Super excited to perform, alongside the rest of the folks at SynthBeats on the 2020 Network Music Festival; Taylor Long, Joey Bohigian, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Rob Cosgrove and Sam Beebe. Full concert line up is here.
Sam Beebe’s Pretty Saro taps into telematic latency and unstable home internet and wifi systems in order to generate a lush, glitch-rich fresco of sound played to a shared (albeit erratic) metronome, which remains silent to the audience. Similar in its minimalist aesthetics yet distinct in both its mode of production and sonic world, Eric Lemmon’s work creates an ethereal texture of bells and crunchy bass tones that slowly give way to a harmonically and visually threatening climax.
Nourbakhsh’s piece remember me draws on excerpts of Nayyirah Waheed’s poetry: Aftrica’s lament, and is sung by SynthBeats members while being harmonized through a vocoder. This piece will express a narrative journey that begins with vocoded sounds and returns them to the original voice, in order to remember the past and our ancestors. In the era of COVID-19, our day-to-day experiences have shifted from embodied to mediated interactions. It is in this way that the meta-figures of the vocoder and the natural voice also serve as a metaphor for our contemporary experience and thus demonstrate the value in not only remembering today, but also our past.