Live Improvised Music with Dan Godston and Guillermo Gregorio

1st set

Guillermo Gregorio — clarinets and saxophones
Eric Leonardson — springboard, amplified objects
Dan Godston — trumpet, small instruments

2nd set : Altamira
Ricardo Lagomasima — drums
John Deblase — electric bass
Nick Millevoi — guitar

Brown Rice

4432 N Kedzie Avenue
Chicago IL 60625
www.brownricemusic.org

8:00 p.m.
$5 suggested donation

Directions: Brown Rice is small storefront located a half block north of the Montrose-Kedzie intersection, a few blocks south of the Kedzie station on the CTA Brown Line. There is a small sign over the entrance that reads “Perfect”. View Map.

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Rarebit

by Steve Barsotti and Eric Leonardson

Transparency CD0125

Performed and recorded with Steve Barsotti at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. From 1994 until 1999 we performed as a duo, and with other local and internationally known artists, including Dan Burke (Illusion of Safety), Carol Genetti, Fergus Kelly, Tatsu Aoki, Chris Heenan, Yuko Nexus6, Yasuhiro Otani, Satoru Wono, Claude Wiley, and many more.

Description:

Rarebit is the culmination of a four-year project in electroacoustic music by sound artists and instrument inventors Steve Barsotti and Eric Leonardson. Their self-built instruments produce remarkable sounds that belie their humble origin. Barsotti and Leonardson’s sense of musical form arises from their deep attention to the individual essences of sounds, rather than the conventional grid of harmony and meter. What results is abstract sound composition that possesses a communicative style. Rarebit will draw comparisons to the sound palettes and ethereal soundscapes of such intrepid purveyors of “left field” and exploratory music as Hal Rammel, Hugh Davies, and Bob Rutman. Nine tracks. Running time 72 minutes.

Rarebit can be purchased from Transparency for $15 ($12 plus $3 postage) to meridianavenue@yahoo.com via PayPal.

My presentation for the 2007 Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium has just been published. eContact!, the electronic journal of electroacoustics, is published by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC).

This issue was edited by David Ogburn, Chair of TES 2007.

Please visit the eContact! 10.3 Table of Contents

Direct link to my article:
The Springboard: The Joy of Piezo Disk Pickups for Amplified Coil Springs

View a photo of the Springboard

Hal Rammel gave me the license to make my own instruments in 1990. Tonight I learned from Hal that a web page is up about the wonderful exhibition of experimental musical instruments he curated, “The Shapes of Sound: Musical Instruments and the Imagination in the Midwest.”

The show was held in late 1997 at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was among the 14 artist-inventors who had their instruments displayed. I also gave a brief performance in the show. Visit the page at www.woodlandpattern.org/gallery/shapes_of_sound.shtml

Many photographs from the show are on this page with Hal Rammel’s catalog essay. To learn more about his fascinating writing, visual art, and music, please visit Hal’s homepage, his MySpace page, and YouTube.

More video interviews with students from my 2008 Instrument Construction course at SAIC have been uploaded.

• SAIC Student Rob Martens: Evil Brother Of Snap, Crackle and Pop Martens?
  http://www.gearwire.com/theramin-instrument-construction.html
• (Part 1) SAIC Student Bethany Childs Tempts The Fury Of Neptune
  http://www.gearwire.com/conchshell-instrument-construction-001.html
• (Part 2) SAIC Student Bethany Childs And Playing An Interfaced Conch Shell
  http://www.gearwire.com/conchshell-instrument-construction-002.html

• Stuart Schmidt Is More Machine Than Man, Now
  http://www.gearwire.com/glove-controller-instrument-construction.html
• Cycling 74 Max: Kyle Evans’ Cigar Box Controller Controls Air Traffic Control
  http://www.gearwire.com/cigarbox-controller-instrument-construction.html

And as mentioned previously…

• Chris Burke’s Interactopus: One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Interactopus
  http://www.gearwire.com/interactopus-instrument-construction.html
• Jenna Caravello’s Celloharp Promotes Inter-Instrumental Hybridization
  [link removed at the student’s request - so sorry!]

One highlight from 2007’s Instrument Construction class remains the “Bubble Organ” designed and built by Aaron Wendel.

Below is a short, unedited video clip of Aaron’s instrument.

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On Friday, May 2 SAIC’s Waveforms presented videos and performances by students from the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gretchen Hasse from Gearwire came and interviewed many of the students in my Instrument Construction course, who opened the evening with an ensemble performance on their new instruments.

The video interviews are being completed now, and the first one up in the series is with Jenna Caravello, who worked all semester on her original acoustic instrument, the Celloharp. As you might guess from its name, this is a hybrid instrument. Jenna’s persistence and resilience in the face of so many kinds of challenges during its design and construction earns my respect and admiration.

The second video is an interview with Chris Burke who took Shawn Decker’s Programming For Sound course this spring. Chris dug deep into Max/MSP and Jitter software, and Ed Bennett’s ArtBus card, to come up with the Interactopus, a hardware interface for the real-time control of sound and video housed inside a warm, flexible fabric body.

Please visit this web page again and soon, as I announce more of Gretchen’s interviews with some of my outstanding student artists and their wonderful instruments.

SAIC’s Waveforms presents sound works and performances by students from the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on Friday, May 2 at the Fine Arts Building (Curtis Hall)
7:00-10:00pm, 410 S. Michigan Avenue 10th floor, Curtis Hall, FREE ADMISSION

Students in my Instrument Construction course will open, performing as an ensemble of invented and hybrid electronic and acoustic instruments, during Looptopia.
Here are some photos of the instruments that the students will be performing on:

My article “The Springboard: The Joy of Piezo Disk Pickups for Amplified Coil Springs” is available now, published in Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 17, by the MIT Press. This year’s issue offers a wealth of articles by Bert Bongers, David Toop, and Peter Blasser, with artists’ statements by Richard Lerman, Brett Ian Balogh, César Dávila-Irizarry, Vic Rawlings, James Fei, Neil Feather, Robert Poss, Kyle Lapidus and Tali Hinkis, hans w. koch, Laura Emelianoff, among many more. Due to the overhwelming response to the call-for-articles an online suplement has been added to accommodate submissions that could not fit within the print version (90 pages) of the journal. For more info, see the Table of Contents: http://www.leonardo.info/isast/journal/toclmj17.html

The journal’s companion CD compilation, “The Art of the Gremlin: Inventive Musicians, Curious Devices” curated by Sarah Washington, features 17 tracks by over 18 electronic artists and instrument inventors. Among them are Norbert Möslang, Haco, Leonardo Di Crappio, Rhodri Davies, Knut Aufermann and Tetsuo Kogawa, and Toshimaru Nakamura.

Leonardo Music Journal
“The Springboard: The Joy of Piezo Disk Pickups for Amplified Coil Springs” Forthcoming publication, LMJ 17 due out December 2007.

Radio Territories edited by Erik Granly Jensen and Brandon LaBelle, published by Errant Bodies, w/ accompanying CD.