JUDITH HAMANN

Australia, Finland at present / judith-hamann.com

DJ Windy Lonesome / I decided one night (and by “night” here, I mean that it’s light at 10pm and the birds are still out) to record myself doing an old school 00’s style youtube DJ set where I knocked back some wine and looked up everything I could think of to do with being alone. This happened around 8 weeks into not touching or interacting with another human in person (except for the supermarket guy behind some perspex but I don’t speak Finnish so it’s not super fulfilling conversation), and I hoped that it would come across as funny, rather than unhinged. Recent polls indicate: a mixture of the two.

This sort of space, which collapses domestic space with pop music, with weirdness, is one of my favourite spaces in experimental music.

YVETTE JANINE JACKSON

cambridge, maSSACHUSETTS / yvettejackson.com

Swan is a radio opera without words that unfolds in three scenes: it opens aboard the tall ship Swan transporting Africans along the Middle Passage to the Americas and gradually morphs into a spacecraft headed to freedom.

NICOLEE KUESTER

BOULDER, COLORADO / nicoleekuester.com

I wrote "six poems about" a couple of years ago. The cycle came together a little by accident when I realized that this cluster of poems I'd written over the course of 9 months all seemed to be interested in a similar swirl of things--solitude, bodies of water, bodies, loss, eating, searching for connection. I guess I was looking for ways of being alone that felt better than what I was doing. The longing for someone else in these poems feels much more urgent right now, and since I can't perform them in public I decided to make a film of them from Colorado, where I'm staying with my brother. I'm enormously fortunate that his house is a three-mile walk from my parents' house across hilly open space in the eastern hills of Boulder County, and I'm crossing that terrain as often as I can these days, and wanted to offer little glimpses of it here to you as well.

ADAM TINKLE

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK / adamtinkle.com

This is a binaural audio diary of a night and a day spent in cabin quarantine. As winter turned to spring, the state of water was flux while, by and large, the state of humanity was immobile. In the midst of this, my family and I walked and sledded in the last of the Adirondack snow, and, like clockwork, the equinox brought the first rains. 

JOE CANTRELL

san diego, CALIFORNIA / joecantrell.net

I believe in the value of unwanted things. They have their own histories and actions that are intimately entwined with our own, whether we notice them or not. I feel a kinship with this broken and obsolete stuff. When I think about how much hard labor and environmental harm went into their manufacture, I find it tragic that they can be so easily tossed away. Instead, I like to explore new uses for broken and obsolete technology - considering them as creative collaborators. Wrangling groups of objects into tiny orchestras, in which each object shows its own quirks and personality. In this little stage, I am far from isolated.. 

This video gives an overhead view of one such ensemble as I ‘conduct’ them to make sound. Parties involved include: a test tone generator, a modified pitch calibrator, a customized discarded accordion half, three cassette players, a soviet throat mic, a guitar effects unit in feedback and a mixer. All items are either broken, discarded or misused in some way.

NICHOLAS DEYOE

los angeles, CALIFORNIA / nicholasdeyoe.com

i waited patiently, unable to distinguish between dreams and reality is a structured improvisation. The title is a representation of my experience of playing this piece, exploring phenomena that are about 70% predictable while also keeping track of which sounds are the result of something I'm playing in the moment and which are embedded in a long loop or a slowly shifting frozen sonority. Some elements are under my control and others can only be responded to. Spending all of my time at home, moving my teaching online, trying to be a positive resource for others while also caring for myself, and trying to understand what my students are dealing with has made me far more aware of the space that exists between the known and unknown, being awake or asleep, between perception and reality. 

SAMUEL EKKEHARDT DUNSCOMBE

berlin, germany / samueldunscombe.com

This piece is based on fragments of found audio tape (1/4”), to which I added synthesiser and field recordings.  The tape was found outside Ludlow near old Route 66, (near the I-40 interstate).  Ludlow (although technically still inhabited by two families who maintain a gas station, motel, diner, and DQ) is one of a series of ghost towns with colourful names like Siberia, Bagdad, Klonkide.  In the early 1960s the US government planned to carve a pass through the Bristol mountain range with a series of nuclear explosions, in order to bypass route 66 with a more direct route (Operation Plowshare - Project Carryall).  Carryall was cancelled (due to large scale community protest, and concerns over the fact that no-one had any clear idea what the detonation of multiple high-powered warheads would actually achieve), but the pass was still cut using conventional dynamite.  Together with the cessation of gold mining activity a few years earlier, the I-40 bypass effectively stripped these towns of their livelihood, and they were quickly abandoned.

The tape was found in March 2019, snagged on a cactus and blowing in the wind.  Joe and I digitised the tape, and then I have composed this piece using these digital materials.  Lately I find myself listening more and more to field recording and soundscape based works, looking forward to a time when I can explore the outside world again.

JUDITH HAMANN

Australia, Finland at present/ judith-hamann.com

I’ve been practicing cello while I’ve been here, and made some recordings, but I haven’t been improvising at all. This was part of a little period of breaking through that, when I really remembered how WONDERFUL it feels to play the cello. 

If you’d like to check out other strange things I’ve been making during my lockdown, check out the HIAP open studios webpage (until May 20) https://www.hiap.fi/event/open-studios-judith-hamann/

MEM1

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND / mem1.com

Laura Cetilia, cello and voice / Mark Cetilia, analogue modular

Even though we’ve been home together 24/7 since the pandemic, we don’t have any time to make music together as Mem1.

By the end of the day after endless Zoom meetings and homeschooling our 5 year old, we only have the energy and headspace to Netflix and chill.

Having to carve out a moment to create something together for the Sofa Series was a shining moment amongst these bleak and stressful times.

On an early Saturday evening, we put our girl in front of Frozen 2, made ourselves some strong cocktails, ran up to the studio and set up our equipment.

We decided to put a mic in our studio windowsill to bring the outside in during our improvisation, so this is as much a duo between Providence and Mem1 as it is between ourselves. Thanks Leslie for including us on your series and bringing us back to who our musical selves are, even if just for this brief moment.

JONATHAN PIPER

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA / jonathanpiper.com

Some of my earliest musical memories are of my grandfather singing in the style of the Greek Orthodox church. Not perfectly, of course, but inflected by his many decades of life and the experience of his wife's illness and death. His singing moved slowly, and over such long spans of time that it didn't seem to move at all. It repeated, it jumped, it cracked, it skipped, it ended without really ending. The further I think I've come as a musician, the more I feel like I come back to those memories.

Somehow, I think that choosing the tuba has made it easier for me to play amidst those memories than other instruments might have. It's an instrument that, given its physical heft and the sheer amount of air needed to set it to resonating, seems to encourage a slower, perhaps meditative, approach. The tuba simply takes time - a palpable amount of time - to respond to my impulse. I like to make music that echos this on larger scales, with impulses unfolding over seconds, minutes, perhaps hours. Music that moves without really moving. I often do this with the aid of electronic effects, modifications of my sound that get me somehow closer to my memories.

I tried to play something that somehow resonated with my own feelings about life during the Covid-19 pandemic. Trying to find comfort and security in my breath. Trying to hold on to some semblance of order. Trying to embrace just how insane this all is. Trying to let go and allow life to keep pressing on.

This was played on tuba, alto horn, and live electronics. There is a ridiculous amount of audio content in the sub-100Hz range, so headphones or external speakers are strongly recommended.

ADAM TINKLE

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK / adamtinkle.com

Chiral Vulture

Quarantined with nothing but a broken handheld audio recorder and a nice binaural mic, I have been enjoying the gap between the hiss of cheap plastic technological failure and the sensuous power and illusionistic of high-fidelity. The recorder emits a hiss from one channel, and leaking its asymmetrical failure into the sonic environment out of pair of headphones, from which the binaural microphone picks up a shreds and ribbons of staticky disquiet in the atypically unbusy, locked-down world. An all-in-one kit for considering human failure amidst persistence and continuity in the biosphere.

Baby Body Quarantine

An absurdist take on COVID-19 pandemic times

Composed/produced/mixed by Mayor Taco Ghost

Video editing Bob Pierzak and Leslie Fisher-Sanders

Pukebucket BBQ

Music by Mayor Taco Ghost

Animation by Joe Mariglio

METTA KIND

ENCINITAS, CA / mettakind.com

Metta Drone  - Ashley Bridgewater & Joe Mariglio

"Metta" is a Pali word commonly translated to "Loving Kindness". It is an alchemical, contemplative practice using phrases of benevolent intent for oneself and others. We have paired this guided meditation with an offering of drones and other sounds to provide an additional sensory anchor for the participant. We invite you to meditate along with us, or to experience this piece in whatever way is most authentic for you.

It's our hope that this practice is of benefit.