anna friz

When not mucking around in the snow with a microphone, I’m toiling away deep in the Nice Little Static Laboratories (possibly in my work pajamas, though rumours are unconfirmed) to produce some sounds for spring. Most pressing: dissertation chapters! And CD projects, including completing one with Eric Leonardson that we began about 2 years ago and which will include the complete suite Dancing Walls Stir the Prairies (band names also up for consideration, if y’all have good ideas), as well as putting the finishing touches on Short Horizon, which I hope to launch in March.

Meanwhile, here’s a little shot of the old antenna far above the house….. just because it’s pretty.

No Comments | In: news | tags: anna friz, eric leonardson, hibernation, research, short horizon, snow all over the damn place, transmission art. | #

Domestic Wireless, Dust. was showing as part of the Leona Drive Project here in Willowdale (metro Toronto) which just closed on   October 31. My piece was installed in the upper bedroom at Leona 9…. 

…you’ll have to imagine the little drones and susurrations of radios, as they transmit the signals of wireless life past and present that pass through the house.

The Leona Drive project is  a site-specific exhibition in a series of six vacant bungalows slated for demolition by Hyatt Homes, a developer in Willowdale, Ontario (in the Yonge and Finch area of Greater Toronto). The exhibition artists will be working in a variety of media: audio, radiophonic interceptions, architectural installation, projection, photography, sculpture and performance for a period of two weeks, from October 22nd – 31st 2009. The overall problematic for the exhibition is the remarkable shift from the suburbs of old to the suburbs of contemporary Canada, namely the neighborhoods and precincts of the multicultural, but nonetheless parsed state.Through the Leona Drive project, we are investigating recent developments in suburbia where new patterns of community and conscience operate. 

We sadly packed up the little Leona houses behind yesterday, boarding them back up after an amazing run. The turn-out for the duration of the show was really enthusiastic, and my favourite part was being the greeter/information person in the entrance hallway of Leona 9, hearing people’s stories of living in similar houses and their impressions of the works. 

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, leona drive project, sound installation. | #

October 25, 2009, at the Hysteria Festival of Women at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, I’ll be performing as part of Evalyn Parry’s fantastic new bicycle piece– she has written a new suite of songs, stories, and spoken word about bicycling today and in the roaring 1890’s. Brad Hart plays the bicycle, and I play the pedals and lights, as well as some other free reed instruments like accordion, harmonica, and melodica. If you’re in Toronto, it’s one night only (at least for this time around), but look out for more dates to come. 

No Comments | In: news, performances | tags: anna friz, bicycles, evalyn parry, hysteria festival, sound design, sound performance. | #

Well, the all-night frenzy of Nuit Blanche is over for another year, and my radio installation Respire had a steady line-up of visitors through the night. Toronto area artist and photographer Tom Blanchard took some marvelous photographs of the piece:

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, Nuit Blanche 2009, radio art, sound installation. | #

Yes indeed, Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s all-night art event is fast approaching, and I’m busy preparing to hang the big radio array in Zone B (in the lobby at 100 Yonge Street to be precise). Trevor Schwellnus is designing my rigging plan, and we’ll all be up and down ladders for a few nights later this week. 

But here, just to prove that art can still be a lot like working in factory… Trevor and I spent two days tying radios onto cable so we can get it all in the sky and then let down each radio on it’s little thread. Phew.

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, Nuit Blanche 2009, radio art. | #

I’ll be holding an open studio on Friday September 25 (6-10PM) and Saturday September 26 (12-5PM) for the 100th and 1oth anniversary events at Artscape Gibraltar Point Arts Centre here on the Toronto Island where I’ve been camped out making art for September. Friday night promises to be a magical evening, with the Shadowland Puppet folks leading a procession from the Centre Island ferry to Gibraltar Point at 5:30PM. For all the details, check out Artscape’s site.  

I’ll be showing the in-process version of Respire, which will be installed shortly after at Nuit Blanche, October 3, 2009 here in Toronto! Come listen to the little radios breathing in the dark…. I’m in the portables out back of the Arts Centre at Gibraltar Point, so come on by and say hello!

Here’s a shot of radios hanging in my little studio:

No Comments | In: news | tags: anna friz, artscape, gibraltar point, radio art, toronto island, transmission art. | #

PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art (MIT Press)  invited free103point9.org to contribute a special section on transmission arts. A few of us free103 regulars weighed in on the topic for issue 93, published September 2009– with Joe Milutis, myself, and Tom Roe writing about the past, present, and future of transmission art, respectively. My piece, “Transmission Art in the Present Tense” considers the much-cited legacy of Brecht in light of the emerging craft of transmission.  Other contributions include Brett Ian Balogh’s FM interface-in-progress, and Lex Bhagat’s “Instructions for How to Listen to Radio”. 

The transmission arts section is readable for free online, and includes some audio and projects in full colour. click here to read it all.

No Comments | In: news, research | tags: anna friz, free103point9.org, PAJ: a Journal of Performance Art, published writing, research, transmission art. | #

 Mid-August means back to work for a couple of weeks of workshopping with Public Recordings and dancemaker and director Ame Henderson on her Faction project. Through a residency at the Theatre Centre in Toronto, Faction is a piece in development over the course of three years (2008-2010). I’m doing some interesting sound design/sound choreography using micro-cassette recorders, and other kinds of magnetic tape tricks. Here’s the official blurb:

“Public Recordings are very pleased to be a new resident company at the Theatre Centre with the project Faction, a collaboration with writer Bobby Theodore, sound artist Anna Friz, designer Trevor Schwellnus and the performers Joe Cobden, Frank Cox-O’Connell and Brendan Gall.

Faction is a work that explores the murky territory between truth and fiction, and choreographed and unrehearsed movement. Using personal stories as the starting point, the work interrogates the relationship between artifice and authenticity in a theatrical event.”

The piece should be premiering in the fall of 2010, details to come!

No Comments | In: news, sound design | tags: anna friz, sound design. | #

Thursday 30 July, 7PM  (show 7:30)

Mercer Union (Toronto)

Music in Alternative Spaces: Eric Woodley and Anna Friz 

In this collaboration, Woodley and Friz explore phenomenologies of recording, radio, and electricity, and the materiality of the transmission environment. Resonance becomes palpable in the meeting of historical recorded material and a multi-channel micro-watt radio intervention involving a broadcast to a number of radios within Mercer Union and surrounding environment. No such thing as dead air but an open channel instead: alive, fragile, prone to interference and decay, and resonant with activity, however local or temporary, however human. 

Using one, two, or three turntables, Eric Woodley works with the history of recorded sound as pressed into vinyl. He gives preference to these sounds as discrete entities, an audio equivalent to the approach Canadian visual artist Greg Curnoe used in his collages of the 60’s. Usually these audio collages are improvised during live broadcasts of his long running show The Lost and Found on CKLN-FM in Toronto. Woodley has also written music for many films including Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and his brother Aaron Woodley’s Rhinoceros Eyes, Toronto Stories and Tennessee. 

Since 1998 Anna Friz has created self-reflexive radio art/works for international broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also creates dynamic, atmospheric sound works for theatre, dance, and solo performance that are equally able to reflect upon public media culture or to reveal interior landscapes. 

Mercer Union 
A Centre for Contemporary Art 
1286 Bloor Street West 
(1 block east of Lansdowne TTC station) 
Toronto ON M6H 1N9 Canada 
416.536.1519 
info@mercerunion.org 
www.mercerunion.org

No Comments | In: news, performances | tags: anna friz, mercer union. | #

I had the great pleasure to become a beast of the night last weekend, for this fun event: 

Saturday, June 27, 2009, in the window of La Centrale Galerie/Powerhouse, on St-Laurent Boulevard, in Montréal: watch and listen for Les bêtes nocturnes!

Sound artists project out on St Laurent the sounds that shift our quotidian experiences: they are repetitive, electronic, random, strange, and yet so distinctively animalistic. It’s dark in there but if you look closely, you might catch a glimpse of those rare mutated creatures of the night, through the window of the gallery-become-zoo.

The best time to hear the beasts is after sunset (10pm), before sunrise (5am). Bring your lawn chair and binoculars. Anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and field recorders are welcome to this rare opportunity to witness animals improvising with lo-fi poetics.

Sound beasts :

Magali Babin, Myléna Bergeron, Martine H. Crispo, Nicolas Dion, Chantal, Dumas, Nikki Forrest, Anna Friz, Jackie Gallant, Anne Françoise Jacques, Martin Tétreault, Nancy Tobin.

No Comments | In: news, performances | tags: anna friz, beasts, la centrale gallery powerhouse, sound performance. | #