anna friz

FJARÐARHEIÐI is new multi-channel audiovisual performance by Konrad Korabiewski and me, which we premiered last autumn at the Festival de nouveau cinéma in Montréal. Here’s a little trailer/excerpt, featuring images from one of the two channels of photomontage which I created to accompany our live music.

Anna Friz | Konrad Korabiewski | FJARÐARHEIÐI | Festival Nouveau Cinéma Montréal | live | excerpt from Konrad Korabiewski on Vimeo.http://korabiewski.com

Here’s what the performance is all about:

Using field recordings, cottage-built electronics, analogue tape and feedback systems, Friz and Korabiewski perform live, accompanied by Friz’ monochrome two-channel photo-montage. Together, they craft pensive audiovisual landscapes, strongly influenced by the extreme oscillation between daylight and darkness characteristic of life over a year on the mountainous coast just below the Arctic Circle. Fjarðarheiði is taken from the name of the 25 km mountain pass which connects the village of Seyðisfjörður to the nearest town of Egilsstaðir in eastern Iceland. On this sometimes treacherous road, the visual and acoustic environments are transformed by dense fog and snow storms, effecting a perceptual flux between white-out and black-out which leaves only an aftergrain. If afterglow refers to the light or luminescence left in the sky after sundown, aftergrain is the sonic and visual noise that remains when most other frequencies are subtracted.

Support for the development of the project comes from Canada Council for the Arts (Friz); the Danish Composer’s Society and the Danish Arts Foundation (Korabiewski). Developed as a Skálar production.

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Last spring I made a radio art piece for Radio Arts UK entitled Two Sleeps, which was an oneiric journey through imagined landscapes, and the tendency in my dreams of ascending and descending through air and water. This time around it was much more basic: the plane takes off from the fog and murk of East Iceland, soars over the pack ice around Labrador and descends into another fog bank near Santa Cruz, California.  From air to earth, but actually to water–though there’s drought here, the ocean is the nearest and most impressive body around.

My new appointment here at UC Santa Cruz is keeping me busy, but some additional shows are coming up fast: even as we speak I’m madly finishing the audio for Public Studio‘s new 360 degree video installation entitled Zero Hour, to be presented at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche on October 3-4, 2015; and a brand new audio-visual performance Fjarðarheiði created with Konrad Korabiewski and presented by Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music at the Festival de nouveau cinéma in Montréal, October 10, 2015.

Look out for misc. colloquia in the central California area to be announced shortly as well… and when not teaching students about the glories of listening and making noise, I’ll be out and about, loitering about the waterfront…

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From our travels around the northeast corner of planet Iceland…

….back in East Iceland, doing some photography/sound recording/materials gathering together with Konrad Korabiewski during the foggy days and the all-night twilight. Moonscapes: check. Half expecting other planets to rise over the mountains. Contrary to the calendar, summer seems to be giving Iceland a miss, so it’s all wet wool all the time around here. We’re heading up to the Langanes Peninsula for a work period later this month, once the mechanics have finished sprucing up Konrad’s mighty Volvo Laplander.

While in Montréal last month, Emmanuel Madan and I finished the stereo mix of The Joy Channel version 3, our radio art play exploring the future of radio where the airwaves are used to transmit emotions. We mastered at Oboro, with the good ears of Stéphane Claude to weigh in, and the work will be released as part of a new transmission art series on the strange and wonderful west coast label IO. sound later this year.

Currently working on an episode for Radio MACBA Interruptions on the ‘little people’ who live inside the radio (not to be confused with Icelandic faeries, but perhaps they are relatives…), and a composition for 10″ vinyl release through Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music entitled The Eternal Cuckoo.

My travel to undertake artistic research in Iceland this summer is generously supported by a grant from Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Division.

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