Deep Listening, Improvisation & Spatial Sound: Phill Niblock, Kara-lis Coverdale, Lea Bertucci

About

The concept of Deep Listening, as coined by Pauline Oliveros when her nascent Deep Listening Band descended into an underground cistern to perform using the space's 45-second reverb, has become increasingly vital in modern music. She described Deep Listening as "listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing". This course will hurl a small group of intrepid listeners deep into these principles of active sound experience, guided by five of the most acclaimed and experienced pioneers of the field - Phill Niblock, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Lea Bertucci, Tim Shaw and Jorge Boehringer.

Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer, multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde since the 1960's, influencing wide sections of the modern music landscape with his intense vision of deep, minimal drone. Niblock's music and intermedia performances have been presented at venues across the world, including MOMA, the Pompidou Center, ICA London and the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin; he has collaborated with Susan Stenger, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Kevin Drumm, Kasper Toeplitz, Jim O'Rourke, Ulrich Krieger, Seth Josel, Petr Kotik, Tom Buckner and others. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his NYC loft space, including Suzanne Ciani, Ryoji Ikeda and Zbigniew Karkowski. During a full day of workshop, performances and films, Phill will take his own music as a launch-point to explore themes of deep listening, durational music, microtones, overtones and spatialisation.

Kara-Lis Coverdale works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s world-building work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Heralded as "one of the most exciting composers in North America" (The Guardian), Coverdale's work has been meet with consistent critical acclaim, and she has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others. Kara-Lis will share current compositional research and practice, highlighting her own approaches and techniques in both interior and exterior "listening" in relation to the notion that compositions are comprised of a series of micro-improvisations. There will also be attention to form, tuning, spectral approaches to harmony, alternate notions of time and duration, and the link between memory and experience, quotation, the body, and material permutation.

American composer and performer Lea Bertucci's session will take the form of a survey of creative musical notation techniques from early standards of conventional notation to 20th and 21st century approaches. This workshop takes a synesthetic approach to visual methods of describing sound. Integrating drawing techniques from disciplines outside of music including architectural drafting, electronic design, and fine art, participants will experiment with the tools of hand drawing and consider new relationships between sight and sound. Lea's work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance - in addition to her instrumental practice (alto saxophone and bass clarinet), her work often incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique and tape collage. She has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters including Unsound, TUSK, Rewire x Korzo, The Kitchen, PS1 MoMA and Blank Forms. She is a 2016 MacDowell Fellow in composition and a 2015 ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence.

Tim Shaw's "Ambulation" sound walks incorporate performance, walking and field recording, offering a sound responsive journey through a landscape, immersing listeners in a familiar yet abstracted environment. Participants wear wireless radio headphones, receiving an audio feed of live recordings, locational radio broadcasts and electromagnetic energy from their immediate environment. These sounds are processed, layered and re-introduced live by the artist directly into the participants’ headphones as the walk continues. Using a selection of listening technologies and a variety of different microphones a diverse range of sonic material is collected, processed and broadcast. After an introductory sound walk lead by Tim, you'll experiment with the technology and techniques, under Tim's guidance, to produce your own sound walk.

Jorge Boehringer is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher currently based in Huddersfield, UK. Boehringer channels his eclectic and experimental practice into sonic artworks that take the form of installation works, musical scores, performances, drawings and other visual artwork, and texts. Having studied and performed with Pauline Oliveros at Mills College and elsewhere, he is deeply committed to strategies put forward by Deep Listening. Boehringer's work explores the contingencies of chance and indeterminacy that characterize the everyday texture and perception of our environmental situations. Jorge will present the workshop "The Turning Moment: Sonic Bridges in The Improvisation of Everyday Life"."