The fact that the objects filled two boxes from the estate of Martha Graham, the preeminent genius of modernist choreography, adds even further layers of poetic resonance. Read the rest of steve roden at LACE in Art Voices' October issue or online here.
steve roden at LACE
Important Records astounding 12 CD box set Pauline Oliveros Reverberations - Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 consists almost entirely of previously unissued works that nevertheless comprise one of the most historically significant oeuvres in 20th-century electronic music. Oliveros, who turned 80 in May, has achieved a legendary status in new music circles due to her multifaceted “Deep Listening” practice, which insists on the honing of auditory attention as a pillar of musical composition, performance, and appreciation.
This encompasses not only a wide range of musical performances with The Deep Listening Band and other ensembles – anchored by Oliveros’ sensitive, unorthodox accordion improvisations, and performed in cavernous, resonant spaces like caves and power plant cooling towers – but an entire spectrum of alternative educational situations from workshops and retreats to full-on apprenticeships and a certification program (check it out at http://deeplistening.org)...
Oliveros learned accordion by playing country music, and originally hails from rural Texas -- though it’s more the Houston neck of the woods, which some say accounts for her work’s swampy immersiveness. 10 years later and about 500 miles west in Lubbock, Terry Allen emerged into an environment that was drier in every way, and eventually developed a hybrid of roots music and avant-gardism that was quite different. Allen came to LA right out of high school to attend Chouinard, and was part of the first generation of quirky conceptual artists -- like Al Ruppersberg -- to issue forth from there. For the month of May, 1971 Ruppersberg converted a house on Sunset Blvd. into the fully functioning “Al’s Grand Hotel,” and Terry Allen was the in-house entertainment for two performances, which were recorded, then misplaced for a few decades.
In the meantime, Allen developed a complex career as a visual and recording artist, alternating multimedia installations with increasingly high-profile musical outings. His records stand out in the art world because, unlike most artists who dabble in showbiz, he actually has enormous talent as a songwriter. Ranging from the stripped-down storytelling of his first LP Juarez (1975) to the guest-star-studded Human Remains (1996) to his experimental radio narratives like Pedal Steal (1992), Allen’s discography has matched a keen, skeptical intelligence with a fierce sentimentality and populism, while balancing an ambivalent (but masterful) appreciation of honkytonk music with a restless late-modernist jones for innovation...
Read the rest of Pauline Oliveros & Terry Allen in the Sept/Oct issue of artillery Magazine or after the jump.
www.importantrecords.com
www.orionread.com
One of the most unexpected collateral benefits of the internet is that it seems to have sparked a frenzy of cultural archeology, and a concurrent torrent of actual physical reissues – music, film, print ephemera, and more – that has subsequently nurtured a generation of informed connoisseurs for cultural artifacts that originally reached an audience of a few hundred. Or none at all.
Important Records astounding 12 CD box set Pauline Oliveros Reverberations - Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 consists almost entirely of previously unissued works that nevertheless comprise one of the most historically significant oeuvres in 20th-century electronic music. Oliveros, who turned 80 in May, has achieved a legendary status in new music circles due to her multifaceted “Deep Listening” practice, which insists on the honing of auditory attention as a pillar of musical composition, performance, and appreciation.
This encompasses not only a wide range of musical performances with The Deep Listening Band and other ensembles – anchored by Oliveros’ sensitive, unorthodox accordion improvisations, and performed in cavernous, resonant spaces like caves and power plant cooling towers – but an entire spectrum of alternative educational situations from workshops and retreats to full-on apprenticeships and a certification program (check it out at http://deeplistening.org).
Buried under all this post-hippy Schaferian gobbledygook lies Oliveros’ legacy as one of the pioneering figures of American electronic music - a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and its director when it moved to Mills college. “Reverberations” covers this period, her overlapping association with Hugh LeCaine’s studio at the University of Toronto, and her subsequent tenure at UC San Diego.
Oliveros’ instruments range from primitive sine-wave generators, ring modulators and Sears-Roebuck tape recorders to hot-off-the-soldering-bench Moog and Buchla synths - liberally seasoned with Oliveros’ own invented circuitry, tape delay and feedback mechanisms. With these tools, Oliveros manages to map out an epic range of sonic possibilities – many of which prefigure the sort of ambient industrial music that emerged from the UK in the 80s, as well as more recent schools – while others remain surprisingly alien forty years along.
While these hardcore live-in-the-laboratory improvisations may seem coldly clinical from a distance, I was struck – on deeper listening – how often they evoked similar states of mind to her more recent, more explicitly psychological work. Oliveros learned accordion by playing country music, and originally hails from rural Texas -- though it’s more the Houston neck of the woods, which some say accounts for her work’s swampy immersiveness. 10 years later and about 500 miles west in Lubbock, Terry Allen emerged into an environment that was drier in every way, and eventually developed a hybrid of roots music and avant-gardism that was quite different.
Allen came to LA right out of high school to attend Chouinard, and was part of the first generation of quirky conceptual artists -- like Al Ruppersberg -- to issue forth from there. For the month of May, 1971 Ruppersberg converted a house on Sunset Blvd. into the fully functioning “Al’s Grand Hotel,” and Terry Allen was the in-house entertainment for two performances, which were recorded, then misplaced for a few decades. In the meantime, Allen developed a complex career as a visual and recording artist, alternating multimedia installations with increasingly high-profile musical outings.
His records stand out in the art world because, unlike most artists who dabble in showbiz, he actually has enormous talent as a songwriter. Ranging from the stripped-down storytelling of his first LP Juarez (1975) to the guest-star-studded Human Remains (1996) to his experimental radio narratives like Pedal Steal (1992), Allen’s discography has matched a keen, skeptical intelligence with a fierce sentimentality and populism, while balancing an ambivalent (but masterful) appreciation of honkytonk music with a restless late-modernist jones for innovation.
Allen’s last album of new songs was 1999’s Salivation, as he has gradually synthesized his installations, storytelling, and music into theatrical Gesamtkunstwerks like Dugout (2004) and Ghost Ship Rodez (2010) – which makes the release of Live at Al’s Grand Hotel (Orion Read 2011) something of a treasure – particularly for the inclusion of five previously unreleased songs, including Off Malibu -- dedicated to Mike Balog, a fellow Chouinard grad who had dated Diane Keaton, been snapped up by Leo Castelli, then blew his brains out. Rock & roll.
The album also contains a good chunk of the Juarez cycle, plus the perennial favorite Truckload of Art, all performed solo on the piano with a confidence that belies the 4 year gap before Juarez’s release. Limited to 500 copies on vinyl, Live at Al’s Grand Hotel offers a fly-on-the-wall slice of LA art history, and a document from the formative years of one of the most underexposed pioneers of quirky Americana music.
importantrecords.com/
www.orionread.com/
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