anna friz

After two years of research residency at the Theatre Centre with Toronto-based performance company Public Recordings, our new show is finally on the stage:

I’ve designed the sound mostly from tape detritus, and predictably, I’m playing the score for this show entirely from cassette, with some electronic effects (and a few Califones cassette players thrown in for good measure). For tickets and more info, check out the Theatre Centre’s page.

300 Tapes will travel to Calgary for the Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival in February 2011, and from there to points beyond.

A nice little review by Kevin Hegge of NOW magazine can be found here.

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photo courtesy of Tuuli Kyttälä

I was commissioned by curator Kimmo Modig of the Äänen Lumo: Festival of New Sounds in Helsinki to create a new piece for radio and performance about Helsinki, without visiting the city. You’ve never been here? Oh good, he said, please don’t come. But we have some keen sound design students from the Theatre Academy who will be your agents in this enterprise, who will record what you ask, and perform what your score.

For the time being is the result–the first in what will eventually be a series of works about transmission and timekeeping. Five people live here. One person lives seven timezones away and has never been here. How can time and place be heard and shared across blind distance? For the time being explores the subjective rhythms of micro-local time and experience against the standardization of ‘universal time’ in broadcast media. This piece records time passing in Helsinki, measured in both the regulated time that otherwise rules our lives through mediated timekeeping via watches, mobile phones, radio, television, train schedules, and in the polyrhythms of the city at dawn and dusk.

I sent my five agents (Ina Aaltojarvi, Roy Boswell, Ilpo Heikkinen, Tuuli Kyttälä, and Johannes Vartolaout) once a month for four months (beginning June 21, 2010) to a location of their choosing in Helsinki at either sunset or sunrise to record the ambience. They were also asked to count passing moments aloud, based on the rhythm of some characteristic element of their chosen site. Finally, they recorded some incidences of time-keeping from broadcast media heard in Helsinki. Once I received their recordings and sound journals from each recording session, I crafted a score, with some rules attached to it, which the five agents (under the name Suomen Teatteriorkesteri) will be performing for the opening of Äänen Lumo in Helsinki on Monday, November 8, 2010. Meanwhile, I’m making a composed piece called For the time being (clock radio mix) to air on the Finnish national radio station YLE.

The Suomen Teatteriorkesteri will be performing in a darkened cinema, with a mix of raw and modulated field recordings and auxilliary electronics. The score does not dictate treatment or duration of each section, and performers may make choices as to whether or not they will overlap sections.

For the time being, performance score (2010)

time (media, solo)
mic handling
time (media, duet)
clear sky
multitudes of birds
time (chorus)
rhythm (small droplets of water)
everybody’s just passing me by
sneaky listening of people talking
talk to someone
wind, water
time (solo)
time (chorus)
train
all the people are missing
animals
rhythm (tiny insects are flying in the air)
the place seems even a bit more familiar this time, as though it was expecting me
time (solo or chorus)

For those of you in Finland, you can tune in to the broadcast of live and taped pieces on Mon 15 Nov, 10:05-11:05pm on Ääniversumi radio show, Yle Radio 1. It will remain online for Finnish listeners only for some time afterward, so look for a podcast or audio file.

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The October 2010 issue of the Wire features a cover article by fellow radio art enthusiast Knut Aufermann. There’s a very nice mention of my recent radio installations, as well as other excellent artists and projects like the international independent radio art network Radia FM, Tetsuo Kogawa, Reboot FM, Radioerevan, and many more.

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Radio listening continues, even when the chips are down and the doctoral dissertation must be finished. This little baby doesn’t actually receive any nearby stations, but the white noise is sublime.

Lots of good news for future projects, however:

I have received generous post-doctoral funding from the Fonds de recherche de la société et la culture (FQRSC) in Québec which will allow me to spend two years in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute. I’ll be moving stateside in April 2011 to get that rolling, and look forward to hanging out with the distinguished sound geeks there, including my long-time collaborator Eric Leonardson.

Meanwhile, the winter will be dominated by writing, editing, and production on a couple of great projects:

I’m working on a new commission called “For the time being” for Äänen Lumo Festival for New Sounds, taking place in Helsinki November 8-14, 2010. I have been especially invited NOT to attend the festival, but to work with five excellent sound students from the Theatre Academy Helsinki to create a new work for Finnish public radio, as well as craft a score for the intrepid agents to perform at the festival in a darkened cinema. They’re out there with their microphones at the ready, even as I write! Looking forward to working with the material they send me.

300 Tapes will premiere at the Theatre Centre in December 1-12, 2010 here in Toronto, and then head to the 25th playRites Festival at in Calgary in February 2011. It’s a Public Recordings show directed by Ame Henderson, and developed over the past two years in a company residency at the Theatre Centre in Toronto. I’ve been a co-creator of the work, as well as composing, sound designing, and will be doing live sound for the shows. Yes, there really are 300 tapes in the show, as promised.

Fresh from a rip-roaring run at the Minneapolis Fringe, Evalyn Parry’s bike show SPIN will also get its first full-length run at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre here in Toronto in March 2011.  I’m doing sound design and performing live in that one too (it’s the one show where I get to SING as well as twiddle knobs!)

And now, I need to get back to my nice little static, as it were.

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I’m currently in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where we performed Evalyn Parry’s show SPIN at the Sound Symposium. That’s Evalyn, in her guise as Frances Willard, feeling some political optimism. Brad is in back, playing the lovely little blue Raleigh bike we borrowed from Bill’s Bikes. That’s me down below, doing some singing and accordion-ing.

Great music and sounds here all week (a major highlight is the daily port symphony at 12:30!), tender fresh cod at the Ship, and a comfy bed to lay my head at J-P’s. Tomorrow we’re going out to participate in the big finale at Cape Spears– the eastern-most point of the continent. It’s all very mysterious, as I have been issued cryptic instructions for when to play and where, and promises to be a spectacular setting.

More photos to come!

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photo by Omer Yukeseker

I’m doing some transmission and tech work for a wonderful show by Toronto dancer extraordinaire Susie Burpee— A Mass Becomes You. 

It’s a solo piece, inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #122 (1983), featuring Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor and a host of boomboxes.  Susie is an amazing performer with such intensity and a laughing-to-keep-from-crying Beckett-like sensibility that really drives this absurd and beautiful work. 

My job involves some composing, a lot of boombox wrangling, and keeping all the little radios working as they should. Designing Mozart-meets-radioworld has caused some weird musical organisms to occupy my inner ear– like a choral reef, you might say. 

For those of you in Southern Ontario, the show happens at the Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival at the River Run Centre in Guelph on Friday June 4 at 8PM, and at the Canada Dance Festival at the  National Arts Centre in Ottawa on June 9 at 4PM.

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E.C. Woodley and I have an interesting side project going titled after his long-running radio show on CKLN 88.1FM here in Toronto. He brings the records from his most recondite collection (featuring spoken word and misc. arcana pressed to vinyl back when the top speed was 78 rpm) to sample in long form, and I bring the glorious noise of radio world, all spatialized into three vertical layers of sound. 

Our most recent gig was at the opening of Deep Wireless on May 1, 2010, and the above photos are from our previous outing at Mercer Union‘s “Music in Alternative Spaces” in July 2009 (both locations in Toronto). Our set-up riffs on traditional radio listening (the big central radio around which the audience gathers), as well as my multi-channel tactics (in this case, an array of hanging radios, and speakers above the radios in the ceiling). 

Here’s how the official line on what we’re up to:

“The Lost and Found” is an ongoing collaboration between Anna Friz and E.C. Woodley to explore phenomenologies of recording, radio, and electricity, and the materiality of the transmission environment. Woodley uses three turntables to work with curious recordings, giving 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. Friz adds VLF, shortwave, interfrequency static, and live electronics to the mix, and spatializes the sound via multi-channel micro-radio transmission to an array of vintage receivers. “The Lost and Found” convenes a communal ritual of radio listening, and promises an evening lost and found voices heard in the dark corners of the radio dial.

Friz and Woodley met in 2005 over an impromptu collaboration on Woodley’s long-running radio program (also named “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”.

I know, I know, another scene of sound artists pouring over gear on a table. At least we sit off to the side, so people can choose if they want to watch us twiddle our knobs or not. For the Deep Wireless gig we had the lighting adjusted better than in these photos, and I also replaced the Grundig Emergency radios in the array with a series of bigger transistor radios from the late 60s-early 70s (Nordmende Globetrotter, Transita, and Corvette; plus a Bel-Air and a Panasonic). 

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Hugo Verweij over at the always-interesting sound blog Everyday Listening has an ongoing series where he poses five questions to various sonic-obsessed folk, and this week he’s featuring my rambling answers to his questions…. Walk on over and have a look.

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Spring means a new issue of Musicworks magazine “for curious ears”, and this issue is all about “The Future of Radio”. Local filmmaker and writer Chris Kennedy wrote a lovely feature article on my recent radiophonic installations, and the issue showcases other interesting radio/sound artists like my occasional collaborator Kristen Roos. There’s a CD accompanying the magazine, which includes an stereo remix of an excerpt of the composition from my multi-channel radio installation Respire.

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