anna friz

Jay Needham curated an evening of radio art pieces and surround sound works on Saturday April 2, 2011  for the Outside the Box New Music Festival, a festival of sound and music at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, Illinois. My good friend and collaborator Eric Leonardson was on hand to play live, and the rest of us contributed our works remotely for the surround listening experience…. the “rest of us being” Dinahbird, Ron Coulter, Zoe Irvine, Jean-Phillipe Renoult, Barry Truax, and myself.

I had hoped to come down and play in person, but I was in the middle of moving down to Chicago and couldn’t bend my head around anything other than boxes, so I sent along the remix of Pirate Jenny which just played in Estonia at Radiaator last month. Jay had a nice setup to play the radio pieces back through a muster of radios, and I’m super pleased to have Pirate Jenny in circulation again. I really think it’s time that she came out of hibernation and started up some new trouble. What have those little people in the radio been doing for the past few years anyway??? Stay tuned….

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photo by Jeremy Mimnagh

I’m performing in the first full run of Evalyn Parry’s SPIN, a show about bicycles, early feminism, consumerism, and collisions in traffic and of heart. Written and performed by Evalyn Parry, with Brad Hart on the bicycle, and me on a variety of instruments, from accordion to mbirra to bike lights. Thanks to contact mics, the table is all mic-ed up too, and I play that with a leatherman tool. I’m especially pleased to play one of Iner Souster‘s junkstruments, which we have dubbed the Time Machine.

Show runs until March 27, 2011, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, Wed-Sun nights at 8PM. Reserve tickets!

“Through a series of songs played live on a vintage bicycle, SPIN recounts a theatrical cycle of stories about bikes, women and liberation. Inspired by the incredible true tale of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to ride around the world on a bicycle in 1894, SPIN blends theatre, music and technology in a unique tribute to the bicycle as muse, musical instrument and agent of social change.”

Here’s a shot of the Time Machine:

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I have a piece in the listening room at the first ever Radiaator Festival in Tallinn, Estonia March 17-18, 2011. I’ve sent them a remix of Pirate Jenny, called “The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny: Are you one of us?”

Some great live performers will be making noise and radio, including Felix Kubin, Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann, Paul Devens, Neboisa Milikic, Eesti Elekter, LokaalRaadio, and EleOnora.

If you’re near Tallinn, you can listen on 107.2 FM, or head down to EKKM, the Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art.

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photo: Gavin Young, Calgary Herald

I’m currently in ice cold Calgary with the rest of the 300 Tapes gang for the double premiere of 300 Tapes at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival. We run from Feb 17-March 6, 2011. In case you’re wondering, there really are 300 tapes in this show. My sound design is predictably all on tape too… and I brought some nice Califone decks to play them back on (thank you Florida public school board).

Here’s what it’s all about:

“Imagine recording your memories on 300 analog tapes. Record. Rewind. Play. Listen. Stop. This intimate mash-up of fact and fiction explores how our memories and identity are shaped (and warped) by time, our own ideas of ourselves and the eyes and ears of others. Featuring a ground-breaking sound design and the curious choreography of our everyday twitches, this bold experiment in storytelling playfully provokes questions about authenticity.”

Developed in residency at The Theatre Centre, Toronto, and co-produced by Public Recordings, with The Theatre Centre and Alberta Theatre Projects.

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image by Bette Burgoyne

Peter Coutemanche (Absolute Value of Noise) and I made a little generative piece for Art’s Birthday back in 2009. We’ve redone the mix to play during Art’s Birthday 2011 and beyond as part of the Art Gallery of York University‘s ongoing “Audio Out” exhibition: which basically means infiltrating the hallway near the gallery with sounds to soothe (or aurally poke) the passing student.

Here’s the project description:

Extremity Cassette is a generative audio piece that imagines samples on a near-endless stretch of audio tape. Wound through a complex, multi-head cassette machine, the samples overlap with themselves, repeat, vanish and reappear. The magnetic nature of the machine itself picks up noises from the ether and mixes them with free reed and heterodyne sounds.

Inspired by the short story The White Death by Stanislaw Lem, where a planet made entirely of inorganic material is the crystalline host to fabulous machines, Extremity Cassette imagines a prehistoric mechanism that loops and churns out a never ending, ever changing musical score. Until one day the organic world is introduced … then rust interferes with the workings of the cassette … the sounds become progressively more erratic, and eventually stop.

Originally composed for Art’s Birthday, 17 January 2009, Extremity Cassette will play at the AGYU for Art’s Birthday 2011 from 5 January – 20 March 2011.

Peter Courtemanche (Absolute Value of Noise): VLF Antenna and Receiver
Anna Friz: Theremin, Harmonica, Kazoo, Melodica

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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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