EVENTS

Acoustics and Instrument Building Workshop
Thurs May 23 @ 7-10pm
Suggested Donation of $15 / FREE for WF Members

*Registration required. Register by email: newmusic@front.bc.ca

Leslie Ross will offer hands-on explorations of conventional and invented instruments – from conical and cylindrical bores of wind instruments, to resonators for string and percussive instruments. Participants will learn how to broaden the range of tonal possibilities of any given acoustic instrument and to build and use basic pick-ups and interfaces. Open to all.

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Leslie Ross Solo Concert
Wed May 29 @ 8pm
Door Tickets: General $15 / Students $5 / FREE for WF Members

Ross will perform an evening of solo work for bassoon, using multiple speakers and microphones, sound processing and spatial play, to create a thickly textured listening environment of nuanced pitches and phrases, frequencies and timbres.

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Leslie Ross with Square One
Thurs June 13 @ 8pm / Fri June 14 @ 8pm
Roundhouse Community Center
Door Tickets: $10

As part of Sonic Playground, Leslie Ross will work with Square One, a diverse group of youth from the Burnaby School District that explores a fusion of musical genres.  In collaboration they will construct several bicycle driven pump organs for the creation of a unique installation performance.

Through considering the role of props in her filmmaking process, 
artist Margaret Haines presents a series of short stories titled
 Prop Talk: What’s Real? about the creative production of artist DKNY.
 The artist’s father, Tor Haines,  responds to these stories, drawing from 
his own philosophical text, titled simply ‘Props’. Both texts 
contemplate how ‘prop’ is looking for semantic focus. Together and
 through a scripted play, Margaret and her father reflect and debate 
upon the possibility of mimesis in fiction, cultural reference as 
calcified identity, the crisis of the object, digital props, and the 
death (rebirth) of art.

“Last year, I received an email from New York, asking if I would be interested in producing a paper for a book that would be edited in function of a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois. I e-mailed back that I felt flattered, that I knew the work of Louise Bourgeois, but that I did not feel very knowledgeable in the field of art and psychoanalysis. And then I received an even more flattering e-mail, telling that Louise Bourgeois had read two of my books, and that she had explicitly asked that I would write a contribution for that volume. At that point, my narcissism made it impossible to refuse, so I said yes. Two months later I received a third email, with the sad news that Louise had died, and with the question if I would be interested to come to New York to study her diaries, and that I would be granted full access to them. At that moment, I did not hesitate, and during the summer I was immerged for a week in her diaries. This resulted in a paper that has been published in the meantime in Portugese, because the retrospective was first of all put on stage in the Sao Paulo Guggenheim, and later this year or next year, an English version will be published as well.”

Programmed as part of the 2013 La Conference

Scrivener’s Monthly is a series of public presentations that explore the space between material practices and spoken words: a periodical that talks. Set alongside the exhibitions program at Western Front, this experiment in “not publishing” involves readings, performances, and other articulations.

This is the second in a pair of exhibitions that look at the attitudes of objects. Properties’ sister exhibition Edible Glasses looked to the roles of objects as active performers, whereas Properties looks to the unconscious thoughts of things.

Exhibition Brochure and Catalogue Essay  (PDF Download)

The exhibition will be accompanied by a public presentation by LA based artist and writer Margaret Haines on May 28^th at 8pm at the Western Front in the Luxe Hall.

Lyndl Hall explores how both the physical and implied line, and various tools of delineation, are active agents that direct our perception and affect how we navigate the spaces we inhabit. She is interested in orientation and geometry, specifically within the histories of cartography and draughtsmanship. Current projects touch upon sundials, hopscotch and Victorian architecture.

Devon Knowles’ material centered practice assesses historical and contemporary models of production, interrogating their cultural positions and how they form material language. Through the investigation of a material an intimacy is also established directly between its physicality, use and history. It is from within this blended configuration where Knowles’ practice engages, and where the conscious act of making becomes conceptually productive. While acknowledging a material’s history, she allows her subjective material sensibilities and attentiveness to the optical experience to enter the work expanding beyond set material customs and asking how known material language can be cajoled into delivering a new understanding.

Erica Stocking’s artistic practice investigates inherent and manufactured value, the desire for connection, and notions of place. She works site specifically, using found materials to draw out local narratives from the surrounding contexts. Stocking’s projects ask where value is located and where both an individual’s and an object’s sense of agency occurs. Rooted in the personal, her work evolves from a desire to find a sense of place in the world, often resulting in installations where the inside and outside are complicated. These projects use found materials in a way that expresses a singular and personal experience of the world through a discourse dependent on local vernacular.

Often working with text and language, Erdem Taşdelen draws from a diverse set of references that includes both highbrow and lowbrow expressions of personal identification. These references are filtered through self-reflexive processes where he questions his various existences in social realms, ultimately presenting an investigation of subjectivity and its representations. His works are often imbued with dramatization, playfulness and humour, and his practice engages the socially constructed and culturally learned aspects of self-expression.

All artists live and work in Vancouver.

New York based artist Shana Moulton will produce a new performance in her ongoing Whispering Pines series at Western Front, specifically for the Grand Luxe Hall.  Building on a decade of video and performance work, Whispering Pines features Cynthia, Moulton’s alter-ego, traversing new age mysticism, consumerism and domesticity through rituals that are at once banal and uncanny. Moulton will present a selection of video works followed by a new performance.

A contemporary player piano, our Disklavier has inspired composers and artists to challenge the piano’s typical capabilities—like when Canada’s enfant terrible John Oswald conspired with programmer David Jaffe to recreate a blistering automated version of the Rites of Spring or when in 1994 Kazue Mizushima connected a giant web of silk to the piano and played it like a giant harp for her piece Eve of the Future.

To keep on the forefront of innovation and cutting-edge technology, we need to upgrade our Disklavier.

We need to raise a minimum of $20,000 to ensure the restoration of the instrument that is key to concertizing and production at the Western Front.

All donations, large and small, will help us to:

• acquire and install all necessary hardware

• completely restring the Disklavier

• upgrade the Disklavier’s control unit

Help us support the creation and presentation of boundary-less performance.

Buy a piano key today or contact us on 604.876.9343 or development@front.bc.ca for more information.

Audio Work 1:
Jonathan Chan, Cassandra Lobban, Courtney Stickland, and Victoria Tcherven examined the community’s perception of the greenspace along the Arbutus Corridor. Specifically focusing on the community gardens along the Corridor itself, they examined the soundscapes that exist in these areas. The soundpiece is a chronological representation of the transition of the Arbutus Corridor from an industrial space to a public greenspace.  The piece aims to recreate the ideal perception of sounds that existed and continue to exist in the area.

Audio Work 2:
Qiyu Dai, Daniella Szalkai, Lenny Wilson, and Carter Xin combined geographical commodity chain research with sound recordings, to record some of the processes involved in a commodity chain. A commodity chain entails tracing the various aspects involved in the production of a commodity with the goal of revealing such processes that are often hidden or ignored by consumers. The piece contains recordings of the Lululemon Lab in Vancouver, showcasing the contrasting sounds found in the lab section and in the retail section.

Audio Work 3:
Nathan Bunio, Kathryn Dandyk, Perry Kwok, and Onami Rahman created a sound piece representing “a day on the 99 B-line,” as an artistic rendering of a research topic that they had been exploring over several months. The group collected a series of recordings on the 99 B-line at various times of the day, days of the week, and route directions. In this piece they attempted to mimic the sounds you might encounter at specific times of the day on the bus, to represent the daily changing sensory environment of the 99 B-line.

The first impulse, on revisiting this extraordinary concert from 1978, is to hear the music in terms of natural phenomena. It does not take a great intuitive leap to describe Evan Parker’s roaring, squealing, frothing, grinding soprano saxophone as a kind of braided river, brimming with mesmerizing channels and currents. Nor is it entirely wrong to compare Parker’s song to that of the less melodious birds. There are moments here that bear remarkable timbral resemblance to the alarmed honking of the Arctic snow geese that winter on the Fraser River delta, just a few kilometres south of the Western Front.

On closer inspection, however, this music can’t be seen as anything other than linguistic, and thus deeply human. In fact, Vaincu.Va! is a key document in Parker’s development of a unique saxophone syntax. In the ensuing years his approach has been influential, and not only on reed players. Nonetheless it remains his singular discovery—and this recording catches, in exquisitely detailed depth, a high point in that language’s early development.

As of 1978, Parker had been working without accompaniment for about four years. Saxophone Solos, from 1975, documented his first solo recital, and the bones of Vaincu.Va! were already present. But when this later album was recorded, he was at the end of a 29-city North American tour, and at a creative peak.

That’s clearly audible in this recording.

In the greater sense, Parker’s musical journey really began in 1962, on a visit to New York City that included hearing a concert by the Cecil Taylor Trio. Something of the legendary pianist’s penchant for long, unbroken improvised phrases is still evident in 1978 but, as Parker tells it in 2013, his solo style derives far more from his thorough investigation of the soprano saxophone as physical object.

“Having some control over the circular-breathing technique opens up other things to do with cyclic phrasing and looped patterns,” he explains, referring to the process of simultaneous inhaling and exhaling that allows for the creation of continuous sound. “One thing follows the other. And then because you hear the music emerging from the technique, the technique is solidified, and then new techniques emerge, or new musical possibilities emerge, one after the other.”

On a more theoretical level, Parker was also intrigued by the process-based and tape-recorder-enhanced explorations of Steve Reich and others, and by such early minimalists’ “openness to not being fixed to any music system as such”. Parker stresses that his process, though, allows for and encourages improvisation.

“There was a little exchange of views in the early days of Steve Reich, I guess when he was first coming to be known,” he says. “The tape pieces, which I still find to be among the most interesting part of his oeuvre, were very much concerned with the same kinds of slow development. And in fact he wrote a piece about it called Music as a Gradual Process, and I slightly objected to his commandeering the concept of process as referring only to processes which were fixed in advance—processes which were, let’s say, rigidly predetermined. I thought there were also processes which could be subject to modification in the course of their realization.”

Some of the extraordinary sounds he achieves here are again rooted in the physical facts of air being blown through a tube. “Those bends and quarter-tones will emerge naturally from the separation between the left and the right hand,” he explains. “You have keys in the left hand that are opening while keys in the right hand are closing; that automatically produces bends and quarter-tone inflections.”

Parker’s ability to vary these effects—to make aesthetically gratifying music through modifying the process, as it were—is also a function of the performer’s psychological state. The idea that his music derives from some kind of trance state is one that he dismisses: “I don’t hyperventilate,” he says, “and I don’t really go into those kind of states.” Part of his practice, however, does involve stepping back from judgment and control. In performance, the “rational and analytic” mind fades away, allowing the “intuitive and holistic” to take over.

“I think there is something that happens on a good night, when I sort of leave the analytic behind and start to deal with the whole story,” he contends. “That might have some kind of correspondence with an altered brain state, or an altered consciousness state. It’s certainly an altered brain state in relation to the brain as a control mechanism.”

In performance, does his perception of time slow down enough to give him greater control over his sonic effects?

“Time doesn’t really exist any more, until the switch comes and says ‘You’ve done it.’ And then something switches you off,” he says, laughing. “And it’s usually about the time that you said you would play. It’s like a light switch: it’s on until it’s off.”

Curiously, on this recording—as well as on the long-out-of-print Beak Doctor release At the Finger Palace, cut in Berkeley the night before the Vancouver performance—that switch was triggered at around the 40-minute mark. Parker isn’t sure why that makes for just enough music to fit comfortably on two sides of an LP, but he does suggest that duration was one of his primary concerns during his 1978 concert tour.

“Nowadays, I’m a little bit more user-friendly, I would say,” he adds. “I wasn’t that concerned with user-friendliness back then.”

This listener begs to differ, though. If being friendly to users means taking them on a thrilling and sustained journey of adventure, opening their eyes to the mutability of sound, and startling them with the seemingly impossible, Evan Parker’s 1978 self has nothing to apologize for. In this era of sound bites, sampling, and digitally degraded audio, Vancu.Va! is nothing less than a luxury.

Alexander Varty, 2013

Alexander Varty is a Vancouver-based musician, arts journalist, and former Western Front music curator. He was in the audience when Vaincu.Va! was recorded, and remains amazed.