Hour-long live electronics set featuring lap steel guitar, analog pedals, modified cassette player, voice, and found objects
TAPE TAPe TApe Tape tape is part of a 4-album release on Parlour Tapes+, a cassette label I co-manage with Deidre Huckabay, Andrew Tham, and Zach Moore. Since the founding of Parlour Tapes, I have been obsessed with making medium-specific work, and in particular, tape-specific work, with a mind to lend meaning to cassettes beyond their immediate nostalgia (though not discounting it either). You’re never just listening to the thing recorded on the tape, you’re listening to its body, and the working bodies of every implement involved in its playing. You can hear both tape and player doing their jobs while you listen to a recording—that hummy white noise throughout, the periodicity of the gears turning, the physicality of pushing actual buttons. I find so much tactile delight, fullness, and satisfaction in the materials, and I look to the tape’s form as inspiration for indulgent, luxurious play. TAPE TAPe TApe Tape tape is documentation of a pleasure practice using cassettes and various tape-playing implements as vessels for ecstatic discovery. It’s also an ode to the Sony shoebox player/recorder I hung onto by accident after I got a minicassette recorder in college. All tracks were made in and around my apartment—the first track with only the Sony, the second with a live performance setup on the floor, and the third with the sound of an electronic hum re-recorded over itself on tape 20 times, collaged with vocalization and hacked-together analog electronics, then recorded to tape again (and collaged again).
TREESEARCH is the third collaboration between artist collective Mocrep (US) and Bastard Assignments (UK). TREESEARCH was commissioned by Bastard Assignments as part of their 2020 series, Lockdown Jams.
In TREESEARCH, we each observed, studied, and shared stories about specific, curated locations in our real lives—sites near trees, shaped by trees—with a tree meditation at the root of our shared practice. We collected and created video, audio, text, and images as traces of this process. This site offers a scrapbook of randomly-generated snapshots of the material we accumulated during our collaboration. We encourage you to navigate it as you would any site in the physical world—with openness to unexpected discoveries and the courage to pursue deeper encounters when curiosity compels you.
Under quarantine, we felt touched by the potential of remote collaboration to connect people in disparate places, and to connect each of us more deeply to our own place in the process. In North America, where members of Mocrep live, settler colonialism has eradicated the histories of the sites we live on. More broadly, capitalism and white supremacy culture create incentives for us to forget or misremember history, natural history, ecology, and biology. We undertook TREESEARCH in hopes the collaboration would drive us all to recover some local histories and sciences, and to share that learning. We likewise hope it spurs you to notice, appreciate, and work to understand the site you are viewing from.
Oscar: for Trombone and Tape is the result of a long collaborative exchange between composer Jenna Lyle and trombonist Riley Leitch. Both artists, throughout the process, explore questions of awareness and expression based on an imposed identity, in this case represented by a makeshift suit of unrolled cassette tape. A trombonist navigates the sonic world of the tape through gesture, imitation, live processing, and analog playback.
Everything Touches Everything Else was written for the combined forces of Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Adapter, and Distractfold. In a series of permutations, performers transition from playing as soloists in a circle around the audience to playing as trios, quartets, quintets, etc., moving inward among the crowd until the entire 3-ensemble group is huddled together in the center of the room. With each permutation, performers negotiate co-playing arrangements so that no single person in a combination plays less than two instruments at a time. Premiered at Radialsystem Berlin in July, 2019. Photos by Phil Dera.
I Like My Friends is a collaborative debut album from Mocrep. This record is co-created and performed by Mocrep. This material includes: electronic and acoustic work, composed tunes and improvisations, recorded between the Spring of 2018 and the Spring of 2019.
Mocrep is nothing. Equal parts nothing, nothing, nothing, and nothing. Mocrep creates nothing and wants nothing. Originally created by nothing and for no purpose, it remembers nothing perceives nothing and reflects on nothing.
This album is an expression of fluid, multivalent relationship dynamics; associations which intersect artistic, spiritual, and practical planes. It is A Monument. It stands for experiences that define Mocrep for its members: intimate friendships, art crushes, sympathy, antipathy, and fear of missing out. It is a means of ensemble communication: how rare and reassuring it is to speak frankly to one another about the work we share. It is also a record that exposes to the listener how it is made: through earnest, not-at-all straight forward interpersonal negotiations, undertaken with effort and guaranteeing no particular outcome. It represents a great risk for nothing.
mocrep.org
Photo by Ricardo Adame
H.O.V. is a collaboratively devised work for cello with two performers, made for and with cellist Katinka Kleijn. Two players navigate opposing passageways up and down the body of the cello, problem solving as they intersect, and eventually merging into equal agents with complementary impacts on the sound of the instrumental.
This is for Jacob was composed with Australian keyboardist Jacob Abela, for premiere at the 2018 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. Playing a contemporary version of the Ondes Martenot (Ondomo), Abela exploits the instrument’s idiosyncratic nature—looking for glitches, hidden harmonics, and complex sounds elicited using little to no movement.
Technically, Yes. was written for NY-based duo Popebama (Saxophonist Erin Rogers and Percussionist Dennis Sullivan). Playing modified wind instruments that respond to a contact microphone with feedback, both performers essentially have a spoken conversation that results in varying degrees of sonic disruption.
for DIY instruments, electronics & movement; Commissioned by MATA Festival 2018 for Ensemble Contemporaneous
The quote “Let them stop swaying; then there won’t be any wind” comes from a Soviet children’s story, The Little Sparrow. Alongside the story’s heavy-handed moralistic plot, there’s a beautiful narrative of a baby sparrow mis-perceiving the world around him. He’s confused about humans and assumes a cat has eaten off all of their feathers and torn off their wings, for example. And he believes the swaying trees cause the gusts of wind that nearly blow him out of his nest. He understands that his body is affected by the wind, but can’t process the idea that other bodies (in this case the bodies of the trees) are not the cause of it, which is the message I take with me.
In Let them stop swaying; then there won’t be any wind, cause and origin are often obscured. Performers are asked to respond to minute changes in the sound of air as effected by their own bodies and the bodies of others. The sound source and the consequences of movement are augmented and diminished throughout by way of live mixing, recorded or performed doubling and abstraction, and imitation.
Louise, for solo performer and Sonic Fabric garment, is a multimedia collaboration directed and performed by Jenna Lyle. Designer Scarlet Le, collaboratively with Lyle, has made a garment using interdisciplinary artist Alyce Santoro's Sonic Fabric (cassette tape woven with polyester thread). With a variety of implements, Lyle performs a 3-part work, named for the late Abstract Expressionist sculptor Louise Nevelson, exploring the sound of sculptural movement and the sonic properties of textile. Much like the installation work of its namesake, Louise is an expression of intimacy and autobiography, dithering between the tiny and the monumental in scale.
Premiered at Resonant Bodies Festival, Chicago. Photo by Marc Perlish
For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast (2017) is a collaboratively devised work with Alejandro T. Acierto for modified clarinet, light, mylar installation, and movement. A light apparatus inside the tube of the clarinet alters the flow of air through the resonating body of the instrument and requires adaptive embouchure and fingering. Throughout the course of the work, Acierto moves through a choreography of breath, vocalization, fingering, bell positioning and bodily contortion to expose a resultant choreography of light and sound changes reflected on an immersive mylar installation. Light affects movement, which affects sound, which in turn affects light again in an endless feedback loop. Video by Dan Nichols mediates the experience of live performance with an intimacy that perhaps only film can capture, adding a layer to the work and shifting it into an entirely new artistic paradigm.
Commissioned by D U C K R U B B E R (Cellist TJ Borden + electronicists James Bean and Paul Hembree), Duo for Actual and Human Cellos is a tribute to Charlotte Moorman, John Cage and Nam June Paik’s experiments with the instrument. One player wears a harness with rosened strings, holding them taut with extended arms while another player bows the strings. The two human cello players perform in consort with an actual cello/cellist, moving from unisons to counterpoint and imitation to shared playing across both instruments.
