Static Radio Furniture: for Bass Clarinet, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Guitar, FM Radio, Transmitters, Endless Cassette, Audience

Mar 27, 2009: 8pm- 11pm
The New Roulette Performance Space

20 Greene Street | New York, NY
http://www.roulette.org/events/2006_12.html

Static Radio Furniture: for Bass Clarinet, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Guitar, FM Radio, Transmitters, Endless Cassette, Audience is the premiere of two new compositions for a Young Composers' Commission Award which are a collaboration of Lea Bertucci with Ed Bear as well as projectionist Anastasiya Osipova and featuring Tyler Dusenbury.

"Three electro-acoustic voices: bass clarinet, baritone saxophone and bass guitar mix impressionist motifs, tone clusters, and microtonal drones. Three select motifs are silently looped, while the musical performance plays out. Bleeding into the conclusion, each loop is concurrently transmitted on separate FM stations forming a non-linear, interactive, and spatialized piece created in real time. As the performers shed their assumed role, they lead the audience members, who will be equipped with handheld radios, in tuning to either of the three stations that are being broadcast on, revealing the layered, static-infused, and distorted motifs. The three separate stations which each loop will be broadcast on will allow the audience to mix the instruments, creating a perpetually mutable sound environment without a defined ending. The idea of “Furniture Music” as conceived by 19th century avant-garde composer and all around ne’er do well Erik Satie, was a re-imagined version of traditional chamber music as a household ornament rather than a temporal event. We expand this notion of live performance to shrink and blur the boundaries between the audience, performers and performance. Performance is set among white screens on which shadow play and an intricate mix of black and white images are projected. Taking her cue from a line of Boris Poplavskiy's poem describing the situation of two men reading newspapers on the either side of the cinema screen, Anastasiya Osipova created slides that explore the theme of transparency and luminosity of paper and the unsurpassable materiality of letters. Visually referencing the early days of cinema as well as Constructivist book design, the projections usher in the luminous shadows of a rather noisily transmitted past."