THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL 2015 program 2 THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL is presented by the San Francisco Tape Music Collective and sfSound funded in part by: The San Francisco Grants for the Arts, The French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, The Zellerbach Family Foundation, and individual contributors. equipment kindly provided by: The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University. sfSound/SFTMF is an affiliate of, and is fiscally sponsored by, the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the service of chamber music in California. THANK YOU Wendy Carlos, Byron Evora, Matthew Goodheart, Grux, Benjamin Kreith, Charles Kremenak, Dianne Lynn, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, John MacCallum, Hadley McCarroll, Collin McKelvy, Sam Nichols, Eric Seifert, and Erik Ulman S A T U R D A Y J A N U A R Y 10 2 0 1 5 8 P M V I C T O R I A T H E A T E R P R O G R A M 2 Cuerno de Chivo (2012) Francisco Eme Sufficient for a Head: Radio Edit (2015) Collin Mckelvey sunSurgeAutomata (1987) Carla Scaletti Ablation Zone (2014) Cheryl Leonard Schrei (2014) Pierre-Luc Senécal Bodies-Soundings (2014) James O’Callaghan interval Track #1 (2013) Matthew Schoen Bellbox (2003) Kent Jolly Flux - Sound Re-Design (2015) Byron Evora Walkways of the Hopeful and the Hopeless (2015) Thom Blum Nasal Retentive Calliope Music (1968) Frank Zappa giraSol~giraNada (2014) David Arango Valencia FRANCISCO EME Cuerno de Chivo (2012 :: 4:00 :: 5.1 channels) In 2006 Mexico's President Calderon launched a war against the drug cartels. Violence soared to the point of becoming a way of life in certain areas of the country, thus creating a "culture" of drug trafficking and violence. One of the strongest symbols of this culture is undoubtedly the "goat horn,” the popular name for the AK47 assault weapon, the weapon of choice for drug lords and hitmen. Seized weapons from big capos have been entirely dipped in gold or encrusted with diamonds as amulets and status symbols. There are also several popular songs that refer to it, and hundreds of pictures of men and women posing with this gun, including politicians. The piece is based on two types of sound materials, audio recordings of actual clashes between soldiers and drug traffickers, obtained from an investigation of journalistic content, and a “narco- corrido” (folk music that speaks of drug exploits) played by the band "Los Dareyes de la sierra" called "goat horn.” The song talks about the legendary weapon AK47 and its "heroric" use by a Mexican drug lord. In the piece a musical group is interrupted by gunmen and that's when the languages are intertwined and start making music together, although it’s a music of death. This composition is not meant to glorify this culture of violence, rather it is meant to provoke awareness of a reality lived by many. Born in Mexico, FRANCISCO EME currently works as a composer and sound and multimedia artist. His work has developed in the areas of sound art and electroacoustic music, performing pure electronic, instrumental and mixed compositions, sound acts, sound installations and video. He has also done works for dance, theater and media. His works have been presented in México, Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, Canada, Argentina and El Salvador. Primarily self taught, Francisco has also undergone studies in the Mexican Centre for Music and Sound Arts and the Laboratory of Musical Informatics and Electroacoustic music at the UNAM. He has taught several courses in different art schools in México, teaching electronic musical composition, video making, sound engineering and music production. COLLIN MCKELVEY Sufficient for a Head: Radio Edit (2015 :: 7:02 :: 4 channels) Sufficient for a Head: Radio Edit was originally composed to accompany a live film piece. This drove me to create a dynamic piece that would really utilize and push the expansive frequency range that the Meyer Speakers can articulate. The piece itself is developed from some very mundane phonography and incidental sounds recorded primarily in my studio, which is a thirteen square-foot room with 9 foot ceilings. The source material was recorded and then processed and arranged. There are bowed metal springs, violin, paper sounds, household items being manipulated, voice, doors creaking, an avocado tree, a chair moving on a wooden floor, and the narrow gauge Skunk Train from Fort Bragg California. My goal was to create a tense and dynamic piece that had a good sense of movement as well as tension. The piece on tonight’s program is a more concise version. COLLIN MCKELVEY is a San Francisco based artist working with sound and video to create site specific performances. McKelvey has shown work at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Southern Exposure, Royal Nonesuch Gallery, ATA, Human Resources, The Lab, Guerrero Gallery, the Kanbar Forum at the Exploratorium, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Geffen Center at MOCA and other artist spaces throughout the United States. CARLA SCALETTI sunSurgeAutomata (1987 :: 5:10 :: stereo) The title comes from Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell in which he describes the "steady surge of energy pouring out from the sun into the unfillable sink of empty space by way of the earth,” resulting in the "improbable ordered dance" that we call life. All sounds in the piece are derived from "clicks" organized using one-dimensional cellular automata (self-organizing systems, the most familiar example of which is the 2-D version called Conway's Game of Life). Clicks were chosen as the source material because in the mountains of New Mexico (where the composer grew up), nearly every animal makes some kind of clicking sound. sunSurgeAutomata was realized using the Platypus Digital Signal Processor. CARLA SCALETTI holds computer science and music composition degrees from University of New Mexico, Texas Tech University, and University of Illinois. In the 1970s, she worked as principal harpist in the New Mexico and Lubbock Symphony Orchestras and composed for acoustic instruments, but later she developed an interest in computer generated music. After completing her education, she worked as a researcher at the CERL Sound Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois before leaving the university to launch the Symbolic Sound Corporation. Scaletti designed the Kyma sound generation computer language and co-founded Symbolic Sound Corporation with Kurt J. Hebel in 1989 as a spinoff of the CERL Sound Group. CHERYL LEONARD Ablation Zone (2014 :: 5:13 :: stereo) In 2009 I spent a month at Palmer Research Station on Anvers Island off the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Palmer is built on a sliver of exposed rock at the edge of the Marr Ice Piedmont, a vast glacier that enshrouds the island. Like most glaciers in this region, the Marr is shrinking, its surface increasingly fractured by exposed crevasses and its periphery collapsing into the sea. Behind the station the ice has retreated more than 1500 feet over the last 50 years. The “ablation zone” of a glacier is the area below a certain elevation where there is a net loss of ice mass due to melting, evaporation, sublimation, calving, wind scouring, and so forth. Within the Marr’s ablation zone I collected field recordings of meltwater streams and crevasses full of icicles. In the ocean near the Marr’s terminal ice cliffs I recorded icebergs and brash ice that it had jettisoned. The Marr produced a beguiling array of unique sounds. Each meltwater stream bubbled, gurgled, or sputtered its own rhythms and melodies, sometimes sounding like electronics or machinery. Icicles dripped the intricate layers of gamelan songs. Icebergs crackled and snapped like giant pop-rocks, or provided large cavities for waves to resonate within. To these field recordings, full of motion and insistent energy, I added the more subtle sound of smooth penguin nesting stones rubbing together, and then otherworldly voices produced by bowing Adélie penguin vertebrae. CHERYL E. LEONARD is a composer, performer and instrument builder. Over the last decade she has focused on investigating sounds, structures and objects from the natural world. Many of her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers and bones as musical instruments. Leonard is fascinated by the subtle textures and intricacies of sounds, especially very quiet phenomena. She uses microphones to explore the micro-aural worlds hidden within her sound sources and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. Her projects often feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments that are played live onstage, and field recordings from remote locales. Leonard is particularly interested in collaborating across artistic disciplines and creating site-specific works. In addition to developing her own projects, she has written numerous soundtracks for film, video, dance and theater, and has designed sounds for exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Leonard holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from Mills College. Her music has been performed worldwide, and her compositions for natural-object instruments have been featured on several television programs and in the video documentary Noisy People. She is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, ASCAP, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, the Eric Stokes Fund and Meet the Composer. Leonard’s commissions include works for Kronos Quartet, Illuminated Corridor and Michael Straus. She has been awarded residencies at Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Arctic Circle, Villa Montalvo and Engine 27. Recordings of her music are available from NEXMAP, Unusual Animals, Ubuibi, Pax, Apraxia, 23 Five, The Lab and Great Hoary Marmot Music.