Experimental Music Yearbook: Stephen Cornford, Ingrid Lee, Todd Lerew
SATURDAY JANUARY 9, 8PM. $5 SUGGESTED DONATION
The Experimental Music Yearbook closes out its concert series of issue 2015 submissions with a film screening and concert in partnership with Echo Park Film Center. The evening begins with premieres of new works by Todd Lerew and Ingrid Lee, each of which constitutes a response to the other’s text on the topic of sympathetic resonance. The Los Angeles premiere of Stephen Cornford’s Digital Audio Film (2015) follows, in which blank film stock is exposed to the laser pick-up of a portable CD player.
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Stephen Cornford Program Note:
Stephen Cornford’s Digital Audio Film (2015) is one of series of films which aim to refute technological narratives of progress and simplistic divisions between analogue and digital by finding commonalities across media history. Blank film stock is exposed to the laser pick-up of a portable CD player, transforming the discman from an audio playback device into a cinematic writing machine. In doing so the work aims to bring these two optical media, one of sight and one of sound, into mutually anachronistic dialogue.
Stephen Cornford Bio
My work stems from an abiding fascination with consumer audio electronics: how these devices that we are sold to consume music and images increasingly frame our engagement with the audio-visual world at large. Reconfiguring these media from the inside, re-imagining their functionality, defying their obsolescence and searching for their intrinsic poetry are for me strategies with which to challenge normative use, social conformity and the myth of technological progress. The work inhabits both gallery and gig, taking the forms of kinetic installation and process-based performance by turns, always searching for situations in which the material; whether solid, spatial or sonic; controls the outcome as much as myself.
I am currently a Research Fellow at the Sonic Art Research Unit of Oxford Brookes University, where I co-direct the annual Audiograft Festival with Paul Whitty. I studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art before completing a Masters in Time-Based Arts Practices at Dartington College of Arts.
Recent solo exhibitions include Lydgalleriet (Bergen), Campbell Works (London) and Permanent Gallery (Brighton). My work has been included in a large scale retrospective of Sound Art at ZKM Centre for Media & Art, the Mediations Biennale in Poznan and has been purchased for collections on Germany and Poland.
My audio works have been released by Senufo Editions (IT), Accidie Records (US), Another Timbre (UK) & Cathnor (UK) and as a musician I have established ongoing collaborations with Samuel Rodgers with whom I curate the Consumer Waste record label, Ben Gwilliam and Patrick Farmer & Sarah Hughes.
http://www.scrawn.co.uk/
Ingrid Lee Bio
Ingrid Lee is a composer and performer from Los Angeles/Hong Kong. Her work takes the form of compositions, installations, performances, lectures and objects that explore collective listening practices, the physicality of sound and themes of failure and hybridity. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Lee is currently researching erasure and forgetting as generative methods of thinking, doing and being. She is based in the Netherlands.
Todd Lerew Bio
Todd Lerew is a Los Angeles-based artist and composer working with invented acoustic instruments, repurposed found objects, and unique preparations of traditional instruments. Much of his work deals with the physical properties of sound and the nature of perception, exploring the use of sound as a plastic medium, and revisiting relationships within a performance environment. Other works examine the effect of isolated elements of indeterminism within mostly-closed systems, and the generation of musical material by deviation from an impossible given task.
Lerew is the inventor of the Quartz Cantabile, which utilizes a principle of thermoacoustics to convert heat into sound, and has presented the instrument at Stanford’s CCRMA, Georgia Tech, the American Musical Instrument Society annual conference, and Machine Project in Los Angeles. He is the founder and curator of Telephone Music, a collaborative music and memory project based on the children’s game of Telephone, the last round of which was released as an exclusive download to subscribers of music magazine The Wire. He has received commissions from So Percussion (New York) and the Now Hear Ensemble (Santa Barbara), in addition to performances by members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the Wet Ink Ensemble (New York), and the Canticum Ostrava choir (Czech Republic).
The Experimental Music Yearbook
The Experimental Music Yearbook is a repository for composers, performers, and the public to glean the methods and styles of various artists working in the experimental music tradition. As the modes of experimentation in the sonic arts change from year to year, the Experimental Music Yearbook’s annual issues will build into a comprehensive, and varied, database of experimentation in music/sound. Since the inaugural edition in 2009, the Experimental Music Yearbook has featured contributions from such artists as Tom Johnson, Bill Dietz, Tashi Wada, Cat Lamb, Vinny Golia, Jessie Marino, Julia Holter, and many, many more. Along with the three permanent editors (Casey Anderson, Scott Cazan, and John P. Hastings), each year features a guest editor who provides curatorial direction. The 2015 edition features guest editor Travis Just (Object Collection). Former guest editors have included Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Laura Steenberge and Olivia Block. Live performances of contributions have occurred in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Cologne, Germany.
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