November 6, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

Top (L to R): Daniel Wohl, Arooj Aftab, Josephine Decker, Devonté Hynes; Bottom (L to R): Mati Diop, Manon Lutanie, Rafiq Bhatia, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

In the Northern Hemisphere, we sense the departure of autumn through familiar cues: daylight wanes, the ground hardens, the temperature drops as bodies curl inward, creating a protective shell around our heartspace. Breath shallows. But the coming winter months hold within them a promise of possibility, chance moments when the gaze may lift with the draw of a spectacle. The chest, in turn, expands — allowing breath to enter new spaces, create new openings.

Your world breaks free from its norm for a moment, is how Liquid Music Artistic Director Kate Nordstrum describes the human effect of beholding the natural phenomenon known as a sun dog.

And it’s that kind of breaking free — that breaking open, that inbreaking — that you’re likely to experience in the final performance of Liquid Music’s fall season.

Yet Sun Dogs is far more about a way of making — one that hopes to inspire within the shared realms of image and sound, and across a landscape where so much can feel broken. This singular project pairs artists across the distinct languages of filmmaking and music composition as storytellers on equal-footing, from inception to performance:

Rafiq Bhatia (composer) + Apichatpong Weerasethakul (filmmaker)
Devonté Hynes (composer) + Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie (co-filmmakers)
Arooj Aftab & Daniel Wohl (co-composers) + Josephine Decker (filmmaker)

This November, Sun Dogs will tour across continental America with live accompaniment by the “unusually versatile, reliably exhilarating new-music ensemble" (The New York Times) Alarm Will Sound. You can trace their path through Saint Charles, MO, (The Emerson Black Box Theater), Brooklyn (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Minneapolis (Northrop), and Los Angeles (Center for the Art of Performance UCLA).

I spoke with Kate Nordstrum and composer Daniel Wohl ahead of the tour, drawn in by a shared enchantment, sent onward with a radiant question: What lasting gifts might this natural spectacle imprint on our ways of creating and being, through something as equally ethereal and atmospheric as music — as spectacular as light captured on film?

This interview took place on October 28, 2024, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Amy Chatelaine: I’d love to hear more about the title Sun Dogs. What’s evocative about that image as it relates to the concept for this project?

Kate Nordstrum: In the natural world, there are these special moments when elements combine in unique ways, and they offer a momentary spectacle. I spot a sun dog once or twice a winter, here in the North. And it's always a reminder to me that known quantities — like how I see the sun and its light — can shift and offer me another perspective. The collaborations within the program are similarly meant to offer small spectacles and new ways of seeing and sensing.

“For me, a sun dog feels like a portal ... It reminds me that it is possible for the world to break free from its norm for a moment.”

— Kate Nordstrum

For me, a sun dog feels like a portal: I always see the sun in this one particular way, but a couple times a year, I'll see it differently. It reminds me that it is possible for the world to break free from its norm for a moment. It triggers a reminder that I think is special.

We're seeking to break open the norm here with this project, too. By effective element combinations and new ways of working.

Chatelaine: That's gorgeous.

How did the two of you come together around this project?

Daniel Wohl: Kate and I had done some multimedia work together back in 2017, and we continued in conversation over the years.

Nordstrum: Daniel regularly expressed a desire for new systems or approaches for composers and filmmakers to work together. I heard that from other artists, too. That activated my producer-mind. I thought, How could we build a platform that could assist here, and see what results?

We feel very fortunate that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra took this on as a big investment, because it’s not just the commissions; it's the production budget necessary to make a short film. The CSO partnered with FotoFocus, a lens-based organization, to make it happen.

Chatelaine: Daniel, I'd be interested to hear from you what this project and its shift in approach has offered you. What has it made more possible?

Wohl: My experience has mostly been in blending music with visuals in multimedia projects, where either filmmakers or video artists are responding to my work, or I'm composing for a film, TV show, or documentary and responding to what’s already created. I've also worked on music for dance and choreography, where the process is much more collaborative, building a project from the ground up. I was curious to see if something similar could happen with film, and that’s really where the project began — a curiosity and a sense that something was missing in the usual filmmaker-composer dynamic. It turned out others were also interested in exploring that more collaborative approach.

Chatelaine: How do you begin that creative conversation, when one is coming from the language of sound and the other from the language of visuals? What’s Day 1 like?

Wohl: I can't speak for how it was for Dev or Rafiq, but for Arooj and me, it was a bit awkward at first because there’s no real blueprint for this kind of thing. Film scores often don’t make sense on their own since they're designed to respond to visuals. Arooj and I had to create something musically coherent, while Josephine had to bring that coherence visually and narratively. So, there were a lot of phone calls between Arooj, Josephine, and me as we brainstormed how those two elements would come together. The first musical ideas were Arooj’s vocals and some violin playing that we sent over just to spark ideas, which in turn evoked certain images for Josephine. It was a very intuitive process but also one that required a lot of early conversations, with us working separately for a while and then coming back together with more developed ideas.

“The project began [with] a curiosity and a sense that something was missing in the usual filmmaker-composer dynamic. It turned out others were also interested in exploring that more collaborative approach.”

— Daniel Wohl

Nordstrum: And what I like is that none of the pairs started with a story in mind. They came together because they wanted to work together; that was the impetus. And from that intention, they had to think about what they wanted to say, and decide how to start working together without the story given. They all ended up with pieces that they wouldn't have made without the other. And that's pretty special.

Chatelaine: This year, the films will feature live accompaniment from the New York-based ensemble Alarm Will Sound. Could you share a little bit about the group — their approach, and what appealed to you about partnering with them?

Nordstrum: We've both worked with them before separately. They're great — always open to ideas. We premiered Sun Dogs with the Cincinnati Symphony — an 80 piece orchestra — and we knew that in order for this piece to have legs, we needed to scale down. Alarm was eager to collaborate, and to continue a series along these lines together.

Alarm Will Sound | Photo: Thomas Fichter

Wohl: Yeah, I think they're one of the best chamber orchestras out there. It’s a 16-player group with really versatile instrumentation. They’re also very open to non-traditional projects and sounds, with a lot of experience working with composers who aren’t strictly from the contemporary classical world. So far, everything has been really seamless.

Nordstrum: They want to partner beyond just playing the piece; they’ve connected with the composers on their newly arranged works, and they’re finding residency support to develop this further together. Daniel and Rafiq are working with them as co-creators for some sort of program overture. They’re also involved in a new work that Daniel is premiering in Minneapolis with Northrop’s in-house organ, a special feature of the space.

Chatelaine: Is there anything you’d like the audience to know about that piece before the performance, Daniel?

Wohl: Yeah. This piece was created specifically for this iteration of Sun Dogs, and it includes Arooj’s vocals and some harmonies from the piece we did together. I’m taking elements from that piece and reimagining them for pipe organ, electronics, and vocals. In a way, it serves as an overture for the whole night. I thought it was cool how, in silent film, the live organ was the central soundtrack before music became integrated directly with the visuals. So, using the organ as an overture here felt like a nod to a new way of composing for film and orchestra — not exactly an homage, but definitely inspired by that idea of setting the scene for a kind of spectacle.

The organ really was the original 'fake orchestra': with all its pipes —flutes, strings, and other timbres— it could do everything. When an orchestra wasn’t an option, you had the organ, and it brings with it that whole history of church music. The piece has this kind of ethereal feel, and to me, the organ naturally brings out that spiritual quality — maybe even a sense of the ‘sun dog’ realm, in a way.

Chatelaine: Are there particular moments from the process, for either of you, that give testament to what becomes possible in this approach? Did any creative challenges arise that you found particularly worthwhile to navigate?

Nordstrum: Well, it's such a personal process. There were some key moments of healthy friction between first-time collaborations.

When you've committed to working together as equals, no one automatically has the final word — that had to be negotiated. This project called for co-directorship.

Wohl: One thing that struck me, along with a lot of the composers and filmmakers, is how thematically related the three films were, unintentionally. The commonalities across the three were both interesting and completely unconscious.

Nordstrum: Yeah, no one knew what the others were working on. Each pair was doing their own thing, on the same time horizon. The CSO premiere was the first time the group experienced the pieces back-to-back. There were overlapping threads and reflections, kind of echoes of the films across the three. It’s fascinating.

Wohl: It was also amazing what we were able to do in Cincinnati — running it six times or so, which is almost unheard of in an orchestra setting. That process really allowed us to refine things. Even though this iteration is different, it’s evolved from that initial groundwork. It was really lucky to have Kate and Nate Bachhuber (who was the CSO director then) put that process together.

After hearing it, Arooj was like, I really want to work with orchestras more, and it sparked her interest in adapting her work for that medium. I think it also opened some eyes for composers who usually come from a band background, showing them what’s possible in an orchestral setting.

Chatelaine: All the artists involved are exceptional in their fields — and I’m also appreciating the amount of risk and vulnerability asked of them to take on this new way of working.

I'm thinking, too, of our audience members, who may resonate with some of the creative challenges you’re touching on, at both an individual and societal scale. The creative challenges — again, that image of sun dogs — in navigating these big shifts in our ways of working together that change our orientation, our perception of one another.

Are there any fruits from this process you could see reaching beyond the performance hall?

Nordstrum: I think the coming together with mutual respect, without an outcome in mind, but knowing that you are signed on to get there together. That you make a commitment to one another to create something beautiful and true and meaningful. That beginning together without a final story in mind, willing to come to the table with yourself and with your skills and with mutual admiration, is good practice.

“Beginning together without a final story in mind, willing to come to the table with yourself and with your skills and with mutual admiration, is good practice.”

— Kate Nordstrum

Wohl: And I think I was also hoping to open up new pathways for communication, to avoid getting stuck in just one way of working. Going back to your original question, it was about discovering a fresh approach to creating across disciplines.

Nordstrum: Another good practice is to ask institutions to consider formula change from time to time. Orchestras don't typically consider commissions outside of music. It's not what they're seeking. But this project provided a new way for composers to work and imagine, which of course benefits orchestral music. It’s always worth asking for gaps to be addressed. I'm willing to do that.

A GLIMPSE OF SUN DOGS

On Blue
Rafiq Bhatia, composer
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, filmmaker

Naked Blue
Devonté Hynes, composer
Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie, co-directors

Rise, Again
Arooj Aftab & Daniel Wohl, co-composers
Josephine Decker, filmmaker

Learn more + get tickets

Follow Daniel Wohl:
Website: danielwohlmusic.com
Instagram: @dwohl_ (instagram.com/dwohl_)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Southern Bodies World Premiere // Kit Downes / September 30, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

“Music, for me, is a lot about intention and being present in the moment — how people deal with the moment together.”

— Kit Downes

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

The sounds emitted from Northrop’s historic Aeolian-Skinner Opus 892 often and readily cluster into constellations familiar to the pipe organ; in the hands of master-keyboardist Kit Downes, they are more likely to venture into the infinite unknown, beckoning the imagination up, out, and beyond. When the house lights go down, the stops are pulled, and wind rushes through the grove of pipes, a listening audience will find themselves swept up in the “boundless musical curiosity” so defining of the man recognized as a premiere British talent throughout the United Kingdom.

Kit’s upcoming performance at Minneapolis’s Northrop Auditorium is the world premiere of his latest endeavor, Southern Bodies. For such an occasion, the luminary jazz guitarist Bill Frisell will share the stage. We, along with Kit, couldn’t be more elated — and it continues. In the interweaving of their distinct timbres, Kit and Bill will be joined by members of the prestigious Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra: Eunice Kim (violin), Daniel Orsen (viola), and Richard Belcher (cello).

Southern Bodies is copresented by Liquid Music and Northrop. You can secure your tickets for what is sure to be an unforgettable evening right here.

We are grateful to Kit for the reflections offered below, a small window into the upcoming performance for a curious audience.

A Q&A with Kit Downes

The world premiere of Southern Bodies is coming right on the tails of another release, Breaking the Shell, another exciting collaboration with Bill Frisell. How did your musical relationship with Bill begin?

Reflections from Kit Downes, Bill Frisell, and Andrew Cyrille at the release of Breaking the Shell (September 26, 2024)

Kit Downes: Breaking the Shell came about through the producer Sun Chung, whom Bill, Andrew [Cyrille], and I had all worked with separately for ECM. He set it up, and I was lucky to be involved! Like millions of other fans, I have been listening to Bill’s playing and composing since I was very young. He is a huge part of how I think about music; it’s hard to understate what an impact his music had on me. So getting to play with him on that recording, and for this concert, makes my head spin. It’s like hearing my own childhood memories coming from the stage in real-time — it’s unbelievable. I feel so lucky to be able to share some music with him.

Liquid Music is recognized as a laboratory for artists across genres, with an interest in nurturing bold ideas from composers and performing artists. Certainly the pipe organ and guitar are less conventional conversation partners! What would you say has been nurtured by taking the imaginative risk of that collaboration?

*Left: Kit Downes, photo courtesy of the artist | Right: Bill Frisell, photo by Monica Frisell*

Downes: Instrumentation is an important factor for sure when making new music, but not the only one, or even the biggest one, I think. Music for me is a lot about intention and being present in the moment — how people deal with the moment together. This can happen on any combination of instruments and still be interesting. Of course the instrument choices add detail to the puzzle, and a strong context, but for me it’s about the people involved, and what they want to say and how they communicate as a group.

Of the many distinctive qualities of the pipe organ, one is that it’s site-specific — requiring a process of acquaintance for you, both of the instrument and the space. What are you anticipating with Northrop’s Aeolian-Skinner organ, and the space that holds it?

Downes: I’m familiar with the make of organ, having played one in the US before. I remember the balance and style of the instrument in general, although this instrument will have its own specifities and nuances, I’m sure. The space is the big unknown factor for me, and also the music itself — as much of it is brand new, as is the ensemble itself!

You’ve shared that Southern Bodies is, at least in part, a reference to the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. The celestial is also present in some of your past work — Light from Old Stars, as an early example. Is there an affinity, or curiosity for you there? What has it offered to your musicianship, if anything?

Downes: I tend to pick titles that touch on a few different things simultaneously that are going on — chance encounters and recurrent themes, both. They often are quite arbitrary anyway! One thing I would say about the night sky is that it’s this huge constant cosmic companion, wherever you are in the world — especially if you befriend it, learn some of its constellations. The familiarity of it helps me feel less alone when I am far away.

Your sound has been described as at once “ethereal” and “earthy” — polarities that hold in common an elemental quality as a reference point. I’ve enjoyed reading reflections on the role of landscape throughout your work — with Obsidian, for example, and “Kasei Valles” on Breaking the Shell. Would you say that’s a particular access point for you as you explore the sounds and textures of your work?

Downes: That’s such a nice observation, I never thought of it. I guess I was always drawn to old traditional music because of this connection with nature, somehow. Something folk-ish, that anyone can appreciate, or that can be reinterpreted and relived a thousands different ways over a very long period — also like natural processes. It can be a mutual point that people with different ways of seeing things can take off from.

What is something outside of music that is animating you right now, that is life-giving?

Downes: Raising my daughter, definitely — I see everything differently now.

Follow Kit Downes:
Website: www.kitdownesmusic.com
Instagram: @kitdownesmusic (instagram.com/kitdownesmusic)

Follow Bill Frisell:
Website: www.billfrisell.com
Instagram: @bill.frisell (instagram.com/bill.frisell)

Follow The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra:
Website: www.thespco.org
Instagram: @thespco (instagram.com/thespco)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Liquid Music at Chaillot // Emily Wells x Dimitri Chamblas / September 19, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

“Liquid Music is thinking more broadly about where, why, and with what partnerships to mount a project. What, in the world, is any given project calling for?” – Kate Nordstrum

Emily Wells performs Regards to the End | Photo: Karlie Efinger / Scott Carr

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

This week, Liquid Music arrives in the lustrous heart of Paris. Ours is one pulse in the company of performances animating the upcoming Chaillot Expérience, at the invitation of the visionary choreographer Dimitri Chamblas. Over four days, Chamblas will spotlight his current projects, collaborations, and ongoing partnerships.

With a kindred appreciation for the generative valence of movement and sound, Chamblas asked Liquid Music’s Kate Nordstrum to select a performing artist to fill the foyer of the historic Théâtre National de Chaillot. And we are delighted to have Emily Wells – polymathic composer, producer, and video artist – with us for this very special international venture.

But first:

Kate, Dimitri, and Emily trace the confluence of their pathways to the temple of dance in the city of light — a story told in three movements.

I.
Liquid Music x Studio Dimitri Chamblas:
“An artistic conversation that’s only just begun”

Kate Nordstrum reflects on the origins of the ever-developing creative partnership between Studio Dimitri Chamblas and Liquid Music:

I was introduced to Dimitri in 2018 through Ben Johnson, who was then the Director of Performing Arts for the city of Los Angeles (now Director of Arts for the city of Minneapolis). Ben knew that Dimitri had begun collaborating informally with Kim Gordon [Sonic Youth co-founder] and thought that might be something I'd be interested in for Liquid Music. I was working part-time with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that year, planning their centennial season Fluxus Festival (2018-19), so there were opportunities to meet a number of times without agenda in the beginning. I wanted to learn about Dimitri's work and vision, and we found we shared artistic priorities. I was very inspired by Dimitri's energy and spirit of "anything is possible."

Kate Nordstrum outside of Los Angeles at a shooting range, creating the score for Dick Higgins' *The 1000 Symphonies* in preparation for a Fluxus Festival event. As part of the festival, Kate would hire Dimitri to direct David Lang's *crowd out* for 1000 voices.

Kim Gordon, Kate Nordstrum, Dimitri Chamblas

Both Dimitri and I have brought each other into our individual opportunities as curators and producers over the last six years. I feel challenged by our dialogue, and honored to be seen and valued by a colleague I admire so much — and sometimes even feel jealous of! Knowing ours is a long-term relationship is probably the most rewarding aspect. This is an artistic conversation that's only just begun.

II.
Chaillot Expérience:
An invitation to “the temple of dance”

Théâtre National de Chaillot | © Patrick Berger

Dimitri Chamblas shares the context of his work with Chaillot, and the theater’s historical significance in France:

Chaillot Expérience was proposed to me, as Palais de Chaillot does for maybe four or five artists every year. Palais de Chaillot in Paris — that's “the temple of dance,” right in front of the Eiffel Tower — it’s this big, amazing building with a program of such incredible curation. Historically, it was the théâtre populaire, which means “the theater for everyone.” And now it's the théâtre de la danse — still totally “populaire,” of course, but with an emphasis on dance as an art form, as a practice.

For Chaillot Expérience, I wanted to start the thinking in relation with my piece takemehome, which I'm showing the whole week in Chaillot. Basically, I wanted to continue exploring new possibilities of the relationships between moving bodies and sounds and music. That’s the whole curation of Chaillot Expérience. There's a workshop for 30 electric guitars. There's a participatory voice piece. There are different performances of dancers and musicians. There's music curation. There's a lot, a lot, a lot of things happening until late in the night. And then from the Palais de Chaillot, it will move to a nightclub to keep continuing — having a different type, though, of relation with moving bodies and music!

“I feel very close, in my relationship with dance, to what Liquid Music is standing for: exploring different forms, approaching music in relation to other arts, and presenting in different types of spaces to give access to a large diversity of audience.”

— Dimitri Chamblas

The idea of inviting Liquid Music, inviting Kate, to come and participate is, for me, an invitation to collaborate around this topic — sharing ideas and giving her the possibility to invite an artist to be part of that. She proposed Emily Wells, who I discovered because of Kate. And of course I really loved her music, but also its relation with moving images and archival dance film. And also, I would say, some of the history of dance that she invites in the space of her live performance. So, yeah, I can't wait to have Liquid Music in Paris, and Kate and Emily.

I feel very close, in my relationship with dance, to what Liquid Music is standing for: exploring different forms, approaching music in relation to other arts, and presenting in different types of spaces to give access to a large diversity of audience. All of those goals and values are shared between myself and Liquid Music through Kate's leadership.

III.
Regards to the End:
A centering moment in the “beating heart” of Chaillot

Kate Nordstrum shares what inspired her pick of Regards to the End as Liquid Music’s feature in the Chaillot Expérience:

Regards to the End is an ever-evolving, magical piece of art by Emily Wells that Liquid Music has actively supported over the years. I wanted to deliver something that could bring big feelings into a large space full of bodies — a centering moment in the grand Foyer de la Dance, the "beating heart" of the building. I thought about Emily's brilliant use of archival dance films in her set, interwoven with images of early AIDS activism and extreme climate events, that stun and move viewers in inarticulable ways. Emily's music and visuals enliven the senses and bring people together in body and spirit. Her love of dance and awareness of how music moves in and through the body make her a beautiful fit for Dimitri's Chaillot Expérience.

“Emily’s music and visuals enliven the senses and bring people together in body and spirit.”

— Kate Nordstrum

Emily Wells offers an intimate look into the life and movements of Regards to the End:

Music, or rather writing music, is a way for me to think, to explore literature, theory, visual art, and then respond through my most sentient language. I think about the climate crisis a lot: it’s at the foundation of life decisions, of worry, of grief. And in wrestling with this presence in my life, I looked for analogs from the past. That’s where I started to find links with the early AIDS crisis — the denial, bureaucracy, enormity, scapegoating of the weak — but those connections were just the door to what became Regards to the End.

I started reading a lot about climate crisis and the AIDS crisis. Then the pandemic descended, and I realized that I needed to expand the scope of my research, that “one cannot survive on terror alone.” So I turned to the people I knew best how to learn from: artists. I fell into their most sentient languages as a way to learn the muscle for myself: the muscle of survival in crisis, the absurd ability to hope and adapt that is innate in the process of making art.

Regards is a relic of that hope and survival. I hope it points to these teachers who, through their work, left us road maps for dealing with enormous unthinkable suffering and complicated togetherness. Their desire for beauty, joy, spontaneity, and most of all each other, was not snuffed out. That gives me courage.

Bringing Regards to Paris

Part of the excitement for me around the coming performance in Paris is the chance to be swept into a larger vision and community of makers. My performances tend to be quite meticulous in their planning and their engagement with the technology I employ. For Chaillot, I’ve tried to give myself a looser leash — and in that, to make way for improvisation and collaboration, including an invitation to Darian Donovan Thomas to sing with me on a few songs.

I started incorporating dance into my video work as a way to be less lonely on stage, and it’s grown into a deep relationship with the form and its history, as well as with choreographers — specifically with my frequent collaborator and friend, Raja Feather Kelly. I also became interested in the way footage of dance, documentations of activism, and captured moments of extreme climate events are linked; something about the way the bodies move in tandem, in reaction, and with tremendous agency, feels like shared language. Projecting these images while I play is a way to extend meaning, and to make more room for the immense emotional selfhood of each individual present.

One thing I've learned is that there is a desire, a need, for real human proximity — and that music can help facilitate that. Also, that people in a room together have a power that cannot be simulated. And that making work is in itself a belief in the future.

A few things for climate activism inspired by the early AIDS activists: we have to be talking about it, not mired or alone in fear, and we have to be loud and specific about what we want and need. Significantly, they knew how to inject their protests with both humor and poignancy.

I wish I could say I’ve had some clear epiphany about the future and how to proceed in it through my time sharing Regards. I think I still have more to learn, and more honestly, more to act on. But the one thing I’m certain of: it’s going to take a lot of us to make anything move.

Follow Dimitri Chamblas:
Website: www.dimitrichamblas.com
Instagram: @dimitrischamblas (instagram.com/dimitrichamblas)

Follow Emily Wells:
Website: www.emilywellsmusic.com
Instagram: @emilywellsmusic (instagram.com/emilywellsmusic)
Spotify: Emily Wells

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

The Conversations That Make a Voice // Josh Johnson / September 9, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

What a curious play of perception, how readily the ear can mistake the vibration of wood or the push of breath through brass for the human voice. Some argue the cello most closely mimics our particular timbre; others stand fervently for the French horn. For composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award-winning producer Josh Johnson, it was the saxophone whose likeness called to him from an early age, and would draw him into a vibrant array of reed-mediated conversations for years to come. A prolific collaborator, you can hear Josh in the company of Jeff Parker, Meschell Ndegeocello, Marquis Hill, Harry Styles, Broken Bells, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (check out his full discography if you relish a divergence of discoveries and surprise encounters). He also served as musical director for Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022.

In recent years, Josh has achieved two albums as a solo artist. His latest, Unusual Object, will be the parlance of his Minneapolis debut. And if you’ve yet to spend an evening nestled amidst the islands of velvet and light at Berlin, let this be your introduction to the North Loop’s oasis for jazz and delectable company. Find your tickets here for Josh’s September 27th performance, co-presented by Liquid Music and Berlin.

Berlin | Minneapolis, MN (Photo by Isabel Subtil)

But as you’ll read below, Josh takes the category of “solo album” and turns it into a question, one central to the composition of Unusual Object.

Perhaps the singularity of Josh Johnson is, paradoxically, a voice that both holds and invites conversation with multiple (and yes, sometimes unusual) others. To be present to his sound is to join a broader consideration of the voices we lean toward, and those that might repel — to an effect that inspires you to keep in the dialogue. It is an invitation to be part of an audience whose attention brings questions like, What feels familiar, and why? And, What feels jarring, and why? And then perhaps, What happens next?

We hope to meet you there. In the meantime, for your eavesdropping pleasure, a conversation with Josh Johnson:

This interview took place on August 16, 2024, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Amy Chatelaine: This will be your Minneapolis debut as a solo performing artist. You’re currently based in LA, but from the Midwest originally, is that right?

Josh Johnson: Yeah. So I was born in Maryland, but when I was pretty young, we moved to Illinois, about an hour from Chicago. That's where I grew up.

Chatelaine: What do you remember about your earliest draw to the saxophone? And what was going on in your life at that time that specifically sparked a connection with jazz?

Johnson: Well, I started on piano first when I was a bit younger — I don't know if it’s in fifth or sixth grade where, in band, you get to pick an instrument. And actually, saxophone wasn't my first choice initially; it was drums. But there was something about saxophone I connected with. I don't know that I would have articulated it this way at 10, but it felt like the saxophone could be like the human voice.

More specifically, a year or two into playing I had asked my parents for Christmas for some recordings of people playing the saxophone, and they went out and bought four or five CDs, different stuff. There was one in particular that I really connected with, this compilation of recordings of the tenor saxophone. And I remember thinking, even at that age, it sounds like somebody's speaking to me, like I'm hearing someone's voice. And I think that ignited something in me. I felt a connection to that possibility of, wow, through an instrument you can speak to somebody in a literal way. It just captured me. It had this swagger and this freedom, but also a singular method of expression that I really connected with.

Josh Johnson performs "Marvis" (listen in full)

Chatelaine: As a highly sought-after collaborator, much of your musical career has been very conversational. And in the past few years, you've achieved two solo projects, Unusual Object the most recent. You’re quoted in the release by Northern Spy Records, describing this project as “a development and documentation of a more personal world of sound” after time spent further sharpening your own compositional voice. Would you say the conversational nature of collaboration played a particular role in finding your singular voice as a solo artist?

Johnson: Absolutely. I feel very lucky to be trusted often with other people's music. One of the things I love about collaborating is getting insight into how other people experience the world and hear and see. It allows me to access, or get to consider, different perspectives — and all of that from so many different sources. It has helped me zero in on what speaks to me, and to expand the things that I see.

I take a lot of lessons from other people and get to be like, What's it like to explore this in my own world? For every person, there are certain things that are really flexible, and certain things that are rigid. And it's really different in every context. I'm often encouraged in collaboration by seeing places where I maybe have been less flexible but somebody else is very flexible, and it encourages me to explore that within my own sonic world.

Collaboration has offered me a space to develop a lot of my ideas as well. A big one, and maybe an important influence leading to Unusual Object, is playing with Jeff Parker. Specifically, there's a band called the ETA Quartet, which improvised together for many, many years. I've been interested in electronics, but I really got an opportunity to explore that solely through improvisation in shared space with Jeff and Anna [Butterss] and Jay [Bellerose]. A lot of the things I found through improvising with all this stuff in real time. Over time I started to catalog, to accumulate a palette. And as I got closer to considering what my next record was going to be, I had the feeling of, I've gotten to explore and connect with all these sounds, but what's it like to now try to put a frame around it, to design the architecture myself?

Chatelaine: It strikes me that there’s a significance to improv being inherent to that process. The search for one’s unique creative voice can sometimes become overly earnest, or stressful in some ways. But improv by nature feels so permissive and playful, and just a good spirit to go on.

“ I think that [playfulness] comes as a byproduct of authenticity, or just being honest and attentive to the things that you’re drawn towards, the things that move you.”

— Josh Johnson

Johnson: Yeah, the exploration with play is completely important to my practice and just my existence since, both in and outside of music. I think that comes as a byproduct of authenticity, or just being honest and attentive to the things that you're drawn towards, the things that move you.

Chatelaine: Does that come naturally to you, that playfulness? Or is it something you've cultivated over time?

Johnson: That's a good question. When I got into music that was present, definitely. But I think somewhere in the midst of the study of music it got lost a little bit. I think that can happen, I feel like I have many friends and collaborators who've experienced something similar. I had to relearn or reengage with that playfulness and understand it as a strength, that it's actually foundational to my experiences with music.

Chatelaine: How do you go about continuing to cultivate that, or returning to it when it feels like it's gone out of reach?

Johnson: Especially in improvisation, one way that I try to reconnect to that is by allowing myself to get lost. It pushes me into a sort of problem solving and attentive state. So for me, part of that practice in music is getting lost, or trying to get lost, because that forces me to find a creative way back. It’s almost like it gives me something to react and respond to. And it has to be playful by nature. It's like, Okay, how do I get out of this? Or, How do I make it back? What's the creative pathway I can find back to wherever it is trying to get to?

“For me, part of that practice in music is getting lost, or trying to get lost, because that forces me to find a creative way back.”

— Josh Johnson

It took me a while to, maybe it seems simple, but to understand that you can be serious about the work and about the art, but you don't have to take it too seriously. I've had some examples, mentors for me who — I think I took a while to understand the beauty and having both of those things. A certain amount of play suggests a comfortability or a confidence in your ability to navigate something.

When I'm collaborating with or improvising with other people, sometimes that looks like in the moment really choosing to redirect my attention. It might be that I want everything I play to be in conversation with the bass drum for a little bit, or something that just gives me a different access point to creativity.

Chatelaine: You mentioned you've had several mentors that you look to that really lift up and dignify the role of playfulness. Who are some of those mentors for you?

Johnson: Yeah, I moved to California for a master’s fellowship program — it was more like direct mentorship, and one of the people that I was most excited about spending time with was Wayne Shorter, who recently passed. To me, he was somebody who really embodied that sense of play, and with so much depth and deep feeling. If you care to zoom in and get analytical, there's so much to be excavated. But even with all that depth, there always was a sense of play and a sense of humor. It's almost like it had the ability to make all of the colors more complex. Or it's like adding texture to color, or something like that.

And in the time I got to spend with him, so many of the lessons and directions didn't utilize musical language. They'd be like, What's it like for you to improvise as if you're this actor playing this role? What's it like to pretend you don't know how to play? All these, not always just prompts, but things that encouraged play and encouraged me to zoom out in a way that still gives access to all these things, but also another doorway and one that might actually have the ability to expand what it is that I’m trying to do. It’s playing music that's influenced by so many other things besides music.

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A post shared by Josh Johnson (@joshuaajohn)

Chatelaine: Turning to Unusual Object now, what were some of the things you were in conversation with when composing that album? Or is there a particular conversation you feel it's having on its own?

Johnson: Yeah, maybe some of both. One question initially it was, What is a solo album? There's a rich tradition of solo saxophone albums, maybe trending towards the avant garde. But the contemplation of that, and just asking myself, What does that really mean? and trying to come to a definition of my own was less instrument specific, but more about inputs. Whereas I do a lot of collaboration, this contrasted in being this one input — and that can be saxophone, that can be electronics, that can be synthesizer, but it's really just one source. And that to me is a version of a solo album — one that is maybe explored more in vocal music, but in instrumental music, I don't know that there’s the same framework. Or often, if there is a framework for a solo album, many times its goal is to demonstrate virtuosity on an instrument specifically. That was not for me; I was interested in not being that.

In terms of being in conversation with other things, there's quite a lot in there. I think I'm interested in poking at genre and asking, What? Why? Why we have a need for it, and who stands to gain from genre, to fit things into a frame, perhaps. [Unusual Object] is in conversation with some things specific to jazz, some stuff specific to electronic music. And also blending it all together, and blurring the lines. I feel really interested in the stuff on the margins and the ways in which when you reach the limits of something, stuff that's unexpected happens. You can also utilize that as a tool and develop a voice on the margins, and often that might lead you to something that is really personal and unique.

Chatelaine: And maybe gaining a hearing for other voices there, too.

Johnson: Mmm.

Chatelaine: There was an interview you gave back in 2020 that described your creative vision as being “equally parts fresh and familiar.” And then, “homey without ever being comfortable.” How do you think about holding those two experiences together? And when did that become important for you?

Johnson: I think it's always been important to me, or I've experienced so much music that way. Music has been an entry point or a catalyst to so many thoughts and conversations outside of music. And there's been so much music that's encouraged me and made me believe we can imagine something better than what we already have and what we know.

“There’s a lot in the world in this moment that seeks to make things flat and one dimensional. I’m interested in participating in, and trying to create experiences that encourage us to reconnect with the fact that there’s so much more color.”

— Josh Johnson

I'm interested in opening a door to a space for somebody, less than dictating an experience. But I believe that people want to feel things deeply. And I think we have a need for that, even if when we put on music that's not always what we think we're doing it for. I’m interested in creating a space that’s hard to define. Not out of trying to push people away, but that has layers in a way that reflects humanity. Maybe that sounds grandiose, but in ways that — I don't know how to describe this exactly, but that's very much the experience of being a human, you know? There's a lot in the world in this moment that seeks to make things flat and one dimensional. I'm interested in participating in, and trying to create experiences that encourage us to reconnect with the fact that there's so much more color.

Chatelaine: This has been such a lovely conversation, Josh, thank you. As we draw to a close, what are some things outside of music that are animating you right now, that are life-giving?

Johnson: So this is hobby-world, but mending clothing is an interest of mine. I’ve been interested in things and practices that encourage me to slow down and pay attention, because there’s so much that is doing the opposite, you know? And I can feel the effects on my attention span. I love sitting with something, and just using my hands, and engaging all of my senses.

Also, increasingly I find myself drawn to poetry for small bites of beauty. That’s something that’s been energizing me and lifting me up. I have a few different collections around the house, but I have a little book next to my bed, and I’ve been trying to — not always succeeding — but instead of reaching for the phone the first thing in the morning, what if I experience something beautiful, and that’s the way my day starts?

Follow Josh Johnson:
Website: joshjohnsonmusic.com
Instagram: @joshuaajohn (instagram.com/joshuaajohn)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Terminal Habitat Collapse // Trever Hagen x Josh Berg / September 4, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

A Point of Entry

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

We are at the doorway of our 2024 Fall Season of Liquid Music, about to step out onto a vast plain of fresh performances — discovering new entry points along the way in the space between movement and sound, time and place, audience and performing artist. We begin with Trever Hagen (composer, performer, writer) and Josh Berg (producer, engineer), in their presentation of Terminal Habitat Collapse.

In these first days of September, Hagen and Berg are together in Minneapolis for a Northrop artist residency to endeavor this new collaborative project, an idea that took root in early 2024. Terminal Habitat Collapse presents a sonic narration of the Anthropocene, creating an “immersive soundscape of ecological change” through engagement with quadraphonic sound.

You can experience this work-in-development as a special feature of the Northrop Open House on September 12, copresented by Liquid Music. Come take this first step with us into the new season, and roam the halls of Northrop for a rare look behind-the-scenes of a local gem in the Minneapolis arts community (full schedule here).

Left: Trever Hagen (Photo by Graham Tolbert). Right: Josh Berg (Photo courtesy of the artist).

Hagen and Berg offered a short introduction to Terminal Habitat Collapse, sharing these words ahead of their departure to Minneapolis:

pre-residency Q&A with Trever Hagen + Josh Berg

How did the two of you come to work together on this project?

Trever Hagen: We first met in Berlin in 2016 as part of the first PEOPLE festival and have been collaborating on various collective projects since then. In Spring 2024, I attended a quadraphonic ensemble in LA that Josh had recommended me check out and, after discussing, we decided to put our heads and hearts together to create a new piece. We combined my interest in “new pastoralism” with Josh’s experiments in quad under the idea of Terminal Habitat Collapse.

Josh, you’ve worked with a range of performing artists, from Ye to Bon Iver to the late Mac Miller. How would you describe your role in creative production?

Josh Berg: My role is: CREATE SPACE TO CREATE. In order to facilitate the work, I discover what the artists need and implement the process. This always involves technical work but it also engages a sympathetic understanding where I can see the artists’ vision and make sure that they have a clear path to get there.

What exactly is quadraphonic sound?

Berg: Sound coming from four discrete sources. Think of four perfectly spaced dots along a circle. Solstice and equinox. This overlays perfectly with our natural experience of the four corners of a room making quad the simplest representation of how we actually experience the world sonically.

What was the draw to pastoralism as an aesthetic framework — one you’re renovating in Terminal Habitat Collapse?

Hagen: Pastoralism represents a nexus of aesthetics and ecology formed by the human gaze. It’s seemingly what human culture wants nature to be at some level: bucolic, placid but submissive, dominated. A couple summers ago I was canoeing in the Boundary Waters thinking about pastoral landscapes as I looked at the sunrise on a lake. Along with that sunrise there was also a haze from the Canadian wildfires. In that moment pastoralism felt ridiculous in the hubris of human activity and in the face of what is arguably a new sense of the pastoral: whole towns burning (e.g. Lahaina, HI), rising sea levels displacing people (e.g. Tuvalu), waterways that poison those who drink it (e.g. Flint, MI). This is the pastoral now. This is what nature is becoming for humans in the short term, with the long term conclusion being terminal habitat collapse for our species. So “new pastoralism” is simply an aesthetic perspective or set of sensory materials that aims to shine the light on the relationship between nature and humans as we know it at the beginning of the 21st century.

What will be unique about the audience experience of this performance?

Berg: For most it will be to actually experience a piece written in and for quadraphonic sound. We defy the idea that you “look at” a performance and rather invite the audience into the circle, literally. We also reframe the understanding of where we are going as a species by offering a less ambiguous term to describe our destination and sonically narrating the journey.

Hagen: As Josh noted, I think listeners have a lot of agency in quadraphonic performances in that you are invited into the performance. The outcome or the performance may be less determined, this way — almost like a happening.

Experience the performance at the 2024 Northrop Open House
Copresented by Liquid Music
Thursday, September 12 | 4:30–5:00 pm
Northrop Rehearsal Studio (Ground Level, East)
Free and open to the public

Learn more

Follow Trever Hagen:
Website: treverhagen.com
Instagram: @t.r.e.v.r (instagram.com/t.r.e.v.r)

Follow Josh Berg:
Website: infinitevibrationtechnology.com
Instagram: @love_burg (instagram.com/love_burg)

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Sounds Continue to Migrate: A Conversation with Moor Mother / September 4, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

“I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies.”
– Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother)

Experience Moor Mother's The Great Bailout on September 14 at the Walker Art Center, presented in partnership with Liquid Music. Find your tickets here.

An excerpted conversation between Camae Ayewa and her collaborator Brandon Stosuy, published in full at walkerart.org:

Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, is a poet, visual artist, touring musician, and professor of Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.

Her recent large-scale work, The Great Bailout, uses as its starting point the United Kingdom’s 1837 Slave Compensation Act, which gave tax bailouts to former slave owners, but nothing to the liberated people. The resulting unwavering sonic meditation—dark, powerful, deeply political and personal—is a nonlinear word map that charts connections across colonialism, slavery, and commerce in Great Britain, along with its modern parallels in the United States.

Ayewa released The Great Bailout as a proper album in March of 2024. It was followed a few months later by an expanded edition, which included earlier versions of the pieces recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The upcoming site-specific Walker performance of The Great Bailout is the first large-scale presentation of the project in the United States.

Brandon Stosuy: I’ve seen you perform dozens of times, and you never do the same show twice. Over the years, as you’ve worked more with classical music and in large-scale institutions like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, your live performances have grown more ambitious, with additional collaborators and variables.

When people perform the same set over and over, it offers a bit of a safety net, but you keep experimenting. What is it that inspires you to approach live performance this way?

Camae Ayewa: I love the concept of reworking: that the music continues to breathe, the music continues to live, and in different situations, the music continues to grow. That’s important to me. I never want to stay locked into the sounds. The sounds continue to migrate, they continue to grow—they continue to have their own life, shall I say. And it’s my job or my passion to keep finding new ways to approach the work, but also new ways for the work to still be grounded in the present. And that’s what’s really interesting to me.

My writing style is about leaving space for the unknown and for the stories of the present moment. I believe it’s all one continual story, one continuous moment, vibrating at different frequencies. It is important to bring out all the layers, present all the layers, as if it was an infinity mirror that continues to shine light, that continues to reflect.

BS: The Great Bailout, the basis for your performance at the Walker: Can you give a bit of background on it?

CA: The project came about when I was commissioned by the Tusk Festival in England to present a work with an orchestra and to create a theme. At that moment, when I was thinking what I could do, I felt it was imperative to focus on a historical moment that still has its residue, or remnants, here in the present. This was, of course, a risky move, to put this type of work out there, but I felt that we had to honor the creative mind and honor all the things that have happened on this planet, really. To dwell into that and close the timeline.

BS: This is the first full-scale performance of The Great Bailout in the U.S. How did you arrive at the approach for the Walker performance?

CA: My approach was to pick the right ingredients…

[Continue reading at walkerart.org]

Learn more + Buy tickets

Follow Moor Mother:
Website: moormother.net
Instagram: @moormother (instagram.com/moormother)
Facebook: facebook.com/MoorMother

Follow Liquid Music for updates and announcements:
Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries (instagram.com/liquidmusicseries)
Facebook: facebook.com/LiquidMusicSeries
Newsletter: liquidmusic.org/newsletter

Partners in Process, in Art + Life // Kate Wallich x Perfume Genius / July 9, 2024 by Amy Chatelaine

By Liquid Music blog contributor Amy Chatelaine

“Standby lights…”

“Lights on…”

“Standby music and haze…”

“Music and haze go…”

Unfurling across the stage, a thick fog poured into the rapt audience scattered throughout Minneapolis’s Northrop auditorium. An atmospheric shift is what it felt like, the room charged with electric tensions caught in the spotlight beams hovering overhead.

Choreographer Kate Wallich and Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas and Alan Wyffels) are back together as creative partners following their 2019 success, The Sun Still Burns Here, joined now by collaborator Tate Justus. We were about to enter the first contours of their new movement landscape, the highly-anticipated sophomore project scheduled to premiere in the 2025-26 arts season, commissioned by Seattle Theatre Group and Liquid Music l Northrop.

And we couldn’t be more thrilled.

“Standby shrimp on ice…”

“Enter shrimp on ice…”

An amplified voice continued to cue the opening scene into being, element by element, its source imperceptible until a crewmember slowly wheeled a limp figure forward from stage right. Splayed across a pile of empty Culligan bottles, Kate Wallich rested one arm across her chest, a microphone tilted up to her mouth.

You might expect to hear cues like this during a rehearsal for traditional stage performances. But when collaborating on a work-in-progress across artistic genres, what cues create a container for an entirely new world to emerge? What cues signal that it’s working?

The fog continued to roll and wrap us in its ambiguities — between performance and daily life, voyeurism and participation. It was not a fog for us to decode as an audience, but to enter with the performing artists as they traversed these points of tension across the stage.

Ten days of their first creative residency yielded an astonishing 30 minutes of material, presented by Kate, Mike, Alan, and Tate, and brought into the minds and bodies of the audience in the vibrant talk-back that followed.

TURNING TO THE AUDIENCE

House lights came up, and the quartet pulled up chairs at the stage’s edge, joined by Kate Nordstrum, Liquid Music Founding Director and facilitator of the Kate Wallich x Perfume Genius match in 2019.

Wallich opened the talk-back by turning the mic to the audience of Liquid Music | Northrop subscribers and guests, inviting us to share our impressions and observations: “Any sort of ‘Wow, that made me feel dark,’ or ‘That made me feel light.’ Not necessarily, ‘I liked that’ or ‘I didn’t.’”

After a brief pause, the first hand went up: “When you looked directly into the camera, that felt exciting.”

Then — in the familiar levee-break of most Q&As — the gates opened to a flood of voices from across the room:

“The flow of going from a lot of music and sound to just the fan felt very intense.”

“It felt like getting sucked inside a TikTok video.”

“I felt my pupils dilating.”

“There was something very liminal and intimate and other worldly.”

Welcoming the audience into a shared starting point of the body — its sensation, its associations, its knowing — was in many ways a brilliant primer for us to step into their creative process as collaborators in our own right, offering crucial feedback in these early stages of discovery.

Photo by Jayme Halbritter

While you wait in this gestation period ahead of the 2025-2026 season, know your anticipation is shared as Kate, Mike, Alan, and Tate continue to meet over the course of the next year: to listen, and to move their way through what this piece has to say, to what it wants to become.

In the meantime, I sat down with Kate Wallich for a deeper dive into their process of becoming — as cross-genre collaborators, and as publicly engaged artists.

IN CONVERSATION WITH KATE WALLICH

[This interview took place on June 23, 2024, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

Kate Wallich: I’ve always said my skill set is — and this is the dancer side of me — that I can feel where there is a lack in the world, and then figure out how to bring the right people together to meet the need. It’s when I want a place to go that doesn’t exist, a place to belong. I start to build, and then assess if it’s the right thing: going through rounds to see if it’s a fertile thing, if my desire for a place to belong is shared, if there are other people who need that, too.

I started a series in Los Angeles called WIP, which stands for work-in-progress. One of the goals is to shepherd an audience through the creation of a work. Each WIP features a moderated dialogue kind of like what we did with Kate [Nordstrum] at the show, and I feel that conversations like this are important when you’re just starting to develop a work: understanding where we’re at as a society, and understanding the public implications of the work.

Amy Chatelaine: How would you say your WIP approach is informing this current project?

KW: Mike and I made The Sun Still Burns Here in 2019 — that creation process actually started in 2018, and was the last stage work that I’d made. Post-pandemic, I made a huge move to Los Angeles. Mike and Alan live in LA, and that was part of the reason I wanted to move. We’d developed a deep artistic relationship and a lot of movement language through the creation of The Sun Still Burns Here. In order to go harder and deeper into those, we needed to be in closer proximity.

My desire to make dances has shifted as I’ve gotten older — I’m no longer functioning in the confines of a dance company, which I did for 10 years. Part of the reason why I brought in the idea for WIP is because I was feeling myself go through a process in my body where I was going to the studio alone, and it wasn’t like this end goal, but something that was developing. And I needed an opportunity to put that in front of an audience and see what exactly was happening, why I was having that desire.

I was using my practice I’d always used in a dance company: I go into a studio, I start to develop a movement language, and then I start to see how I can transcribe that onto other dancers. In that process, I actually realized what I was working through was a self-care practice, and that a desire to transcribe movement onto dancers in the same way I had done inside the context of a dance company wasn’t really there anymore. It was clear that throughout the pandemic and this really profound experience I had with Mike and Alan through the creation of The Sun Still Burns Here, that something in my cycles of creation were shifting in a major way.

I think because I have this entrepreneurial side to me, sometimes I need a container in order to discover something about my creative practice, before I can find the expression. And so I did that with WIP, and a lot of major discoveries came out of that. And it was also a confirmation for me that I did want to go deeper and harder into this relationship with Mike and Alan and figure out what this movement world is going to be.

We have a lot of questions going into this project, but the leading questions are defining themselves right now. And so what you saw [in the open rehearsal] was all the past experiences we’ve had — of movement languages, body memories, rehearsals, understandings — they were all coming into this pot, and for this first time being looked at. Not even sorted through, not even strategized, really. Just looked at, witnessed, and then put out into a play zone to start seeing what could be there.

AC: During the talk-back, you emphasized the role of trust in making a collaborative piece like this, and it’s really clear that you’ve developed that across these six years of your artistic relationship. And it’s also sounding like part of the draw to a WIP approach was to cultivate that sense of trust in yourself and your intuition. I just hear that as the work so many of us are doing right now, developing trust in our bodily intelligence.

In your creative partnership, how do you support one another in tuning into and really staying with, remaining curious about, and respecting the intelligence of your intuition and what the body holds?

KW: It’s really interesting, because I have this deep relationship with Mike and Alan — it’s both very professional and very personal. We’re also friends and spend a lot of time together, almost more like family. And Tate is a new tone and personality that we brought into that mix.

So to speak about bodily trust and supporting each other throughout the creative process — you had mentioned the role of cueing. One of the things that has been coming up so far in this process — I did work with a dance company for a long time, and for dancers, it’s like “noted, locked in, sealed.” It’s just part of their body intelligence; they can remember choreography. Not only am I working with three non-dancers who don’t really have that, but Tate has never really been inside of our structured rehearsal or creation process. There’s not the body memory to become three-dimensionally aware. Part of that cueing was to create repetition, which builds body memory. It was really a practical thing.

All of us are in a place of trying to trust and support each other, and I’m also trusting what that’s revealing for the piece we’re creating as well. And not just in terms of cueing. Like Tate’s desire to just come on stage with those boots — I didn’t direct that. That was Tate’s idea. He didn’t really have the idea, even; he just did it. And I love that.

“There was this pair of boots that were just hanging out in the hallway for a while. We’d all been eyeing them, and this morning I just put them on. They made a really great sound, so I just kind of took a gallop. And that’s a lot of what you’re seeing – people getting together, pulling at our psychological attractions: seeing them, wearing them, looking at them different ways. I mean, we’re pulling from our life: it’s just random sometimes, and we’re seeing if it makes any kind of sense. And this is just the beginning stage of it.”
Tate Justus (May 2024 open rehearsal)

As a choreographer, I have my own internal ways of strategizing behavioral outcomes inside of a room, especially when dealing with a lot of different dynamics. But everybody else has their own approach to that and their own practices, and what’s coming out is a mixture of that. And I think that’s because there’s this mutual — I don’t even know if it’s really even trust right now; it’s almost like an openness, and a mutual respect, or awe, maybe? Like we’re all in awe of each other — and maybe that’s too grandiose. I’m like, “I like your ideas. I want more of your ideas.” And because we all have that for each other, I think that something interesting is coming out.

I think bodily trust is something that comes with time, and learning and listening, and practice.

AC: Hearing you reflect on this, I keep going back and forth between practices in your process and practices in public life. Like your practice of role reversal, which I’ve seen used by facilitators in conflict transformation work, when bringing people together across significant difference — in ideology, in values, in approaches to live into those values. And hearing you say that before trust is even established, there’s a necessary openness and respect, and even something like awe — that just strikes me a wise starting point for the creative work of our civic life as well.

I’m wondering, for those practices, where did you first encounter them as a tool in a collaborative process?

KW: I think a lot has come down to finding practical solutions for a need. And a lot of this is coming from my body. I’ve always been in the works I’ve created, because as a dancer I need to experience something in my body in order to understand what needs to happen, and what choices I need to be making.

In my early days directing in a company, I could step outside and watch and be like, Yes. No. Or, Yes, but slow down your thought process. But being inside the role of the dancer, I needed someone to tell me I was making decisions too fast. Because I couldn’t do both at once.

I realized earlier on in my practice that in order to do two things at once, I needed to develop a practice of duality. So I started to put duality practices into our morning warmup: how can I be thinking of the physical endings of my body while also seeing the birds eye view of my body? And that took so much control, because I’m really responsive and reactive.

But I also realize, when you talk about process and public life, that can be a really unhealthy way of being a person in the world. So I also had to develop these practices in my actual life, to be able to hold back feelings I may have in my body and have that bird's eye view in my real life as well. If something triggers me, I’m not just going to react in my body. If I was taking the director’s role, I wouldn’t want to see that either — that’s unhinged. Maybe there are times for unhinged on the stage, but that’s very designed and contained.

So I had to develop practices to practice that. I love a framework, like: when a text activates you, you wait 20 minutes to respond — that’s a framework I can follow. I think because I’m a choreographer, when I’m in the studio that’s already how I think, you know? I’m a container / framework person. And so figuring out how to build those practices into my life in some ways comes from choreography. And then sometimes I would learn a framework from the world, or from having to go through a mediation process with someone, and I’d be like, “Oh that’s actually really helpful. Are there ways to integrate that into the studio as well?”

AC: Totally, it’s all creative work at the end of the day: human relationship and stage production.

At the very beginning of the open rehearsal, you were reflecting back to 2018 when you first met Mike and Alan, and you said something really gorgeous: that you saw two people living their life in the way you were wanting to, in the relationship between the art they were making and how they were living. Could you say more about that?

KW: Yeah, exactly. And speaking of frameworks or tools to navigate being a person in the world, I think we all spend a lot of time on that and we like talking about it. So when we met, I think we had this cosmic moment of “Oh, we can do that together.” It’s very rare that you meet people who are willing to go to that line. Or maybe you don’t get the opportunity to, because when you are in a dance studio or in a process, that’s a level of intimacy you don’t just get meeting someone in a coffee shop, or honestly even with a casual friend.

AC: Do you have a shared litmus test for when something’s working as you’re creating this together?

KW: I think it’s a relational sense of alignment we’ve developed over time.

Part of the 2018/2019 commission was that we were co-directing together, which was new for me. When Mike and I started working together, I think I was very attuned to that shared leadership. But also, Mike didn’t have the experience of directing in this genre. I wanted him to feel a part of the dance making process, and he wanted me to feel a part of the music making process. So I suggested an infrastructure to be able to find alignment, to pose questions that helped us say, maybe we didn’t like this, or, could you consider the fact that you don’t like what I’m suggesting right now. To actually have that conversation.

And I think since, we’ve been able to build on that. This is where role reversal comes in. I’m like, “Mike I really want you to see this, because I want you to see if you like this direction we’re going.” But then also creating these opportunities for everybody.

When things feel right, my metaphor I use a lot for sensing energy — things can sometimes feel like your spine is out of whack, or your back is slightly off, and when you can just crack it into place, that’s alignment. And I think we can all sense that. And then you can invite languaging and ask people to make sure everyone is aligned before making a decision to go on.

AC: You were talking about how, as a choreographer, there’s this fluidity between the containers and frameworks you’re finding in the world and what you’re bringing into the studio, and vice versa. Going back to the role of the audience in an open rehearsal, as witness to your creative process, specifically: do you have hopes or curiosities about how they might pick up the practices you shared, and bring them into their own lives, especially in the world as it is now?

KW: I think we really do, and I think we learned a lot from The Sun Still Burns Here. Oftentimes in other practices, the curator plays a significant role and wall text is a big deal. And dance and live performance is such a visceral thing. Not to say visual art isn’t visceral; it totally is. But I think one of the things we lacked in The Sun Still Burns Here was getting people to feel what we were feeling, and to fully understand what we were attempting to do.

Now, I feel like we’re in this place where we’re like, Okay, we’re continuing this collaboration: what do we want people to go away with? What do we want people to feel? And also, what are we exploring? And how are we turning this into a question, or a statement, or a thesis in some way?

We honestly don’t know what that is right now. I think in a lot of ways, we brought in questions, we brought in practicalities of, Who’s here? What are our identities? What are our identity politics? What are the shared viewpoints? What are the universal viewpoints? Where are we at right now in the world, in our lives? These are all big things, but I think what’s revealing itself is this deeper thing.

So right now we’re creating this space for tonality, for a certain energy in the room with an audience. And we’re trying to figure out what that is. What is that space doing, how is that space creating a larger echo or imprint on the world or culture? I think that’s rooted in queerness and in non-traditional relationship dynamics. I think that’s rooted in our own privileges as white people. There’s a lot in there that’s hard to pinpoint, but is rooted in who we are as people, and who we are in the world.

AC: Everything you named, I think we can get so locked in our heads about, so philosophical about — and distanced from the lived realities. And the thing that’s so striking, so convincing about your process is having the starting point being in these body-based practices. I think that attunement to the body, its intuition and its stored memory, is both an old intelligence but a fresh intelligence I see others reaching for as a corrective that’s fertile and helpful.

KW: I made a work in 2017 that I would describe as more about creating space to tune into the mundane or the boring. The way the work manifested was really slow, like when you watch a slow movie, even if a lot is happening. Or something like watching a garden grow. If you remember [from the open rehearsal] that sort of desperate landscape where we were all doing our own task-based things — imagine that for a whole hour.

I do think that in taking the approach of psychological attractions — letting everything just be in the pot — that the greater conceptual meaning will start to reveal itself over time. But you actually need time for that to be revealed. And that’s why I’ve been so excited about starting this creation process with a residency. We’re probably going to use a lot of what we developed already. But in terms of what the work is, what the work means, how the work is resonating with people, I think it’s going to take some time to pinpoint.

AC: What does it look like from here?

KW: This was a big start, and we’ll need more creation. We’re planning more residencies for the next year in various places to keep visiting the work, spending time away from it, going in and out – kind of like how a painter paints and steps away, and then returns. It takes a long time to make the painting, and that’s kind of what we’re doing right now.

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It Makes Us Who We Are: Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks on Musical Improvisation, from Jazz to Punk Rock and Beyond / February 27, 2024 by Liquid Music

“What I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser.”

Tomeka Reid. Photo by Michael Jackson.

Damon Locks. Photo by Kristie Kahns.

Despite having trained in different genres, classical musical conservatory and punk rock, respectively, Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks forged a friendship in the Chicago music scene. Over the years, these two artists have incorporated improvisation into their work in unique ways. Finding themselves both part of the Walker’s 2023–24 Performing Arts season, Reid and Locks sat down to discuss how collaboration, community, and life experience continually informs and reforms their music.

Damon Locks: You know this, but not everyone reading this might know: you were my original idea as a member for Black Monument Ensemble.

Tomeka Reid: I know, right? Isn’t that funny?

DL: You, Nicole, and the percussionist I was working with at the time, Damien Thompson. We came so close, just the dates didn’t work.

TR: Learning that we’re both from D.C., and we both went to the same junior high school, but 10 years apart—that was kind of wild. It was these merging worlds for us: similar friend circle, similar appreciation for the different music worlds that we’re in. I was mostly focused with jazz and improvised music, and you were coming out of punk hardcore music. Everything’s expanded from there.

DL: What are you bringing to the Walker this season?

TR: It is a chance for me to bring together two groups that formed in different places. When I was living in Chicago around 2015, I got an opportunity with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival to write some music for a string group. That birthed this Tet idea. I love strings, I love improvising, and I like working with other string players. It was a perfect opportunity to explore that.

When I moved to New York in 2016, I didn’t have the finances to bring the Chicago people to New York, so I started a New York version of the same group. In that case, I did music that was in response to some of my mother’s visual art. I’ve always wanted to record both of those works as well as possibly write a new book, and that is what I’ll be doing at the Walker. I feel really honored that I can combine both these groups.

It will be 16 pieces, and Conductor Taylor Binum is going to be doing some of the conducting There will be composed music, but then also moments [of] string improvisation, because what I love about this group is that everyone is a leader, and everyone has their own unique improvising style. Everybody’s an improviser. Oftentimes you can work with string players who may not be comfortable with improvising. I’m excited to have this whole band of string players that really want to get in there with the improvisation. How about you?

continue reading at walkerart.org

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Sun Dogs: A new film-sound series debuts / October 12, 2022 by Katie Hare

A new series from Liquid Music, Sun Dogs asks inspired composer and filmmaker collaborators to create short-format films with new music for live orchestra.

Typically, a composer responds to a director's images and ideas in a film scoring capacity, or a director is engaged by a musician to create a music video. Sun Dogs explores how stories can be told (both musically and visually) from equal footing. The series’ title is inspired by the rare atmospheric phenomenon that appears like a doorway to another realm. Sun Dogs are mysterious and enlightening at the same time. These films give audiences a glimpse into stories that are more than meet the eye.

The first three offerings premiere Oct 14-16 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by CSO Creative Partner Matthias Pintscher and presented in partnership with the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, merging groundbreaking creators and first-time collaborators.

Composer Daniel Wohl and GRAMMY-winning composer/vocalist Arooj Aftab join forces with filmmaker Josephine Decker (Shirley, Madeline’s Madeline); sound artist Rafiq Bhatia (Son Lux) pairs up with internationally recognized Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives); and Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) collaborates with French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics) and Paris-based publisher and filmmaker Manon Lutanie.

Ahead of the world premieres, we checked in with participants to get a sense of their work and the collaborative process. Continue reading for a glimpse into what to expect Oct 14-16.

Rise, Again | Daniel Wohl, Arooj Aftab, and Josephine Decker

Growing out from improvisations, Rise, Again’s film and music feature an intimate repetition that layers the individual with community. Four mothers raise their four different children with fortitude and love when faced with eviction. A deep rhyming of experience inspired the form. Created collaboratively with women supported by Upward Bound House, the concept emerged from four completely unique experiences that resonated so deeply the collaborators felt they were listening to each other share their own stories.

A note from Daniel Wohl:

“Arooj, Josephine and I held several brainstorming sessions that led to numerous ideas, some of which we didn’t end up pursuing. During this process it became clear to us that we needed to take into account perspectives and practical considerations that none of us were accustomed to. For example, we had to consider what was possible for film while also taking into account how the music would be performed live by an orchestra. Over the next few months, we each went our own way to come up with material.

One of the most exciting moments for me was when we learned that the demos Arooj and I created were being played by Josephine for the women she was working with in her film. Bringing the music so directly into the filming process really gives it an extra significance for me as a composer. From the feedback that was conveyed to me, the music seemed to resonate deeply with their stories and became part of their conceptualization of the final film.”

arooj_hires_01 credit @alxmvh (2) (1).jpeg

JOSEPHINE_DECKER_Photo by Eric Rudd_Indiana University.jpg

ON BLUE | Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Rafiq Bhatia

On Blue is a companion piece to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2018 film Blue, where a woman (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) lies awake at night, and nearby, a set of theatre backdrops unspools itself, unveiling two alternate landscapes. Upon the woman's blue sheet, a flicker of light reflects and illuminates her realm of insomnia. In On Blue, Weerasethakul imagines that Jenjira's insomniac fire will eventually die down, and she will be able to sleep.

Upon encountering Weerasethakul’s work, Rafiq Bhatia was immediately inspired by the glacial pacing and patience. “Though there isn’t much music in Apichatpong’s films, the environmental sound always feels intrinsic, even primary. Above all, there is a sense that Apichatpong creates from a place of deep engagement with his own memory and experience, a practice with which I strongly identify,” he shared.

“On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon’s consistency. It’s predictable yet brings tremendous change.”

A note from Apichatpong Weerasethakul:

“I reflect on the past years as we appear to have slept through the pandemic. Perhaps we are ready to wake up. On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise. As uncertainty becomes the norm, I treasure this phenomenon's consistency. It's predictable yet brings tremendous change.

Revisiting Blue was like re-observing and rearranging a dream before dawn. Perhaps our brains are hurriedly retreating their fragmented scenes, storing them in the shadows before consciousness emerges. I saw a blue sheet crumble like a dream. An old cinema set was reanimated for the last performance.

When first light reaches the eyes, there is a profound sense of clarity. The color blue was giving way to the morning gold. Dream and reality coexist, memories and conditionings fade. Even the word "blue" has lost its meaning. In an instant, we are newborns with no ties to anything.”

A note from Rafiq Bhatia:

“During my first viewing of the visuals for On Blue, I heard music in the gestures I saw on screen. Using instruments built from orchestral sound sources (often quiet actions intensely magnified), I set about searching for what I had imagined. Through careful tuning and timbral changes, I tried to let the musical sonorities melt like the sheets on screen. Harmonies unravel, flex, ripple and relax like their visualized counterparts. Is the state of dreaming always tranquil, or are dreams volatile, like waking life?

Residing in densely populated New York, I feel the city experiencing the night together in phases, despite the asynchronicity of our REM cycles. Here, as in the jungle where Jenjira sleeps, environmental sounds seep into our experience of the night, guiding us along the journey towards wakefulness. I sought to craft the music so that the birds, frogs, insects, and pulley sounds from Apichatpong’s film would function like members of the orchestra—or even as featured soloists—while the CSO’s instruments and Nina Moffitt’s playback voices could conjure the aviaries and ocean waves within Jenjira’s dreaming mind.

“To my ear, the sounds of the softest techniques convey a hyperreal intimacy, vulnerability and ephemerality, as they are usually rich with evidence of the delicate human action it took to produce them.”

When I was presented with this opportunity to create new work for a full orchestra, one of the things that excited me most was the chance to explore the very quietest end of the sonic spectrum. To my ear, the sounds of the softest techniques convey a hyperreal intimacy, vulnerability and ephemerality, as they are usually rich with evidence of the delicate human action it took to produce them. There is, of course, a relationship between the volume and timbre (or “character”) of a quiet sound, but many instruments playing quietly at once can convey the latter without being as constrained by the former. From the outset, I imagined a full dynamic range of textures that could still feel hushed when they grew immense, where even mountainous accumulations might retain a whispering, ghostly quality at their apex. But as I began to work, I was reminded of what William Blake once wrote: “without contraries there is no progression.” It’s after thunder that I most appreciate the stillness of a soft rain.

I am grateful that this commission provided an occasion to deepen my collaboration with orchestrator Taylor Brook, as well as Nina Moffitt, Chris Pattishall, and Ian Chang, who made invaluable contributions to the electroacoustic component of the piece. Those who listen closely may notice nods to György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

I look forward to experiencing On Blue as it comes to life on stage each night in Cincinnati. As Apichatpong wrote to me in an early correspondence: “Silence is never repeated.”

NAKED BLUE | Devonté Hynes, Mati Diop, and Manon Lutanie

Naked Blue features Oumy (age 13) who lives in Paris and trains as a dancer. In a film studio painted blue, she dances in front of mirrors and salutes an imaginary audience.

“It also gestures to the transition from childhood to adolescence, wakefulness to trance, sadness to its overcoming—as well as to the interstitial, tenuous nature of such passages.”

“Oumy is thirteen and the daughter of Valeria, a close friend of ours. Her dance training, particularly in ballet, is intensive, and we have long wanted to film her. This collaboration with Dev Hynes for a commission from the CSO was an occasion to finally work with her,” shared Mati and Manon.

“The fragile, ambiguous nature of the images evokes archival footage of rehearsals for a school show or film shoot. It also gestures to the transition from childhood to adolescence, wakefulness to trance, sadness to its overcoming—as well as to the interstitial, tenuous nature of such passages. It is also a portrait of Oumy at a specific moment in her life, a moment that is deeply moving to us and that we wanted to capture. The dramatic intensity of Dev’s musical composition, performed by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, accompanies Oumy’s movements, mirroring their magnetism, cohesion, and radical autonomy.”

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danielwohlmusic.com
aroojaftabmusic.com
josephinedecker.com
rafiqbhatia.com
kickthemachine.com
@devhynes
@matidiop
@manon_lutanie

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What is Liquid Music: A Playlist / June 16, 2022 by Patrick Marschke

By Liquid Music blog contributor Patrick Marschke

*Liquid Music Graphic and Logo by* *Andrew Jerabek* *from the 15.16 season*

A few weeks ago our friends at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum asked us to curate a playlist for their communal gathering areas in their beautiful riverside building in Winona, Minnesota. The collaboration felt like an immediate fit, and not just because of the serendipity of our names (a museum featuring the art of water partnering with a series called Liquid Music feels stranger than fiction). Below the surface of the obvious mnemonic connection, it became clear that the impetus for our collaboration seems to have more to do with MMAM’s mission to “push the boundaries of what marine art can be,” an idea that’s closely tied to the essence of Liquid Music.

*MMAM’s atrium, where you can currently hear our Liquid Playlist.*

As any person who has tried to put together the perfect playlist for a friend or crush can tell you, it is a subtle art and can be deceptively challenging. Early in the process Liquid Music’s founder and curator Kate Nordstrum pointed out that the challenge of creating a water-themed playlist is not so different from curating a special project series within an orchestral institution: “It’s not about simply ‘fitting in’ to the constraints, but actually embracing them — using the unique parameters as a way to pull yourself out of preconceived notions. It has always been something that I actively seek out, and often results in surprising and novel ideas and opportunities.” After all: a Liquid is a fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a constant volume independent of pressure… (thanks Wikipedia).

At the core of any great music series or playlist is a story. As Kate and I embarked on the work to put together a collection of marine-inspired music for MMAM, we realized that there was an important question to answer before its story would become clear: What is Liquid Music?

Back in 2017 I skirted around actually answering this question in an introduction to an interview with Kate about the origins of Liquid Music:

“‘Liquid Music’ has become its own adjective, especially for longtime followers of the series. You’ve probably caught yourself listening to something and thinking ‘this would be perfect for Liquid Music’ or maybe been caught with a lack of words when describing the series to a friend who has somehow remained unfamiliar. Perhaps you have discovered an artist and have watched their career flourish since. Each year the definition of ‘Liquid Music’ gets refined but no less familiar and useful.”

Avoiding answering the question is easy to do: Liquid Music can feel as slippery as its name implies. While I think everything I said there still holds up, I don’t think that this description really “defines” anything. 5 years later, I think I am ready to try again. So what are the specific components of Liquid Music that make it Liquid Music?

THE SYMBOLIC

If we are going to truly boil it down to the symbolic “Liquid Music” is simply a name for a concert series. It happens to be a very good name. So good I found that I never even thought to question it — upon first hearing about the series it just made sense. Maybe you had a similar experience.

Eventually, I thought to ask about the origins of the name: It emerged from an intense conversation and visioning session with Kate and composer and frequent LM collaborator William Brittelle. Most importantly, after a quick online search, they were surprised to discover that the phrase hadn’t been used yet and the domain was miraculously available. And thus it came to be. The names’ origins feel quaint in an age where brand development is a billion-dollar industry. It is one of many right-time-right-place scenarios that seem almost predestined in hindsight, but it also speaks to the need for a forward-thinking music series like Liquid Music in the early 2010s.

Another important side of the semiotics of Liquid Music is its graphic identity. The series has had a distinct and sophisticated visual aesthetic from the outset. From the seasonal brochures, digital presence, and thoughtfully staged shows, Kate has been uncompromising in making sure that the look and feel of everything Liquid Music were and are as deliberate and refined as the work being presented.

Designer Andrew Jerabek has been integral to the look and feel of both print and digital assets along with developing the original Liquid Music logo. His detailed and tactile graphics aesthetically unified each season’s diverse set of projects, providing a subtle and necessary coherence throughout. The visceral and organic infrared photography GMUNK was utilized for the 17/18 season. In early 2020, longtime LM friend and collaborator Andrea Hyde refreshed the logo and look of Liquid Music for the new decade.

*Liquid Music Director, Curator, & Executive Producer Kate Nordstrum*

THE CURATION

Coordinating all of these collaborative aesthetic efforts is, of course, the curator herself: Kate Nordstrum. She is the visionary, the aspirational leader, and the true believer. It would be easy to say that Kate and her curation IS the series, but she would be the first to acknowledge that Liquid Music is in many ways a collaborative platform. Curation is putting a spotlight on artists, seeing the potential they might not quite see, and providing a context for that potential to flourish into something greater than anyone expected.

An underappreciated component of the curatorial process is helping others see that potential, which is made even more difficult when a project has yet to come into existence. There is a heroic effort that goes into every Liquid Music project description. The core motivating factor behind this is to serve that latent potential, even for projects in their most nascent form. Writing about music is hard: if it was easy to articulate the meaning of a work with words, then musicians probably wouldn’t have resorted to music in the first place. Liquid Music has always sought to provide a space to do the messy work of finding the words for the transcendent work of our featured artists.

A key space for this work has been the Liquid Music blog. I essentially learned how to write in this space, and am constantly flattered that my work is featured alongside incredible writers like Trever Hagen, Katie Hare, and Nick Lanser (to name a few) along with essays by and interviews with the countless unsurprisingly articulate Liquid Music artistic collaborators. In going through the archives as we prepared for our playlist duties I found an essay from MPR Classical Host Steve Seel that says in 40 words what it has taken me 1043 (so far), along with Liquid Language deserving of its own MMAM didactic:

“...And so, nothing is solid where the true experimenters of music work; ideas flow and crash into each other like waves, effortlessly. They shift their shape eternally depending on their ‘containers.’ The only constant in Liquid Music is motion. Fluidity.” — Steve Seel from his 2015 Liquid Music blog What Makes For Truly “Rebellious” Art?

*Steve Seel interviewing composer William Brittelle*

THE MUSIC

*From Liquid Music’s “Bedroom Community and Friends” show at the American Swedish Institute, a previous collaboration between LM and MMAM’s new Executive Director* *Scott Pollock*

As Steve so eloquently captured above, Liquid Music is the music — specifically the music of the boundary-defying featured artists. Their work challenges and transcends classification, striving for that which is just beyond, reaching into the unknown, and often arriving somewhere completely unexpected. But this music wouldn’t mean much without the dedicated audience that so graciously receives it. And it wouldn’t be possible without the venues, partners, donors, advocates, friends, families, interns, funders, sponsors, and countless other individuals — they all are integral to making Liquid Music what it is.

Liquid Music will continue to embrace its boundless fluidity. What better way to celebrate than with a Liquid Playlist!

Included are key LM Alumni and longtime friends of the series such as Nico Muhly (a pivotal player in Kate’s proto-Liquid Music endeavors at The Southern Theater), Helado Negro, Minneapolis-based Poliça, Saul Williams, Angélica Negrón, and many more!

Share any music you think deserves to be included on our Liquid Playlist on socials! Find a text version of the full track list here.

To hear the playlist in its intended setting, stop by The Minnesota Marine Art Museum sometime soon! And give them a follow if you’d like to hear about their upcoming exhibitions and events:

MMAM Website // Facebook // Instagram // Twitter // YouTube

*The* *Minnesota Marine Art Museum, located alongside the Mississippi in Winona, MN*

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UPCOMING LIQUID MUSIC EVENTS

To Find An Enduring Connection // Adam Tendler’s Inheritances / April 18, 2022 by Patrick Marschke

by Patrick Marschke

Collage from composer Darian Thomas's commissioned score, *We Don't Need to Tend This Garden. They're Wildflowers*

On its surface, the concept of inheritance touches on two out of the three of the most emotionally fraught words in the English language: Death and Money — with an extra serving of awkwardness, grief, class, and privilege. Just past its surface, inheritance sparks more philosophical and abstract questions: What have I inherited? What have we collectively inherited? What will we leave behind? What are we to do with the sins and spoils of our predecessors, literally or figuratively? Who is responsible when the recipient has no choice in the matter?

It is easy to avoid thinking about these questions and beguiling to find someone confronting them head-on. But pianist Adam Tendler doesn’t always process things like other people. It is this spirit of questioning and self-discovery that’s at the heart of his latest project titled Inheritances, a truly collaborative commission that used Adam’s own monetary and symbolic inheritance as a launching pad for 16 new works for piano, created by a broad spectrum of sound artists and composers.

Inheritances isn’t the first time that Adam has taken on a wildly ambitious, conceptual, and personal project. Upon graduating from music school, he decided that he wanted to perform in all 50 states. “I’d gone to [music] conservatory and I came out of it a ball of nerves. It almost made me more anxious as a performer,” he reflected over Zoom in April 2022, sitting in front of his piano, laptop propped where the sheet music normally goes. He knew that more school wasn’t the answer. His rationale was simple: all he needed was a simple “yes” — from a church, coffee shop, or hall. With the gradual accumulation of small yes’s, laser focus, and zero know-how, he made this seemingly unprecedented project happen, which he eventually turned into 88x50: A Memoir of Sexual Discovery, Modern Music and The United States of America, a book chronicling his journeys.

Inheritances began in 2019 when Adam's father died unexpectedly. By Adam’s own account, his relationship with his father at the time was complicated: “I wouldn't say we were estranged, but we didn't talk that much,” said Adam. “We talked maybe about two or three times a year, like on my birthday, or holidays…” Adam was pretty close with his dad as a kid, even after his parent’s divorce. But this closeness faded over time in a vague and blurry way that made the eventual experience of his fathers’ passing similarly obfuscated.

“With his absence, there was definitely a sense of confusion. It wasn't like when some people die, what the survivors are left with is this hole, this gaping sort of loss and absence. I didn't have that. I know that sounds really weird. What I lost was access. It was sort of like, oh, well, I guess a part of my life with this person is now over and all the things we shared… that book is closed,” said Adam. At the time he didn’t know anything about his father’s financial situation, but when he eventually heard that there was an inheritance, he had a feeling that it “was gonna be something bizarre.”

“It wasn't a lot of money. And it was in cash,” explained Adam. “It was handed to me in a manila envelope by my stepmom in a Denny's parking lot in Lebanon, New Hampshire, the same border crossing of Vermont and New Hampshire where I was transferred between parents as a kid.” Initially, Adam didn’t do anything with the money. “There seemed to be something sort of sad about letting this symbolic money go into something as stupid as like debt, or subway fares, or rent. It seemed weird for it to just disappear like all my other money disappears,” he said.

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A post shared by Adam Tendler (@adamtendler)

It wasn’t until a few months later at a concert that he had one of those simple, profound, frustratingly platitude-like thoughts that seem to only hit with such force in the depths of emotional strife: “Music is Amazing!” And what better way to celebrate the transformative and cathartic potential of music than by commissioning work with this symbolic cash? So, without a venue, premiere date, record deal, or any other practical justification for the project, Inheritances came to be. Adam started to reach out to composers, asking them if they would write a piece on inheritance, paid from the inheritance he had just received. Incredibly, every single artist that Adam asked to participate in Inheritances said “yes,” materializing, as Adam puts it, “the coolest f**king lineup I could have ever imagined. There's not a single person that I am not stoked about.” Liquid Music signed on to premiere the work and Adam was able to secure matching funds to ask even more artists to participate.

Adam emphasized to all the artists involved that the commissioned works didn’t have to be about him, his father, death, grief, or anything prescriptive. The pieces he eventually received are as diverse as the set of artists behind them. However, to Adam’s surprise, there still does seem to be something tying the works together. “These pieces all have really stunning restraint,” he said. “It’s like they knew that they could actually do something very, very personal and be safe with me.”

Grief expert J. William Worden suggests that there are no set stages to the grieving process and that we approach grieving through tasks that can happen in any order. Those tasks are:

To accept the reality of the loss
To process the pain of grief
To adjust to a world without the deceased
To find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life

Unbeknownst to him, Adam’s outreach to Inheritances’ composers perfectly encapsulates the fourth and most important task of grieving — finding an enduring connection with the deceased while finding a way to move forward. As he wrote in his initial email to the artists, he was seeking “to plant that cash in the soil of something that may actually grow and—if you'll forgive me—live on.”

It is not at all that surprising that the collaborators, when asked to reflect on inheritance in a time with no shortage of grief, responded reflectively with such sincere authenticity. In his own unique way, Adam Tendler has invited us all to participate in the transmutation of his extremely personal experience of ambiguous loss into a beautifully communal ritual of enduring connection — providing us all an overdue opportunity to utilize the emotionally alchemic potential of music to process our immeasurable and nebulous griefs. Accepting, processing, adjusting, and finding hope…

Join us Saturday, April 23 for ADAM TENDLER: INHERITANCES and hear the premiere of brand new works by commissioned composers Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, Laurie Anderson, inti figgis-vizueta, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Angélica Negrón, Christopher Cerrone, Marcos Balter, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Scott Wollschleger, Mary Prescott, Timo Andres and John Glover.

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Liquid Music + National Gallery of Art + yMusic // "True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870" / April 8, 2020 by Katie Hare

Last summer, the National Gallery of Art enlisted Liquid Music curator Kate Nordstrum as “guest artistic director” to illuminate works within their transporting exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870. In the months that followed, Nordstrum and her selected ensemble yMusic had the immense pleasure of immersing themselves in paintings by artists who sought to capture light and atmosphere in breathtaking landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes. We want to share with you their thoughtful program, which would have taken place this Sunday, April 19, with images from the exhibition and musical accompaniment.

Fritz Petzholdt, Tree Crowns in a Forest (Ariccia?), c. 1832, oil on paper, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, Gift of John Schlichte Bergen and Alexandra van Nierop, Amsterdam — Fritz Petzholdt, *Tree Crowns in a Forest (Ariccia?)*, c. 1832, oil on paper, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, Gift of John Schlichte Bergen and Alexandra van Nierop, Amsterdam

The Program

Tessellations by Gabriella Smith
Cribbea by yMusic
Peter Inn by yMusic
Music in Circles by Andrew Norman
Zebras by yMusic
Flood by yMusic
Year of the Horse by Sufjan Stevens/arranged by Rob Moose
Their Stenciled Breath by Caroline Shaw
Maré by Gabriella Smith

A Note From Liquid Music Curator Kate Nordstrum (Guest Artistic Director)

yMusic is one of the first ensembles I worked with as a fledgling curator in 2010. A decade on, I continue to be inspired by the way they navigate the ever-evolving landscape of new music. As individuals and as a group, they are dynamic, hungry to share their musical passions, and deeply emotionally engaged in any project they commit to. It’s been a pleasure to “grow up” together in music and to shape this special program for the National Gallery of Art. We hope that it illuminates the exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 and inspires the imagination. Many thanks to Danielle Hahn for inviting me to take on this guest artistic director role and to yMusic for their creativity and openness.

A Note From yMusic

As an instrumental chamber ensemble, we spend a significant amount of rehearsal time exploring timbres and colors. Wrangling six individual performances, a tangled mix of strings, winds and brass into one cohesive performance requires some effort, and often we lead each other to discover new sounds by describing our ideas with visual prompts.

Visual thinking has always been a hallmark of our process, and we’d like to think it shows; after many of our concerts, audience members come to us and can vividly describe a scene that unfolded in their imagination while hearing us play.

We were immediately excited when Liquid Music curator Kate Nordstrum approached us with the idea of programming a concert for the National Gallery that would map our repertoire to specific works of art. It felt very natural for us to tie our repertoire to paintings from the en plein air tradition. Our rhythmic patterns interweave as though they are streets in a city, rows of farming, or leaves on a tree. Sometimes shocking and even violent dissonance occurs and evokes jagged rocks or the threat of a distant volcano. Surprising textures, unusual instrumental combinations and unconventional sound techniques can convey a hot summer day or a cool breeze by the water, perhaps even an ocean spray by a grotto.

We have had a blast matching each piece on this program with specific landscape styles based on our experiences of inhabiting these soundscapes. But as music is ephemeral and intangible, we invite you to let your imagination run wild! Bring your own personal canvas along with your open ears and paint the landscape of your imagination.

Rocks, Trees, Caves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Tessellations

Tessellations is a short piece about patterns – patterns that fit into each other like an Escher print, additive patterns, subtractive patterns, patterns that disintegrate and dissolve into chaos and then re-form. –Gabriella Smith

Achille-Etna Michallon, French, 1796 – 1822, The Oak and the Reed, 1816, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge — Achille-Etna Michallon, French, 1796 – 1822, *The Oak and the Reed*, 1816, oil on canvas, The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

Nocturnes
yMusic
Cribbea; Peter Inn

Cribbea and Peter Inn represent yMusic’s first foray into composition. The melodies, textures, harmonic progressions, and form of these works were written collaboratively by all six members of the group. Mining the ensemble’s fluency in multiple musical idioms, as well as their skills as arrangers, improvisers, and interpreters of contemporary music, these pieces mark a new chapter for the sextet as it enters its second decade.

Baron François Gérard, French, 1770 – 1837, A Study of Waves Breaking against Rocks at Sunset, oil on millboard, Private Collection, London — Baron François Gérard, French, 1770 – 1837, *A Study of Waves Breaking against Rocks at Sunset*, oil on millboard, Private Collection, London

Capri/Naples/Volcanos
Andrew Norman (b. 1979)
Music in Circles

Music in Circles is one of yMusic’s all-time favorite pieces to play. The folklore surrounding the work is that Andrew Norman composed it one hot New York City summer at his writing desk, which had been placed as close as possible to the life-saving air conditioner. Stumped by writers block, he started transcribing the sounds of the machine, ultimately crafting a fanciful piece that whips silence into gorgeous streaks of color and melody. Andrew writes music that is nearly impossible for performers to phone in. We can never resist the raw power and emotion in this piece, which can leave us nearly breathless. We love where this work takes us, and while it was inspired by a machine, it’s just as easy to imagine creaking ships, whipping winds and stormy seas.

Johann Jakob Frey, Swiss, 1813 – 1865, Cloud Study (4), oil on paper, mounted on canvas, Private Collection, London — Johann Jakob Frey, Swiss, 1813 – 1865, *Cloud Study (4)*, oil on paper, mounted on canvas, Private Collection, London

Giuseppe de Nittis, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1872, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris — Giuseppe de Nittis, *Eruption of Vesuvius*, 1872, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

Capri/NapLes/Volcanos
yMusic
Zebras; Flood

Zebras and Floods are two of the newest pieces we have written as a group. Zebras was initiated during a recording session at Red Bull Studios, continued at a writing session at my apartment, and finished during a residency at USC. We debuted the song at the Bower Ballroom in January. Flood was written with the dual goals of having uptempo instrumental and a virtuosic feature for Alex Sopp. We purposefully wrote the bulk of the piece for just trumpet, bass clarinet, violin and viola and left room for the flute and cello to engage in conversant and dueling material. –Rob Moose

Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Sufjan Stevens (b. 1975)
Year of the Horse (arr. Rob Moose)

Year of the Horse, Year of the Dog, Year of the Dragon, and Year of the Boar are some of yMusic’s favorite pieces to perform. They started their lives as electronic works on Sufjan Steven’s 2001 record, Enjoy Your Rabbit, and were adapted by myself and a variety of other arrangers for string quartet in 2008. When yMusic first formed and was in desperate need of repertoire, I brought in a new arrangement of Year of the Dog as a candidate for our very first concert. We loved it, and it quickly achieved a consistent presence in our live shows. In the decade since that first performance, we have adapted and enjoyed many pieces from that album. yMusic’s Year of the Dog and Year of the Boar were recently collected on a limited-edition vinyl collaboration with visual artist Gregory Euclide. Tonight’s performance of Year of the Horse will be seamlessly connected to its programmatic neighbor, Their Stenciled Breath from Carbone Shaw’s Draft of a Highrise.

Léon-François-Antoine Fleury, The Tomb of Caecilia Metella, c. 1830, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.16 — Léon-François-Antoine Fleury, *The Tomb of Caecilia Metella*, c. 1830, oil on canvas, Gift of Frank Anderson Trapp, 2004.166.16

Rome and the Roman Campagnia
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High-Rise

Their Stenciled Breath from Draft of a High Rise by Caroline Shaw started out in the composer’s mind as a riff on architectural renderings and their depictions of people - evocative yet surreal, uncanny valley-esque figures interacting with nearly there concrete and steel constructions flanked by gauzy flora. The piece, however, was being constructed during the last presidential election, and when texted about the work, Caroline admitted, “it’s not a political piece exactly, but more like my response (both consciously and subconsciously) to the political shitstorm of fall 2016... so I guess that would qualify.”

The work lives in a funny place and time; it’s a solid concept distracted by current events - something that feels very familiar these days. –Nadia Sirota

Michel Dumas, French, 1812 – 1895, Fountain in the Roman Campagna, c. 1838 – 1840, oil on canvas, mounted on wood panel, Private Collection, London — Michel Dumas, French, 1812 – 1895, *Fountain in the Roman Campagna*, c. 1838 – 1840, oil on canvas, mounted on wood panel, Private Collection, London

Water: Coasts, Falls, Waves
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)
Maré

Maré is the Portuguese word for “tide”. I wrote Mare while in residence at Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil. The artist colony was right on the beach of a beautiful island in the Baía de Todos os Santa’s called Ilha de Itaparica. The slope of the beach into the ocean was very gradual, so the horizontal distance between low and high tide was extreme. When the tide was high, it would come all the way up almost to the gates of the artist colony. And when it was low, it would retreat far away, leaving behind a huge expanse of beautiful beach. So the rhythm of the tides became integrated into the rhythm of our daily lives. Maré is inspired by these tidal movements and the way in which they became a part of me during my time there. –Gabriella Smith

August Kopisch, German, 1799 – 1853, View of Capri, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris — August Kopisch, German, 1799 – 1853, *View of Capri*, oil on wood panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

Read and view more paintings from the National Gallery of Art’s “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870” here.

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Words & Sound: An Interview with Dorothea Lasky / November 15, 2019 by Kate Nordstrum

By Liquid Music blog contributor Katie Hare

Ted Hearne’s new work, In Your Mouth premieres at Walker Art Center Nov 21-22 in a theatrical, 12-song suite. The source material and inspiration behind the work comes from the lush, stinging poetry of writer, author, and educator Dorothea Lasky. Along with a quintet and a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, Lasky’s words will be vocalized throughout the piece in an evening reflecting a complicated, loving mediation of the personal and domestic, while savoring the depths of wildness within. Featuring an introduction written by Ted Hearne, this interview with Dorothea delves into her background, the relationship of words and sound, and her collaboration with Hearne.

a note by Ted Hearne:

I first came across Dottie's work in 2016 and was instantly struck by the simplicity of the language – her poems just felt like song lyrics – but also the complicated and ambiguous identities, the dark and tumultuous sense of self, and the rich worlds of different "I"s her poems seemed to be able to harness and hold next to each other.

What does it mean to be wild? My first impulse to set this text was driven by an unironic identification with this idea that the wildness within could be embraced more fully. Perhaps I've never felt more drawn to set a text earnestly because I resonated with the feeling that I was keeping a true part of myself from the rest of the world. Or was the rest of the world holding me back?

“Everyone keeps me from my destiny
Keeps me from it
And keeps me locked away from beauty
And they can’t feel my beauty
In me reaching out
Like glass into itself
And everyone keeps me from myself
Cause the self they had imagined
Was flesh and bone
And this flesh I am is glass”

— Dorothea Lasky

As I started setting these poems for myself to sing, all sorts of intriguing complications set in. Funny how words that felt so empowering to read, and felt empowering to hear in Lasky's voice at one of her readings, sounded differently to my own ears when I heard them sung in my voice. Who was I to be singing her words? Do the words change when I sing them as a different person? As a man singing words written by a woman? Could I assume to put her words in my mouth?

There's a complicated and fluid “I” in Lasky's poems, which seemed to reflect and nicely counteract these compounding questions of mine, and with Dottie's encouragement, that relationship is what led me through writing this piece.

Meet Dorothea lasky

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Lasky earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachussets Amherst. She is the author of Animal, a book of poetry lectures, and co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac with Alex Dimitrov. She has also written five full-length collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. Lasky now resides in New York, and is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Tell us a bit about your introduction to writing, and your journey into identifying as a writer.

I've been writing poetry since I was a little girl. When I was around 7, I started writing in a journal late at night because I didn't like going to sleep when my parents told me to. So, I've always written, but it took me a long time to identify as a writer or poet per se, because I tended to feel like the instinct was narcissistic and didn't help others. It has taken a long for me to realize that writing is capable of helping others, but I think being a teacher of writing has helped me feel the most comfortable in the role.

I’ve read that your earliest poems were meant to be spoken, and always about sound—the idea of a listener. Can you expand on how that idea has translated through your work over time? And perhaps, how it correlates with your collaboration with Ted Hearne?

I feel that my poems are still meant to be spoken. Sound is the biggest motivator for me when it comes to writing and finishing a poem, and I value a word's sound over its meaning. I think because of this it is extra exciting that Ted has decided to put my poems to music, because there is (hopefully) a naturally musical quality to them that will be enhanced by his own beautiful sounds.

What is your thought process behind presenting your work (or any work)? How does space and audience affect your readings?

Space and audience is very important to my poetry readings, because I am a performative person. There is very little that excites me as much as the stage and I see a poem as the ultimate stage.

What inspired you to become an educator, and what do you like most about it?

My mother was a professor and I grew up going to her classes, so I feel an almost inevitability that I have ended up as one as well. I love the space of the classroom, because empowering people to be their most creative makes me endlessly happy.

How do you stay motivated to create?

I try as best as I can to create for the future. This motivates me because I know there will be future readers who will need me.

Screen Shot 2019-11-14 at 4.45.58 PM.png

We’re looking forward to your upcoming talk ‘The Strange Hexacomb’: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace, as well as your pre-performance reading at Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis! Can you tell us more about those? What are you most looking forward to on your visit?

Thank you so much! I am so looking forward to these events as well. The bee conversation will be so exciting to be a part of, because I will be talking with actual scientists and artists who do work on and with bees. I will love to learn from them and I have a feeling that the conversation will inspire me to write more about bees in the future. But the thing I am most looking forward to is hearing Ted's songs.

What have you been reading lately?

I have been obsessed with Shirley Jackson a lot the past few months and can't stop now.

Anything else you’d like Twin Cities audiences to know about you and your work before experiencing In Your Mouth?

Just that I would I thank them so much for having me in their beautiful town!

See Dorothea Lasky in The Strange Hexacomb: A Conversation on Bees and Creativity at Moon Palace Books on Thursday, Nov 21 at 1:30pm. She will also share a few poems and discuss her collaboration with Ted Hearne in a preconcert happy hour reading on Nov 21 at 7:00pm at Walker’s Cityview bar.

BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH NOV 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER
Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall

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Ted Hearne: exploring notions of truth, radical openness, and the promise of the unexpected / November 6, 2019 by Kate Nordstrum

by Liquid Music blog contributor Trever Hagen

“I think I’d like to call it In Your Mouth, actually,” Ted says, pondering a last minute name-change. We are discussing the composer’s forthcoming piece – originally titled Live Things – which will be performed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center November 21-22, 2019. One’s imagination attempts to portray what might take place based on Mr. Hearne’s brief description of the process of creating the piece. However, as with many other Ted Hearne performances, your mind’s eye will never be prepared for what is to come. Anticipation and expectation are difficult to conjure up when you are exploring unfamiliar aesthetic worlds. Partly this is due to Hearne’s up-ending of genre definitions but also in addition to his readiness to collaborate across media in order to realize wholly new performance experiences (and thereby illustrating a depth of expression that necessitates multiple forms of affect). Conveyed across multiple intersecting media currents – sound, language, visuals – and directed by theater veteran Daniel Fish, In Your Mouth calls out the promise of the unexpected.

This is Ted’s first full-length piece for Liquid Music, although he has performed and composed previously for the series. Liquid Music has highlighted the challenging and provoking world of contemporary composition in the Twin Cities, offering artists the opportunity to premiere new work. “I wanted to write my voice into the piece,” Ted explains. “This is the first time I have done this,” he continues. For the text to vocalize, Ted was attracted to the radical openness of the poetry of Dorothea Lasky. “I started really falling for Dottie's poetry in 2016, and it came to be something really special for me over the next year. I wrote a few individual songs before I started to think that I needed to dig deep and make a whole song cycle, and it wasn't until last year that I decided it needed to be an evening-length theatrical work.”

The twelve-song cycle of In Your Mouth will be performed by a quintet, which as Hearne admits, is basically like a rock band performing an album. Put this way, we already can imagine how Hearne draws on a wide range musical references to create a type of meta-language of music. Along with Hearne on voice and electronics, the composer will be joined by Ashley Bathgate (cello), Taylor Levine (electric guitar), Nathan Koci (keyboards), Diana Wade (viola) and Ron Wiltrout (drums).

Together with the quintet and Lasky’s poetry, the performance will incorporate a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, who has collaborated with Hearne on previous occasions. “In terms of working with these three incredible artists, they've each brought a different approach to my understanding of the poetry and of the project. Rachel's analogies in color, material and light; Daniel's patience in experiencing and processing the work in time, and looking to the text and the music to determine how the piece should be structured; and Dottie's big woolley ideas and colorful, sometimes contradictory, always poetic associations that really connected me to the sensuality and timeliness of her work.”

Young Voices

Mr. Hearne grew up in Chicago. His mother was a classically trained vocalist steeped in Baroque performance, which Hearne experienced as a child. Ted joined the Chicago Children’s choir where he learned and sang in a multi-cultural ensemble of voices and compositions. “My mom encouraged me to learn and perform music, but she didn't push me to do it even though it's the thing she loved most in the world. I credit her for getting me involved, but she knows me well enough to know I would probably balk at the time commitment and steep hill of work I'd have ahead of me if she had applied pressure,” Hearne states.

In addition to the fulfilling and grueling regimen of a composer-conductor (e.g., commissions, curations, teaching duties, writing and collaborations), Mr. Hearne finds time, as he will in Minneapolis, to perform as a vocalist. The nature and intent of how Ted sings is immediately gripping. For instance his 2007 Katrina Ballads features him performing the piece “Brownie you are doing a heck of a job” – as much as it is the musical materials that are captivating it is the execution that captures a sardonic energy, which serves to remind listeners of the out-of-touch FEMA response to the 2005 disaster. The place from where he is performing these words seems antagonistic, tongue-in-cheek: a curious vibe reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s disruption of expectations and the status quo. A crowning achievement for the social potential of new music. In this manner, Hearne’s patterned ability for taking mundane or everyday speech and musicalizing it recalls Harry Partch’s vocalisms transformed into musical worlds and phrases.

In addition to his score-writing credits, Hearne also performs in the duo R WE Who R We. “R WE WHO R WE is a band I have with Philip White – we co-write all the songs, so this is very different from almost anything else I do. Also, as a band, everything we write for R WE is for us and only us to perform, and actually we don't "write" anything down at all, although it's just as specific as any other compositions I've written.”

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Most recently, in 2019 Mr. Hearne released the album Hazy Heart Pump, which begins with the composition “For the Love of Charles Mingus”. Ted asserts: “Charles Mingus is one of my favorite composers and has been a huge inspiration for me – the way he controlled chaos, harnessed a feel and employed it abstractly, the beautiful sloppiness. My piece For the love of Charles Mingus for six violins, which is the first track on my new instrumental album, is inspired by the way the opening of "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" pulls the rug out from under you – setting you up to believe you're existing in one 'feel,' only to discover the music is actually being governed by a different time, one you can't hear at first. This underlying pulse that you can't always hear is a source of poetic inspiration for me.”

The Inspiration of Injustice

Being raised in Chicago certainly lends itself to the urban experience of inequality – homelessness next to skyscrapers. Segregation and access to education. Where life expectancy in one affluent neighborhood is ninety and 9 miles away residents live to sixty. Even though urban centers may offer the world’s residents greater economic opportunities and the potential to sustain large groups of people efficiently, we have still yet to uncover how to provide fair access to resources as governments attempt to organize people. As consistent with the history of the civilization, race, class and gender continue to be the lines upon which inequality falls. And for these reasons Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound.

Clearly these forms of injustice move Hearne’s compositions. Not by moralism but rather by Hearne’s witnessing of injustice – particularly social inequality and stratification – is the departure point from which he composes. How might the experience of gentrification be expressed in a score? How might reading the gruesome details of military conflict be composed? These musically-mediated emotional and cognitive responses to the contemporary world are manifest in Hearne’s work. The musical-social mélange of Mr. Hearne’s upbringing sensitized him to the plight of modern daily survival like many processors before – from John Steinbeck to Sebastião Salgado.

“Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound. ”

Plunderphonics and Compositions

We speak for a moment about using samples within orchestral arrangements – taking a listen to Hearne’s 2015 The Source we hear samples from “Mac the Knife” and Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”, popular sounds that filled the ambient radio waves of those years. These plunderphones – recognizable audio bits – serve to ground listeners by using the bits to reference the time of creation and consumption. It is a real-time experience of how culture builds on culture, how memory and associations provide context and coherency for the future. How plunderphonics runs counter to intellectual property and capital. This in itself makes Hearne’s pieces decidedly political by how and which sounds are used.

The use of samples shows how genre material is used to reference genre as a frame of perception. Ted draws on genre at the meta-level – using some of the signs and sounds of genre while using other musical languages. For example, electric distorted guitars sounds against a string quartet. The result is an intriguing soundscape of associations and the juxtapositions are entirely new contexts – the samples and composition create a type of infoscape (to borrow from Appadurai’s thoughts on how we encounter information, an Ives-ian presence of all materials happening at once) that remove the listener from the initial work into a more reflective and considered point of receiving information.

(Absolute) Truth

“Truth isn’t truth” – the phrase uttered by former New York mayor Rudy Giulliani sticks in one’s mind as emblematic of the 21st century social-techno reality of perception management. Indeed, ideas of absolute truth have been dissipating for nearly a century as scholars have brought to our attention fragmented realties and multi-centered universes of the post World War post-modernism world.

What might truth mean in contemporary times? Has it lost its absolute value? This leads us to the question, “Can music lie?” which perhaps might feel like an absurd thought but one that is perhaps relevant in the so-called post-truth world of media and information. “Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you,” he continues. Hearne speaks about how music has allowed him to explore notions of truth and explore other cultures. Indeed, music is precisely this pathway between peoples, places and cultures. And for this reason, music has the propensity to be movingly political.

“Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you.”

Hearne is not hesitant to call his work political. His labeling of his music is an indication of the hyper self-awareness that comes with contemporary identity politics, news cycles, pastiche ideologies, and an informed sense of political agency. Hearne’s work has decidedly fallen upon what many call ‘political’ because of the content it uses: 2015’s The Source, 2018’s Sounds from the Bench. Political, as such, emerges as a comment or presentation upon information and events. ‘Political music’ occupies a different social space than the ‘politics of music’ – the latter being the zone of censorship, discrimination and stigma. The sometimes unintended social reactions to music. In addition to the content, Hearne reveals where the politics emerges from: his response to information. The role of the witness.

Sounds from the Bench, 2018 — *Sounds from the Bench,* 2018

The Source reveals an emotional response to the information leaked by Chelsea Manning (as opposed to say a composer taking this information and then writing a piece that is intently conveying a political position). Sounds from the Bench is a piece based on the Supreme Court oral arguments of Citizens United, which gave corporate entities personhood by granting them legal rights as people. Sounds from the Bench was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which was given that year to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn.’ Hearne, no doubt grateful for the placement in the prestigious prize’s shortlist, commented, however, about the exclusionary practice of the award against people and music of color.

Aesthetically, Sounds from the Bench uses voices and electrified instruments to underpin the line between humans and non-humans. That is novel about Ted’s politics: it is something fresh but also reflected in political discourse nowadays – the subjective nature of truth or rather how we respond to truth, how machines are entering further into our daily lives, how political governance is failing at organizing social needs of communities. In other words, Ted’s music is not a truth-claim but an impression of the truth, and this impression is what is communicated musically.

Musical Pathways

So what is socially engaging music? Is there any music that is not? Or is it that Mr. Hearne’s music attempts to connect the fields of society and aesthetics in a way that we do not commonly encounter? Ted’s music has been touted as such. The label is curious because Ted’s music seems to highlight that however we once thought of the autonomy of music from social forces (that 19th century notion), it clearly shaped and is shaping, of the social forces around. In other words, every music is socially engaging by virtue of it being music – music being a social practice.

Music leads the way for our social explorations. Aesthetic risks, challenges and comfort involved in much of Hearne’s music. To dwell on the trope of being “ahead of one’s time” asserts music’s bullish properties: Hearne’s music is not reflecting society, it is actively showing us a way forward. That finger that music is point back at us is, in fact, leading the way.

Still from Blue Falling ©2019 by Rachel Perry

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Finding Freedom in the Format // An interview with Ashwini Ramaswamy / October 30, 2019 by Kate Nordstrum

by Liquid Music Blog Contributor Patrick Marschke

There often seems to be a paradox at work in the world of Western classical music. How is it possible for orchestras and classical music organizations to stay relevant and contemporary while preserving and venerating music that was created decades and sometimes centuries ago? In response to this dilemma, one of the primary missions of Liquid Music over the course of the past 8 seasons has been to discover and showcase all that is new and alive in the world of classical music. Yet, is this perceived tension between the binaries of new versus old, contemporary versus classical, and boundary-pushing versus tradition-bound a uniquely “Western” point of view?

For many music cultures and traditions, exploring the past through vibrant contemporary art practices while respecting lineage and heritage is standard procedure. In the Twin Cities we have been lucky enough to have one such institution in our community since 1992: Ragamala Dance Company, which approaches the South Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam as a living, breathing language that speaks about the contemporary human experience. Ragamala’s Ashwini Ramaswamy is pushing this mentality even further with her Liquid Music commissioned work Let The Crows Come, premiering November 8–9 at The Lab Theater in Minneapolis.

The work takes place in three unique choreographic worlds: Ramaswamy’s section explores her take on Ragamala’s specific lineage of Bharatanatyam, while dancer/choreographers Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren interpolate Ramaswamy’s movements and gestures through their own distinct and refined schools of movement. Similarly, each of the three sections of solo dance is accompanied by uniquely composed sonic worlds: a Carnatic chamber ensemble consisting of mridangam, voice, and violin; Brent Arnold’s electro-acoustic approach to cello; and Jace Clayton’s live sampling, acousmatic, and DJ aesthetic.

Jace Clayton’s research around digital music culture seems particularly salient to this work and for that reason scattered throughout the conversation below you’ll find quotes from Jace’s book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, which deeply resonated with Ramaswamy’s creative process. Both the book and Let The Crows Come challenge readers and audiences to embrace the idea that no art form is frozen in time, and that artists will continue to find freedom within their framework.

“If this poetry from 2000 years ago is still relevant and we can layer it with something that you might connect with now then we can directly show that past, present, and future are interconnected.” — Ashwini Ramaswamy

[This interview took place on October 14, 2019, and has been edited for clarity and conciseness.]

Patrick Marschke: So, where is the project at at this point?

Ashwini Ramaswamy: All the choreography is done for the dancers: Berit Ahlgren, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, and I. We've been working for about a year, just in little spurts. Now the main big “to do” is integrating dance and music.

I leave on Sunday to meet with all the musicians in Akron, Ohio, to the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. It'll be a chance to see how everything sounds and how it looks on stage. It's also the first time that everyone's getting together for the show. Jace [Clayton], unfortunately, can't make it to that but he'll Skype in. It's my hope that there'll be some opportunities for overlapping musicians within sections. Up until this residency, I've only worked with a very rough recording of my section. Brent and Jace are still composing, and they need to see the dance to bring everything to life. It's going to be very cool to see the dynamics at play after next week and then how it evolves as the piece tours.

PM: I happened to be at your work-in-progress conversation at The Parkway last winter — It seemed like even at that point the overall conceptual framework was really strong, so it could hold up to things moving around within that and lots of exciting development.

AR: Yeah, there's a lot that I'm excited about because it's been in my head for so long. I'm kind of excited for the unknowns, which is a lot of what we're going to encounter next week.

PM: What is the specific orchestration for the three sections?

AR: So far the thinking is Brent will be the instrumental constant amongst the three sections. He won't play in every single part of every section but because all the effects he creates on his cello, he can work in both the electronic and acoustic realms of the music and can bridge the two worlds together. What we did at our Baryshnikov Arts Center residency last year in New York, when Brent came in for the first time, we had an opening song where he played his cello like the tanpura instead of having the drone box, which ended up being really cool. Even if it's just something as subtle as that, it adds a different texture.

For my solo, we have Carnatic vocals by Roopa Mahadevan, Carnatic violin by Arun Ramamurthy, and mridangam/ghatam/kanjira by Rohan Krishnamurthy. Then the second section is Brent's piece, which I know will definitely at least incorporate some of the percussion and probably violin, too. As of right now, Jace is basically DJing the third section so that there's still the live component. Depending on how everything sounds Jace will be sampling earlier sections and potentially performing live with The Carnatic ensemble as well.

You have to be very careful about mixing genres in a way that's not going to be obvious, cheesy, or appropriative. Everything has to feel really comfortable with each other. And when you don't have a ton of time, you want to make sure that it doesn't look like they're putting something on top of something else.

Something that I really want to try is to change the order of the dances from night to night so that it's not always going from Carnatic to classical to contemporary — or whatever you want to call each of the sections. The terms don’t really do it justice. Ideally, we wouldn’t necessarily know what the order is going to be until the day of the performance. So as an audience member, just understanding like, "oh, this could be in any order. What would that look like?" and knowing that it's malleable, is exciting to me.

PM: There's a really good quote in Jace Clayton’s book that applies to what we are talking about. He was talking about a completely different genre of music but he said

"The seeming effortlessness with which lifelong musicians summon voices from their instruments always takes my breath away. A guitar, in my hands, is just a strangely shaped piece of wood, a book in a language I can’t read. I whipped out my phone to grab some video, then my thumb froze above the touch screen. If I recorded it, I’d never watch it. These unrepeatable moments are as throwaway as they are priceless — they have to be. There is value in being free and as lost as all the music before Edison. Improvisation gives lightness to history’s weight" (pg. 236, Uproot).

You are obviously very studied in Bharatanatyam and part of a very long lineage, but it seems like the modularity with this specific piece lightens the weight of all of that.

AR: Exactly. Then you get that sense of "the unknown" as I mentioned earlier. As an audience member that's exciting.

PM: Yeah, there's a risk that is perceivable as well. It has a little spark to it. So are each of the musicians correlated with specific dancers?

AR: Yes — I'll perform with the Carnatic Ensemble, Brent is with Alanna, and Jace's portion will be with Berit.

PM: Have you considered making any other part of the performance modular?

AR: Well, there are sections where we're all dancing together within each solo. So everyone does get to perform with everyone else’s music. That wasn't always the intention, but I just felt it was too stark to only have three solos. Basically I'm just being guided by what I want to see on stage. And so if I was to go to this show, I would want to see us dancing together. Maybe not in a way you might expect, but we will be on stage together at various points in addition to the solos. And personally, I want to dance to all the different kinds of music as do the other dancers. It's an exciting challenge.

PM: It sounds like some aspects of the piece have changed rather significantly since your initial conception of it. Where were you at in your life when you first thought of this idea?

AR: It's really taken a lot of twists and turns. First, the whole thing started when I was thinking about how a DJ takes a song and mixes it, changes it up, changes the beat, just even in the most basic way — you have an essence that is kept and then you have a new version. I saw a similarity to being a second or third generation Indian-American where you have facets of you that have to navigate. It's code-switching. What parts of yourself do you want to keep around for which conversation? How Indian are you today? How American are you? My own experience almost felt like a remixing of culture. So that was just something I was thinking about.

Without any idea of a bigger project, my husband Zach actually suggested that I connect with Kate [Nordstrum, Liquid Music’s Curator]. I've known her for a while since she worked at the Southern Theater when I used to perform there all the time. I knew that she was working with the SPCO on Liquid Music projects and very well versed in contemporary composers, so I basically wanted to just ask her if there was any musician that I should check in with to develop something. She immediately suggested Jace. This was three years ago now.

Since then, it's been a lot of building and lesson learning because I'm pretty new to choreography. This is only my second or third evening-length work and my first time working with non-Indian dancers. Initially, I think in my mind I thought the project would be a solo piece. But once we started talking to Jace, then the concept or theme of Let The Crows Come begin to overlay with what we were trying to do with the music. Then things just kept changing since we had the luxury of time.

PM: Which is so rare!

AR: It's been amazing because I'm also full time here at Ragamala and we have been creating work at the same time as I was creating Let The Crows Come. Sometimes it's nice to be like "I only have a year," but it was kind of nice to say: "we can see how the project takes shape as it should." And then once it became three dancers instead of solo it sort of seemed to make sense to have three composers instead of two.

I always intended to have an Indian composer for my section — I wanted to use a Carnatic composer as well because there's so much to learn regarding traditional Carnatic compositional practices. I didn't want to put two things together that were so separate without having some connection musically to Bharatantyam. That connection is really important to me. About a year and a half ago was when we decided to add a third composer. It's all sort of been slowly working and re-working from there.

PM: Has it felt like too much time? Would you take another year if you had a chance?

AR: I would not take it. I think that'd be too much time!

PM: So now it feels like you're perfectly where you'd want it to be?

AR: I would say yes. For the first year we were Liquid Music’s artists in virtual residency. We took that year and just talked a lot about the project. We got together three times that year just to see what would make sense.

PM: So it started off more inherently exploratory thanks to the virtual residency?

AR: Absolutely. At first, Kate was thinking it'd be a split evening: I would do half an evening and another artist would do the other. And then I said, “No, I want the whole evening!” [chuckles]

PM: In a way, it has kind of organically grown into that in its own way with the three choreographers and composers.

AR: Yeah, and I'm learning so much because I'm sort of the director of the whole thing. And, as I said, I'm basically being guided by personal aesthetics. It lets me ask, “What do you want to see? What do you want here? What do you want to do?” Sometimes it can be overwhelming to be like, "Well, what if what I want to see isn't what everyone wants to see?" But at some point, you can't fixate on that. That gut instinct is what you have to go with.

PM: Yeah, totally. And you can put your trust in your collaborators as well.

AR: Well, that's a huge part of it is: you pick people that you know are gonna kill it.

PM: I read that there was an open call for dancers. What was your thinking behind just rather than just reaching out to people that you just knew or had worked with previously?

AR: I did some of that. But people are really busy and it was hard to figure out schedules so I decided that I would just put out an open call. I got a bunch of videos. Both [Alanna and Berit] came from TU Dance. I was drawn to the fact that they both have very different but very highly trained dance backgrounds, and they're both dance backgrounds that I really like to watch. Alanna I've known of and had been watching for a long time. We've both wanted to work with each other for a long time and finally, the scheduling worked out for this project. And then for Berit, I was actually on a grant panel and saw her work sample, and based on that I reached out to her.

PM: So Berit works within the Gaga framework. What school of dance is Alanna coming from?

AR: She went to Juilliard. And she's got a lot of Graham, but she also has roots in Trinidad and so she's been working with Afro-Caribbean dance. And then of course TU Dance has an Ailey lineage. All that sounded interesting to me.

It kind of worked out perfectly, because before I had dancers cast the whole structure was: one dancer will do an extrapolation of gesture which requires long lines and flow, which Alanna has beautifully. The other was: we'll watch my choreography in reverse and see what sticks out as interesting — what looks odd and what looked beautiful. Gaga is a form I am fascinated by and works very well for this purpose. That reversal is actually part of their process: they learn movement in reverse so that the body has a greater grasp of what it can do. So when I brought it up with Berit said: “oh yeah, we often do that in class.” And so she really took to that.

Ashwini Ramaswamy, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Berit Ahlgren at The Parkway Theater for a work-in-progress conversation in early 2019

PM: To step back a little bit maybe give some context for Bharatanatyam. Are there a few words that you feel really capture Bharatanatyam?

AR: Well this would probably apply to all styles of dance worldwide, but there are just so many subtle and vastly different schools of Bharatanatyam thought and technique. So I can only speak to the very specific lineage that we [Ragamala/Ramaswamy family] come from.

Our teacher in India, Smt. Alarmél Valli, has done something which I find unique within Bharatanatyam. Bharatanatyam is a very spiritual dance form, that is pretty common throughout all of the styles. But our teacher takes the idea of where it came from (which is depicting Hindu mythology) and will find poetry from a variety of sources, not just Indian poetry, that speaks to her deeply and her own truthful emotion. Texts that she can understand and she can feel and she'll layer meaning on top of that so that you what you end up with is not simply a retelling of an old story, but a personalization of something that feels really true. It's not a regurgitation. It's not: "I went to the park today." It's: "When I went to the park today, I saw this flower which reminded me of my grandfather..." and so on.

It gives you this place of depth and texture and meaning that is very difficult to get to. But if you are able to achieve it, it's very defining in our lineage of Bharatanatyam. True emotion and being able to get people on board with that on stage, coupled with a very rigorous physicality and dexterity of feet and hands. When it all comes together, it's just a very complex, multidimensional form.

PM: It's so fascinating to hear that her practice is so rooted in extrapolating sources through her own medium, which seems to be at the heard of Let The Crows Come.

AR: Exactly. So it's a way of creating work that I think we have absorbed just as being her students for all these years. We've seen how she layers and recontextualized sources while staying true to the technique in the form that she's learned from her teacher. You get a really personalized version of an ancient form. I think all art *is* contemporary in that way. It's just how she chooses to do it.

PM: So for someone that doesn't know anything about Ragamala or Bharatanatyam can you talk about how a work is created within your specific lineage?

AR: I would say there are two different tracks that work ends up being created: One is when you are introduced to or you meet another artist you want to work with and you build the work around that. Maybe a musician or another dancer that you seek out. The second track being a theme that you really want to explore. You take that theme and usually add other sources to it, layering music and other poetic, theatrical, or literary texts. Bharatanatyam is inherently multidisciplinary. It is meant to bring to life sculpture. It is meant to bring to life psychology, theater, and music. Whatever you start with, you will eventually build it to become multidisciplinary.

The initial inspiration for Ragamala's last work, Written in Water, was a board game called Paramapadam, which the British made into Snakes and Ladders. It was a game meant to teach children about destiny and fate: if you roll this one way you may go to upper a ladder to heaven or you may go down a snake. And because all of these myths and all these games and ideas have multiple meanings and varied ways of thinking about them, it's not all literal. So it's mining their subtext. The music ended up being a combination of classical Carnatic and Iraqi maqam created by composer/trumpeter Amir ElSaffar. We commissioned original projections from Keshav, an artist in Chennai, India. Everything was layered to become this multimedia work.

PM: So when you travel back to India to study with your teacher is she teaching you choreography that ends up in Ragamala’s work?

AR: No, Ranee and Aparna choreograph all of Ragamala's work, and I began choreographing with them in 2015. We go back to her for technique and to keep gaining knowledge. It's somewhat like going back to graduate school to get a creative writing MFA: you need to do your research, do your reading, hone your craft, and then you can create your own work. It's very much like that. We often compare it to writing because people have a hard time grasping that the choreography is new even though it is created within our lineage of Bharatanatyam -- it's like having a vocabulary that you draw from instead of having to create a completely new language every time you start developing a new work.

PM: I can't think of like a parallel to the academic rigor that there seems to be at the heart of Carnatic music and dance. Do you have a good way of describing the “Carnatic Academy” and Indian society’s relationship to it?

AR: Well, it's daunting to be from someone who's from America because all the people who grew up in India, all that cultural context is just absorbed in them. So it's interesting when my mom and sister and I get together because my mom has cultural knowledge of the music, customs, rituals, traditions, and language deeply embedded within her-- everything is second nature to her. My sister was born in India and came here when she was three so she has had a deeper connection to India than I do having been born here. But I have influences and experiences here that they don’t have. So we work in this continuum.

But it is complicated. There's so much knowledge out there that you will never attain. And I think part of the appeal of practicing this art form is that you are never going to be a master. I think more people should embrace that because you could be great, but you are probably never going to be the greatest. You never know everything, and that's an important and humbling and very central to Indian & Hindu philosophy. You have a guru. As long as your guru is there, someone knows more than you. That is very important.

PM: How would this work be viewed from the Academy setting in India?

AR: People are experimenting with genre, dance, and music all over India too. It's definitely not just people in the West. Ragamala has toured in India, and people seem to really appreciate the fact that we don't change the core of our dance practice. What we prefer is a subtextual, nuanced, and subtle approaches to creating our work.

There's a lot of social justice slanted work in the contemporary Bharatanatyam realm happening in India and other places. I think that what we feel is that just by creating work you are guided to hopefully feel a certain way but not told what to think about the work at all. We try to give our audiences a little bit more agency to take from it what they want.

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We try to give our audiences agency to take from it what they want. Creating work as an immigrant woman is in itself kind of radical. That's kind of the space that we encompass, which is not to tell you what to think about this or that issue, but rather if this poetry from 2000 years ago is still relevant and we can layer it with something that you might connect with now then we can directly show that past, present, and future are interconnected.

PM: So it's not necessarily building a work around a politic, but that the process of making it work is inherently instilled with politics.

AR: Yeah, I think so. There's nothing wrong with any of those approaches. It's just a personal preference, like any other creative approach. We want our audience to take from it what they, and hopefully keep thinking about the piece for a while after seeing it.

PM: Do you feel like you have to make sure that your technique is perfect to be taken seriously?

AR: Well, first of all, we have a teacher who is very exacting. She will do something a thousand times — and it's not even about perfect technique. It's about feeling like you won't get that truth out of a performer if they don't 100% know their stuff. You gotta know your stuff! Only then you can start exploring and improvising. So I think that is more of where we're at: It's not about "you have to have perfect technique." It's: "If you haven't done the work to make it the best it can possibly be, then what business do you have?" I do think that in order to showcase our art and have it taken seriously here, there should be no doubt that you put in that work. I think that about all art forms.

PM: I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between Carnatic music and “Western” music (for lack of a better term) — I find it fascinating that Carnatic music is able to create so much tension with rhythm and melody alone as opposed to Western music’s reliance chord changes to create tension and resolution.

AR: I like that the musicians can manipulate the rhythm to the point that the listener won't quite understand where the beat is. It adds a lot of excitement to the dance. But also the ragas you choose, of which there are probably infinite, have a huge effect on the performance. I find I'm drawn almost exclusively to Ragas that don't feel resolved, that have a "minor" quality and aspects about them that sound a little haunting, and even end that way. And every time I say I like a raga it will have some sort of minor or some kind of key jump that doesn't ever feel resolved or sweet, it's more haunting or something. And so the combination of picking a raga or these times signatures in the way that you can play with them just gives so much opportunity for... not necessarily tension but surprise, which I like.

PM: There’s a paragraph in Uproot that I thought might resonate with. Jace is talking about DJing at The Loft in NYC in the 2000s:

“Those late nights at the lofts taught me never to take an audience for granted. It's not something that just materializes and passively consumes your creation. Especially in the visual arts, there's this sense that an artist makes his or her work, installs it in a gallery and that's it. Little consideration is given to who's going to see and how they might engage with it. Whereas up in the Loft, engagement with the audience was everything: the crowd responded to the energy of the mix and the DJs fed off that creating a tight feedback loop. The audience became a form of intelligence and expression in of itself. The people in the room were never entirely separate from the performers.” (pg. 11, Uproot)

How does like listening to the music and then in performing for audiences in such tightly structured work like Bharatanatyam relate to that?

AR: It's interesting because in its original state Bharatanatyam is a solo dance with live music. So it's not as tightly constructed as you might think because the dancer has practiced so much that they can kind of follow the musicians and vice versa. So the dancer won't do it the same every time.

Indian Arts have a philosophy called Bhava and Rasa, Which is the relationship between audience and viewer and that it's reciprocal, that you need each other, which I very much believe. There is a conversation happening there. In India the audiences are much less formal than audiences here. People will walk around and talk, and you know, "Aha!" and "Bravo," basically talking to the performers and clapping whenever they want. It's much more of an active participation. Which is cool in some ways. But also in some ways, it's also like, sometimes you don't really want people walking around or talking during your performance. But they feel comfortable, which is nice.

I've always been fascinated with DJs having to read a crowd and change what they're playing based on what they think people are going to respond to. I think it would be really hard. It seems like sometimes people think that a DJ is just hitting play on a recording but it's very much like being a live musician. That's part of what we're playing within this piece: we've got this tradition of Carnatic music, where they're playing instruments live and improvising. You should feel the same way about what the DJs are doing.

PM: It seems like the word “improvisation,” at least in the way use that word when talking about American music, doesn’t really capture what you are talking about here.

AR: It's hard. So much of this is a language barrier. That's part of the whole practice and technical proficiency thing we were talking about earlier. If you do a piece three times a day, even just in a very basic way spatially, you start figuring things out. Like if you go to this part of the stage and turn this much. You might do it a different way that feels equally good and then feel much freer because you know all of the options and you can fully explore any of those options. You have to practice that much in order to get that improvisatory feel, which I think might be counterintuitive to some people, but to me, it makes total sense.

A lot of improvisation in Bharatanatyam has to do with space: taking up more or less space or where you're going and then having this vocabulary to draw from. Specific hand gestures definitely mean certain things, but you have multiple options for each word or each meaning that you could potentially draw from and change as long as the musicians know this is what I'm going to do to finish it up, and then we can go onto the next thing.

PM: It seems really difficult to capture in words how improvisation works within Bharatanatyam — I’d imagine that a lot of folks see it as very “tight.” But at the same time, the mridangam player is basically doing calculus to resolve on the correct beat while improvising and reacting to the dancer.

AR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that for improvisation in dance from a Western perspective also sometimes feels more "free in a space" or like "jamming" — it doesn't feel as "set." What we do is more "set" like in the traditional sense of the word. There are still a lot of rules. We just find the rules very freeing. It's technique and when you're able to follow rules in some ways you can play with them more.

PM: Are there any aspirations for this piece to live on past this initial tour?

AR: Well it will definitely tour for the next two years. Who knows about what will happen after that! I'm definitely interested in continuing this idea of using other dancers who don't do Indian dance — working with them on some of the principles of the dance form and kind of manipulating and extrapolating on them.

PM: Has any part of the creative process in developing this piece been especially surprising or has it all felt very organic and intuitive?

AR: I mean... at this point, I literally have no idea what it's gonna look like because we have never all been in the same room...

PM: Is that exciting or terrifying?

AR: I've seen all the sections on their own, so I know it'll work. And the Lab is going to be an interesting space for it because you can't really hide in there. There's no wings or anything. So we're just gonna embrace that and not worry about trying to disappear and be in that space together. It's going to be fine [chuckles].

PM: Another quote from the book that seems relevant to our conversation:

“Sampling can forge cultural links just as easily as it can sustain a stereopype … more and more I saw sampling used to maintain cultural distance.” (pg. 184, Uproot)

It seems like you use the words “extrapolation” and “interpolation” to describe the process of the other two dancers interpreting your choreography. It might be another failure of words to describe art, but can you differentiate “extrapolation” from “appropriation?”

AR: I'm working very closely with the other dancers — they are directly taking from my solo, right? Every movement that the other dancers are doing I've directed in some way based on what I'm doing. So I still feel like it has to do with my personal feelings of having different experiences as an American. I take what I want from being Indian, and use it in different ways -- it's a lens into a crazy multicultural experiment. Though I do want to be careful with what we're doing. It's definitely not "I'm giving you this thing and you're just going to do what you want with it." I'm very much overseeing everything and making sure that I feel like it makes sense and that it feels like me.

PM: Yeah. And it's a two-way dialogue. It's not taking, it's sharing.

AR: Right. Exactly. So they all feel like it's them too. I've definitely never wanted to teach another non-Bharatanatyam person to do Bharatanatyam — that was never the point. It was more like: "you're amazing" and "what does this, what does this remind you of?" and then we work from there.

PM: Do you foresee this style of collaboration being a big part of your work in the future?

AR: Yeah, I think so. Maybe a goal would be to see if someday a non-Indian company would want someone like me to set work on them. It doesn't really happen like that for culturally-based forms in the way it does for other dance forms. You see that there are all kinds of non-ballet choreographers setting work on ballet companies even though they're not trained in ballet. I'm not sure I'd be interested in that specifically, but it is something I'm thinking about.

PM: It seems like having self-produced all of your own work you've developed a director brain that is valuable in so many different performative art practices, even outside of dance.

AR: There's a lot more to learn too. I'd like to keep expanding on these ideas, maybe starting with solos and going into more group stuff. It's very stressful at the beginning and then it becomes kind of fun as long as you don't worry about it being a huge failure [chuckles]. And in some ways, it's like, why are we doing this if we are not trying new things?

PM: Can you talk more about the symbology of the title of the work, Let The Crows Come?

image+w+crow+overlay+-+Anil+Vangad-1.jpg

AR: I had been reading an article about crows, and realized that I never really thought about crows. I think it was a short article in The Guardian about how crows are very misunderstood. They're very communal; they defend each other and can make tools— and more of these cool little stories. I had always thought of them as a nuisance or creatures that predict doom.

In Hinduism, there is a belief that crows play a major role in linking the living to the dead. In this sense, they bring to vivid life the spirits of the past. Pitru Paksha (meaning fortnight of the ancestors) is a period when Hindus pay tribute to their ancestors so that the departed souls can rest in peace. After burning a mixture of sandalwood and camphor, rice is offered to the crows.

I developed the visual language of Let the Crows Come from a variety of textual sources, including the epic poem Ramayana, second-century Tamil Sangam poetry, and ancient Sanskrit texts called the Brihatsamhita and Kakajarita. These sources allow us entry into a world where the human, the natural and the metaphysical — as well as past, present and future — are forever engaged in sacred movement.

Buy Tickets to Let The Crows Come

Read more about Ashwini Ramaswamy and Jace Clayton’s Virtual Residency on the Liquid Music blog:

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“There is no set way ever": An interview with Darkstar's James Young / May 1, 2019 by Liquid Music

James+Young.jpg — DARKSTAR & JAMES MCVINNIE

*COLLAPSE*

James Young, one half of the London-based electronics duo “Darkstar”, talks with Liquid Music blog contributor Nick Lanser about their new work *Collapse*, a collaborative effort with world renowned organist James McVinnie commissioned by Liquid Music and premiering at Northrop on May 4.

Nick Lanser: How did you and Aiden come to start making music together? Did you have earlier music projects before delving into the electronic music world?

James Young: Aiden and I started passing ideas back and forth around 2005, I’d been going to a nightclub called fwd in London and we started making sounds that would sit in on the periphery there. Darkstar was our first thing we tried to be honest. We lived in West London and started making tracks that were being played on Pirate Radio. Once we forged a sound that was our own I think people started to take note that we were trying something a little different for that context and it worked for us.

darkstar_foam_island_stoke_the_fire_the_405_new_music_news.jpg

NL: What was your earliest memory of electronic music? What inspired you to start creating independently?

JY: Earliest memory probably Thriller, the Linn drum used in that, the way it was so rigid but worked so well. What got me making music was probably tape packs and just scraps of paraphernalia from clubs in the North West of England, flyers, posters, radio, the odd cross over tune, I started wondering what if at that point and began dj’ing, then bought a sampler and went from there.

Foam Island, an album by Darkstar on Spotify

NL: Walk me through your creative process. When you are creating new music, what comes first? Do you start with a concept? Or improvisation?

JY: Both really, there is no set way ever. Not one piece of music ever starts the same – in my eyes anyway. I always think it just happens or we dig and dig until there’s something there to move forward with but each time there are differences. We’re not precious about what we use or where we make music we just try and get time together and look for something we both like without over thinking what we’re doing, the overthinking comes much later when we have seven or so tracks then we’ll try and look at it conceptually or explore how it all fits together.

NL: How did you start working with James McVinnie? How did you know he’d be a good collaborative match for Darkstar?

JY: We began working with James on a piece called “Dance Unity” performed at the Southbank Centre. It was part of the PRS New Music Biennial. We had an idea in mind to delve into archives of old 90’s records we liked and somehow re-contextualize them with the organ. James was really open to our ideas and it worked perfectly. I think from a musical stand point, because we have a certain type of part that is common in a lot of our work, looped intricate melodies, James could grab onto this and evolve it through performance. So not only was our work identifiable through the piece, James was also progressing our ideas through nuances in how he manipulates the organ.

NL: What have you set out to say or to achieve with Collapse? Is there a planned evolution for the work post-premiere?

JY: We wanted to try and delve more musically knowing what the organ and James are capable of. We wanted something quintessentially Darkstar yet expansive. To try layered loops that build and develop into often explorative compositions. Something that would swell and evolve, fall back and rest, like a cycle of harmonic layers constantly shifting.

I think there will be an evolution with this work but what yet I have no idea, it’s always hard to think ahead after just finishing it. But we will I’m sure look to progress it or use again.

NL: Where do you find inspiration outside of the music world?

JY: We have been doing a lot of youth work recently and that has been inspiring. To see so much talent and enthusiasm for music was energizing and I think probably changed our approach to recording slightly. How? I’m not sure just yet but after working in different settings with people that don’t have the means to make music everyday like we do… it left a lasting impression on how we use our time and how we develop Darkstar from this point. It feels like a crossroads but one we’re happy to be at.

Liquid Music presents the world premiere of Collapse by James McVinnie and Darkstar Saturday, May 4 at Northrop. BUY TICKETS HERE.

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James McVinnie on organs, electronics and “Collapse” / April 24, 2019 by Liquid Music

On May 4, Liquid Music presents renowned organist James McVinnie with London-based electronics duo Darkstar in the world premiere of Collapse at Northrop (Minnesota debuts for all artists). McVinnie’s boundless approach to music has led him to collaborations with a fascinating variety of distinctive artists across musical genres. From 2008 to 2011 he held the post of Assistant Organist of Westminster Abbey. Read McVinnie’s generous program note for Collapse, which overviews more than his collaboration with Darkstar, but gives insight into his life as an organist and his relationship with electronic music.

I come from a thoroughly traditional background as a classically trained organist — I’ve held positions in church music and played the majority of the core organ repertoire. Music with less traditional roots has however always been a big part of my musical makeup and a fire to my imagination. It was through my record label, Bedroom Community, that my knowledge of electronic music really started to blossom. I came to know, as friends, a network of artists who were creating groundbreaking work — particularly Valgeir Sigurðsson and Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik — and a whole new world slowly revealed itself to my ears and mind. I’ve become fascinated with synthesis in music and how that relates to the pipe organ; the two seemingly opposite sides to a coin are in fact much closer to one another than one might imagine.

Each organ is different; each has its own unique disposition of ‘stops’, ‘registers’ (or ‘instruments’ in all but name) which are voiced to sound their best for the acoustic space they inhabit. The room that houses the organ therefore becomes part of the instrument itself and organists therefore become orchestrators — each piece has to be fitted to each new instrument, often taking into consideration the wishes of the composer and/or conventions about which ‘registers’ or ‘stops’ to use according to national styles or fashions of the day. Organists thus develop a highly attuned ear for adapting music to a particular instrument and acoustic space, a process which is identical to that of a producer, creating and mixing music originating from the studio using synthesised instruments.

The sound of the organ is created by air resonating through pipes. This sound is without modulation or change; the note stays sounding the same until your finger or foot releases the key (often unfairly earning the instrument an unmusical, inflexible reputation!). This super-flatness encourages the player to use various different registers (or ‘stops’ as described above) of the organ in imaginative ways to create variety of sound, just as a composer would chose their instruments in an orchestral work, or like how you would program a synthesiser. These registral colourations, coupled with careful and intricate deployment of compositional textures and figurations, provide limitless possibilities for musical exploration.

McVinnie at Eaux Claires’ Baroque Installment

One of the most appealing aspects of the organ is that its vast symphonic capabilities are accessible to a single person. The organist can change registration (through simple sequencing technology) in an instant. Tom Jenkinson (better known as the electronic musician Squarepusher who has written me a large body of music for organ) writes:

There are aspects of writing for organ which I find comparable to writing music for electronics. There is a very tangible weight to the amount of technology around you in an organ performance, unlike any other acoustic instrument I have any experience of. Sounds may be accessed by the touch of button, such that sonic variety is achieved by mechanical means as much as it is by the performer's skill. In that way I see the organist as immersed in technology much more than performers of other acoustic instruments and, despite its long history, it thus seems an eternally modern instrument. Maybe there is something reminiscent of the dark glamour of a computer genius about the organist, wrapped up in machinery, remote from and indifferent to praise.

The pipe organ is famed in popular culture for its gothic ‘dracula’ appeal, a notoriety which belies its subtlety, great nuance and strangeness. In working with James and Aiden on this project, I have tried very hard to make the organ not sound like an organ — I’ve tried to pair the notes written with unusual, characterful registral combinations to try to blur the edges between electronics and pipes. This performance represents our largest scale collaboration to date.

Liquid Music presents the world premiere of Collapse by James McVinnie and Darkstar Saturday, May 4 at Northrop. BUY TICKETS HERE.

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Six days out: Six questions for Dustin O'Halloran / April 13, 2019 by Liquid Music

In anticipation of Liquid Music’s Double Header: New Music & Dance Duos on April 17 & 18, Liquid Music blog contributor Nick Lanser interviewed composer Dustin O’Halloran to learn more about his collaborative project with dancer/choreographer Fukiko Takase, 1 0 0 1. Here they discuss inspiration, creative process, and the animating concepts of 1 0 0 1, a half-evening of new music and dance exploring territories of technology, humanity, and mind-body dualism in our electronics-forward existence.

Nick Lanser: How did you and Fukiko come to work with each other? What about each other’s art or practice made you want to collaborate?

Dustin O’Halloran: Fukiko and I first met when we worked together for Wayne McGregor's contemporary dance piece ATOMOS. I was so impressed with her instincts and intellect toward dance and felt that we had a connection in this way, and we planted the seed to one day do something together.

NL: When composing for dance, do you have movement in mind? As you create arrangements to support movement, do you have a different approach than you would, for say, a film score?

DO: Film is very much a box in some ways; it has defined borders, and timelines which can be restrictive. Dance is a much more open concept of working for me, and I approach it how I would write for myself, like a blank canvas that needs filling. I think its one of the purest ways music and visuals can connect as its completely organic. I learned from working with Wayne McGregor that music for contemporary dance doesn’t necessarily have to support movement in a traditional sense as much as it needs to create an atmosphere and environment that can evolve and shift and give space. This freedom is fundamental to me and its an area to be very creative and explore new ideas.

NL: Your Liquid Music project is about technology, humanity and mind-body dualism as we “approach the age of AI.” How did you and Fukiko arrive at this concept? Did another piece of artwork or literature inspire it?

DO: We're inspired by the concepts from the Japanese anime classic The Ghost In The Shell and also this new frontier that seems to be coming soon with AI and what it will mean for humanity. There are so many questions about the soul and technology and where it will lead us. We found these concepts inspiring for us as we both wanted to explore taking organic materials and transforming them with technology and how this could be interpreted through dance and to search for new languages in our art forms.

NL: What has been the most significant moment in the creation of this work, thus far, with Fukiko?

DO: It's always incredible how creative connections can inspire you, so for me each time seeing pieces of the choreography gave new light to the music and the directions it could go. It was helping me be more open and deeper into the process and take bolder steps where perhaps I would not alone. Also the conversations we had with our lighting designer, which were very inspiring as we discussed concepts of the soul, new languages and technology.

NL: Your body of work as a film composer is substantial. What has been your favorite film project thus far and what do you have coming up?

DO: Its been a busy few years, the highlight being the film Lion which I co-composed with German composer HAUSCHKA, it's rare when all elements come together like this. We just finished a new film entitled The Art Of Racing In The Rain which will come out this year, and I’m also completing a new record with Adam Wiltzie my partner in the ambient/drone project A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN.

NL: What is the biggest non-musical influence on your work?

DO: Paintings and books are always a significant influence on me. A great book will stay with me like a dream, and these subconscious thoughts still find themselves in the music. Abstract painting for me is always how I experience music, inexpressible colors and feelings that are visceral.

Purchase Tickets for 1 0 0 1, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos double header April 17 & 18, also featuring Mike Lewis and Eva Mohn’s When Isn’t Yet.

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“Your body has it's own mind": Fukiko Takase in conversation with Berit Ahlgren / April 10, 2019 by Liquid Music

Fukiko Takase was born in New York and raised in Japan. She has been dancing since the age of two under her mother Takako Takase and Katsuko Orita's dance training. When she was 14, Fukiko started creating and performing her work for competitions to develop her creativity and physical capabilities. She received the Cultural Affairs Fellowship from the Japanese government, studied at Codarts Rotterdam Dance Academy, London Contemporary Dance School. As a dancer, she worked for Henri Oguike Dance Company (2006–2010), Russell Maliphant (2010), and Company Wayne McGregor (2011–2018). Fukiko danced with Thom Yorke in a music video and featured in projects for AnOther Magazine, County of Milan, Channel 4, The Brits, BBC Late Night Proms and Uniqlo. Her choreography includes Autumn Hunch and Cultivate a Quiet Joy.

Berit Ahlgren: It’s an honor to speak to you, Fukiko! Your work is very inspirational for me as a dance artist, and when I was asked by Kate [Nordstrom] to take this opportunity, I said “wow, yes”. So first, thank you, it will be really interesting to hear from your voice about your art and creative process.

Lets start at the beginning! Your parents were both dancers, and knowing this, I am curious what you were exposed to as a young child that no doubt shaped your interest in dance from a young age.

Fukiko Takase: I think about my Mom who danced with both Kei Takei’s company Moving Earth in Japan and New York City-based Laura Dean. Also, Tetsuhiko Maeda, a really talented Japanese costume and set designer, shaped my creative interests. But really, so many choreographers and dancers I saw daily. I was surrounded by lots of adults when I was little, constantly with my mom in this circle with different creative people. In the studio, theater… a lot of time it was like a kindergarten for me, hanging around in auditoriums watching my mom perform. I got in to a bit of naughty acts! I used to blow the ash out of ashtrays and make a mess, jump around the greenroom sofas and do things that kids do, it was just always in a theater setting.

BA: Like being on a playground.

FT: Yeah! I think I sort of naturally had an understanding of the theater space as a small kid. Being in the a black box and the sensing the people in it—or not!— with the effects of the lights within the space. The theater has a sense of, I don’t know, spirituality to it for me, as well as the studio. The studio has something. I was clearly interested in environment just hanging around in these spaces, and feeling how the thought comes up in a creative process. Sort of like a painter, looking at the paper, or similar to a raindrop—you drop it somewhere and it starts from there, whatever you feel with it.

BA: It’s really beautiful to consider the theater or the studio as, like, a sacred space, almost.

FT: Yeah, yeah.

BA: What comes to mind are temples and churches or place where some sort of precious, important ritual of sacredness happens. Regardless of whatever you believe in, a divine source of creation takes place. It’s a really beautiful way to think about that.

FT: Yeah, I mean sometimes I try to do some exercise at home but it’s not the same as in the studio.

BA: No, never, right?

FT: Weirdly. You think the same things working in spaces outside the studio or theater, but you don’t have the same feeling of tension. Maybe not the tension, but your body doesn’t quite get it.

BA: Agreed. The body doesn’t respond in quite the same way. Speaking of studios, your foundational training was in Japan, followed by Codarts Rotterdam Dance Academy and then London Contemporary Dance School—building a strong contemporary ballet base. Are there dance techniques that you wish you had studied or that intrigue you now that could be pursued at this point in your career?

FT: This is maybe slightly different, but quite recently I went to see a battle of Tutting. Dancers have one minute each with their choice of music or DJ, then improvise. Tutting is very specific form of dance using hands and arms to create the shapes and geometric structure in the space. I’m not that great at it, but it’d be nice to do a workshop. It’s totally different. I’m super curious and mesmerized by it, so I maybe start learning from a video, just the basics like figure eights and drawing. Perhaps one day!

BA: Are you still working with Wayne McGregor in London?

FT: I graduated from that last year. Maybe I’ll go back, I don’t know, but for now I want to focus on my work. We’re still in touch, but I’ve got to move on with my curiosities and interests.

BA: Mr. McGregor’s work is well known as being innovative, multi-disciplinary and technically precise. In terms in the way that he works as a creator and choreographer, and how you are making your work, do you find similarities, or are there things that you absorbed from working with him?

FT: Oh definitely, definitely. I learned a lot from working with him, as well as other choreographers over the years. He works with a neuroscientist, so imagery is very important to the process. I still use this lens, and constantly analyze what I’m getting data from in order to know, to understand, my thought process within the choreographic process. You know, I am quite anal with where the step is coming from. What is the source of the step? What does it mean? Why do I do this? Why am I in this space in this particular spot? To make sense of the piece, to understand thought process is quite important. It’s the key to the work.

BA: That sounds very scientific!

FT: Yeah, I know!

BA: …and organized and different. Not everyone choreographs in that way, so that’s really nice to hear! And in terms of collaborating with musicians, especially since 1001 is a shared project between you and Dustin O’Halloran, how has that fit in to your creative process and where might such collaborations lead? Is this something you really love to do, working with musicians?

FT: I first met Dustin through Wayne’s work Atomos. That was maybe 2013, and we clicked as friends but also… we sort of speak the same language! I’m not talking about English or Spanish, it’s an artistic language. We often said “lets do something together” but of course we’re busy people in a busy time, but I’m so blessed by this project with Liquid Music to make the time. I’m really happy to work with Dustin, he inspires me. When we discussed collaborating, we talked about how he approaches the music, how I approach the dance. Our lighting designer Yaron also speaks the same language. So just by talking on Skype or having a meeting, it doesn’t have to be a long phrase, it could be just one word, and it’s already inspiring for us what is exchanged. The notes, how he thinks about the chords, how I say “oh it sounds like this” or “I want a little bit more of this feeling”. We inspire each other by sharing our work.

BA: That’s great. I’m really excited to see and hear what you’ve put together, as well as the work of your lighting designer. It sounds like his involvement is a very important key to the piece! Speaking of 1 0 0 1, in this premiere you explore aspects of technology. It sounds like you and Dustin have known each other for a bit, so was there a specific process that distilled to this concept?

FT: We talked about what should we do, and around that same time the film Ghost in the Shell came out. I’m a bit of a fan of animation, so when I saw the film I was really impressed by it but I was also thinking “what’s next” from that animation. It was a mixture of feelings. You watch it and know it’s technology, but you know, at the same time, it gave me question as to our sense of reality. It’s a mind game. And it got me thinking how we could do that with the music. So that’s the beginning. But you know 1 0 0 1 is not about Ghost in the Shell, obviously. I thought, how can I relate to that feeling of a machine that has consciousness, and that the consciousness evolves? But the real question is “what is human being?” Because, basically if you have a source of consciousness, a human could be in anything. It could be a refrigerator, an icicle… those things could be human if it has consciousness or feeling.

BA: And so you’re saying consciousness and feeling are related, or connected—in order to have consciousness you have feeling, or if you have feeling you have consciousness.

FT: Yes, and that you are in it—your soul, your consciousness— you just have a shell of some form. But maybe also in some other form at the same time, out there showing intelligence, artificial life. It’s a crazy world we live in.

BA: Very, increasingly so.

FT: Right? And that idea evolved into considering the realm. We have a realm that we live in, and also the spiritual realm, and now there is the world wide web realm.

BA: The world wide web is it’s own massive realm.

FT: Exactly! And that’s why it’s such a confusing time. We had two and that was a handful, and now we have three. It’s crazy. There’s a lot of people doing a cyber detox—they stop emailing, Instagram, Facebook, everything. I do it as well sometimes. And when you do it you feel more dead than before. Like you’re dead to the world almost, but of course you’re not dead.

BA: It’s as if you don’t exist if you don’t have a form of yourself that’s on a screen. When you drop those profiles, you can’t exist or coexist or get around the day. It’s pretty fascinating. That these other versions of us are so real, yet so two-dimensional.

FT: I know, right? I mean, there are many things, it really doesn’t stop. It’s so unknown, there’s so much possibility. It’s really exciting but also daunting at the same time!

BA: Elaborate on the questions you ask the audience regarding 1 0 0 1: “How will a new form of consciousness manifest inside a body? What will happen to our soul?” What ideas were on the table for you and Dustin that got distilled down to these core queries? Do you feel these questions have been somewhat answered for you, and offered for the audience to sit with?

FT: I think for me the closest thing to relate to a machine feeling is when I performed some of Wayne’s pieces for 5 years, some pieces for 8 years. Some of those performances I remember feeling like a machine. When you do the same things over and over, you lose this raw feeling from the premiere to the 200th time you’ve done it. You don’t have the same feelings of excitement from the first time it premieres, but you’re still striving for perfection as a dancer.

BA: Always.

FT: Always, right? Your body has it’s own mind. It’s a result of repetition, striving for perfection, and such an intense concentration on your work. Also it’s a performing art, so you’re doing it in the theater—in a sacred space—with an audience of 2,000 people’s eyes on you. In this black box, every performance happens, but it’s not the same. This robotic feeling is muscle memory in dance, and it’s the same with music as well. Dustin plays piano, and his muscle memory is at work, as well as thoughts, feelings…

BA: You can become a bit numb with muscle memory.

FT: Yeah, exactly!

BA: Like you were saying before, performing over and over the same choreography is the most similar thing to being a robot that you can imagine. The more you perform a certain work, go through the motions, know the parts that are going to be more exhausting than others and how to mentally and physically to get through the piece… it becomes numb to the real experience of dancing instead of the joy and freshness that was once there.

FT: Yeah. I think I am still investigating, and it’s not an easy task for me. But something about repetition and maybe the way of repeating something.

BA: And predictability?

FT: Yeah, maybe predictability and also the accumulation of things.

BA: Moving forward, where do you hope to go from here? I know that’s a very general question, but you’re at a transition in your career. While you’ve done so much independent work already, where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years, considering the work that you’re making now collaborating with other artists? Is there some, I don’t want to say a “dream” idea of what life would look like, but something itching where we can find you in the future?

FT: I’ve always worked solo. I get to know myself by finding my language. In a dream, doing this commission with Liquid Music is a perfect opportunity for me to find myself. I want to keep doing this self inquiry. I’ve done it since I was 14 years old, though I haven’t been consistent with it. In contemporary dance, this research could be anything. There are so many combinations of steps, it’s not like traditional ballet, and I want to see how language evolves within me. Of course I’m getting older so I cannot do the stuff I could do 10 years ago, but that’s also a good challenge for me. The more restriction I have the more creative I have to be.

BA: Absolutely.

FT: And I have this opportunity to do Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. It was first performed in 1964, ages ago. Yoko sat in a gallery with scissors in front of her and audience members cut her cloths, freely. It was up to them, so she, herself, became the artwork. I haven’t done it yet. I’m scared about that, but really excited. This is totally different—I’m not dancing in the gallery, I’m just sitting. To do these new challenges in this time period is an opportunity to grow as an artist. I want to do more of that, maybe more to do with interacting with other forms of art. I don’t know what will happen!

BA: One thing at a time!

FT: Yeah.

BA: Where do you call home now? London still, or…?

FT: I am here in Japan now and want to call Tokyo home again as an artist. London was home for the past 14-15 years. My family is in here, and I want to make Japan home too. That’s another project I have. But perhaps the country doesn’t really matter, I just want to find the place I can feel home after I’ve traveled around so much for a long time. Possibly a life where I can have a dog!

BA: That’s great, and a very important project that requires an artistic mind as well!

Berit Ahlgren makes dances and performs in other peoples’ work, searching for ways to best implement how these two activities weave most beautifully with the world around her. Her work as both performer and independent movement researcher has taken her from Klamath Falls, OR, to Rishikesh, India, with many well-established and tiny towns between. In addition to teaching gaga/people and gaga/dancer classes regularly in New York City and the Twin Cities, she’s been a guest instructor at the New York University, Wesleyan University, University of California Berkeley, Carlton College, St. Olaf College and The Royal Ballet School of Sweden to share her knowledge in the Gaga Movement Language. While a company member of TU Dance from 2006-2014, she made significant creative contributions to the projects of resident choreographer Uri Sands, and retains close ties to the company and its dance school, based in St. Paul, MN. Ahlgren completed her M.F.A. in Dance from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts in May 2016, and continues to invest herself in dance that resonates for both the artistic team and curious audiences with equal importance. Ahlgren’s global citizenship leads her in fresh directions regularly, and offers myriad opportunities to be humbled while learning from the surroundings she lands in.

Purchase Tickets for 1 0 0 1, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos double header April 17 & 18, also featuring Mike Lewis and Eva Mohn’s When Isn’t Yet.

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Receiving Music with Mike Lewis / April 9, 2019 by Liquid Music

by LM blog contributor Trever Hagen

Perhaps it is a bit tongue-in-cheek to call Mike Lewis a local musician. The saxophonist regularly (and literally) plays to hundreds of thousands of ears every year across the globe. But calling Mike Lewis “local” accomplishes three things: first, it gives us who live in the Cities some kind of pride, I suppose, that we can call him one of our own; second, it tethers ‘local’ to something socially organic, a luxury in the distributed digital culture of modern relations; third, Mike does in fact play remarkably often in the Cities. So how is he not local? For example you’ve surely heard Mike blow as part Happy Apple for the past twenty years. You’ve probably seen him at the Khyber Pass Café in St. Paul on Thursdays with Fat Kid Wednesdays. Or maybe you caught him singing background vocals while playing bass for Alpha Consumer at the Turf Club? Possibly you were lucky enough to catch him at First Ave. when Gayngs played their Last Prom (remember Prince gazing on from the side stage?). Or certainly you saw Mike playing with Bon Iver at Rock the Garden. If you haven’t seen him on any of these stages, then you have absolutely heard his recordings on KFAI or The Current. Mike is never far away, if you are listening.

This is all to say that Mike is a person whose depth of musical communication is matched only by his social grace. Furthermore, he has an innate ability to articulate his reflections on creative expression, which makes him well-poised to offer point after point of wisdom for any performer or curious mind. Why call it wisdom? Well, it seems that Mike has digested quite a bit of the contours of performance, improvisation, theory, narrative, storytelling, abstract communication and affect. He has digested it in a manner that feels natural—as if music was his mother tongue rather than a language learned in a classroom or through memorizing vocab flashcards. It is much less about the display of knowledge as it is about actually trying to engage communication. I recall some years ago asking Mike about his practice schedule when he was younger; I figured that he would confirm my assumption of musical learning by listing a host of jazz pedagogical materials. Rather, Mike stated: “I don’t like practicing alone, I just like to play with others.” Perhaps that statement could be considered an overarching ethos of Mike’s approach to playing music: to connect with other people.

On April 18, Lewis brings this ethos to When Isn’t Yet, a piece for Liquid Music with dancers Eva Mohn and Sarah Baumert, and Maggie Bergeron on lights. When Isn’t Yet is like a Zen koan, a linguistic paradox to expose intuition and reality. Their approach is with clear improvisatory intent, which requires one to shore up all of their perspectives on the unfolding drama of existence. Mike’s most recent work with dancers has been with TU Dance and Bon Iver’s Liquid Music-commissioned collaboration, Come Through. That project began with rehearsals in the spring of 2017 and most recently was performed at the Kennedy Center in spring 2019. However, Come Through is a much different collaboration than what we will witness in April. I caught up with Mike in Cincinnati via phone while he was on tour with Bon Iver to discuss how When Isn’t Yet will be realized.

Trever Hagen: What would be different for you in this scenario of dance and music? How do you approach performing something like this?

Mike Lewis: The primary thing is trying not to get so lost in what I'm doing—like the orchestration of what I am doing—so that I'm unable to pay attention to what's going on with the movement. That is part of the reason that I'm considering pulling JT [Bates] in. Just so I don't have to rely on myself for every single part of what I want to pull off. With what ends up being the composition or the general structure, I want to make sure that I can be engaged on a level beyond just the musical. Because [JT] will be taking on this conductor-type role and performing role I suppose. And yeah, just catching cues and providing them and trying to make sure that the narrative is somewhat clear. So that’s what I want to get [the performance] to be.

Is the narrative or orchestration something improvised or is there actually material you are composing?

We kind of put together an initial idea about it last year and right from the get go, we wanted to make sure that improvisation was a large part of it. Because that was actually the first conversation I ever had with Eva. [Dance can be] such an incredibly structured world and it's rehearsed so heavily—down to the most minute details—that we're kind of trying to play more with an idea of real-time reactions to things. Having areas that we know we want to hit, energies that we want to explore. So having “zones” that we arrive at but then within those zones, we try to have room to have things happen in real-time that are that are different. That's a nebulous answer. [laughs]

*Sarah Baumert and Eva Mohn in residency at Carleton College, September 2018*

We're trying to embrace the title of the piece. It's kind of playing with the idea “what is yet”, or “when ‘when’ isn't yet”, kind of that idea. It’s the mastery of “Why did things happen when they do?”, “Why do you make the decisions that you make when you make them?”, “What makes one decision feel better than another one or translate better?” So much of the answer to these questions has to do with years and years and years of learning to create in abstract contexts. So improvisation is definitely a huge part of it. We're going to be relying on those skills that we've honed over long periods of time, and, you know, and try to really get inside of why those things happen when they do.

In terms of aesthetic decision-making, this approach or awareness you are speaking about seems to tease out all of this tacit knowledge we carry on our bodies.

It's like we're driving from where we have arrived at after all of this time. Like figuring out how to improvise—figuring out how to have it not just be wild scribbling but rather how to be centered in an idea, in an energy. So a lot of how we've talked about it thus far has been maybe not even necessarily like “Okay, when this happens, we'll do this.” Instead we'll talk about how we've been feeling that day; we've talked about film or what spaces and moments feel like.

So attempting to connect almost on an extra-musical level first?

Things are interesting, like simply the world that you exist in on a daily basis, just as a human being. And how that is affecting you. Like the way that people relate to each other, or like the way that people relate to a time in their lives and their equilibrium within that: communication between people even if you don't have anything in common. How do you connect? How do we translate something into something not necessarily extremely descriptive and specific, but how do you create an energy? How do you create the kind of give and take and release that everybody deals with? That's a difficult question.

How do you attempt that or know when that occurs?

There're definitely moments when it happens. Yes for sure, you know when you know. You're weirdly always able to tell when you're in the midst of one [of these moments] and that has to do so much with an openness and an energy that you're offering, how it's received and reciprocated by people that are in the room with you. And once you have successes in those lightning strikes, it's like [that energy] tells you when to do the next thing. You just get immersed in it and then that helps you, like, hold a note out longer or hold the pose. How do you make something come off pretty? How do you create tension in dissonance and then release it into something that makes people feel like they’ve had some travel?

It's like if we pull it off, if we do a good job with this piece, I think there will be moments that are goofy and funny and I think there might be moments that are really lonely and kind of scary and desolate. You decide to make meaning out of it for you. I think that's what we're playing with right now.

There's a lot of intent in that but you're leaving so much up to like just emergence. As if it isn’t completed until the audiences hears it.

Yeah which is why it is hard to put any of “improvisation talk” into exact words. This approach [with Eva] is almost obsessively restorative in terms of what a performance could be for people together. It's like you go back to the title of the piece and realize how true it is. It's like how do you know “yet”? It probably won't known until the day of the performance. You kind of have to just show up. That's the biggest, most important thing. And actually a measure of that.

Do you see dance and music as two different languages? Or could you say they're the same language? Or there's two different languages speaking together on the same topic?

I'd say like two different vocabularies. But not wildly dissimilar conditions. My understanding of modern dance is basically nil. I am approaching that purely from a completely reactionary and up to certain extent, obliterated perspective. But I'm also trying to trust my ability. Instead of just deciding that, I don't know anything and deciding that I don't get it. If you know who you are, where you are, and what you think about, then you're able to be able to receive—like the ethereal part of [performance]. At the end of the day, that's how any artistic output is working. Because you can’t expect anybody to know anything about what’s going on.

Indeed, aesthetic affect should be able to be received no matter of what age, concept, background, school, etc.

I think that about jazz music all the time. It's sometimes a major downfall with jazz music. Especially when it comes to the musicians who are working in such a small camp. It is so misunderstood, for lack of a better term. So often the way jazz music is sold is like what's playing in the background while you eat dinner or it's like a weird, corny aesthetic that people make fun of. And I think a lot of musicians get bitter about that and then just end up saying, like, “Well, you wouldn't get it, because you don’t know Eric Dolphy.” Or “You wouldn't get it because you don't know what was happening in New York in the 50s.”

I think that's really unfortunate. I think it's understandable because we're all human beings, we're all real and we're insecure. And it's like, so easy to kind of lash out in the context of that insecurity. And to get defensive. We're all animals. It's like if you're afraid of something, you lead with anger. But I do believe that if you drop me in the middle of a shopping mall food court in Oklahoma City, you know, with JT and we played free music, I think we could translate something. And I could get some people with an open heart and with the idea of like, truly trying to connect as opposed to some ego-based activity. Something to make myself feel better. I think that you can translate to anybody and I don't think that prerequisite knowledge has to be involved.

I have a tendency to I lean away from the “placard”, you know? I know they're there. But I also know that that's somebody’s summation of what I'm supposed to receive. I don't know if I want to be told. Maybe that's why I'm an artist. I would rather know absolutely nothing and be completely cleared out so that I have every faculty available to me. Like in terms of how I think about the world at large or how I live so that I can be more fully present with a completely open mind as I'm receiving whatever that given moment offers.

How do you see this type of so-called specialized language and its relation to communication?

It's not like ridiculous to want to showcase your work. But it's a very slippery slope. That's why when you're younger you're amassing so much knowledge and technical ability to play fast or to play complicated or jam, you know, like or if you're writing, you know, you have an insane vocabulary and an understanding of all these different theoretical ways to write where you can display the raw intelligence of whatever. And I think sometimes it takes a long time to realize sometimes you get so far down the rabbit hole of that you're not—after all this work that you already did—in the present moment anymore.

It became for me a long time ago so much more about how do I clear as much of my fragile human psyche. The vessel, you know. How to clear as much of that shit out as I possibly can? So that whatever actually is happening is something that I can translate to whatever actually is happening in the room.

How do you see theory entering into our understanding of musical communication?

Some of my favorite [former students] to teach were kids who wanted to learn about theory, you know? And it's like, “Okay, cool. Let's talk about theory.” But understand that theory is math. It's a code. It's a way to code what's happening. It's not the reason why. And it doesn't mean some people don't take theory to such an infinite degree that it becomes just a tool with which they used to arrive back at that original point. Why you're doing anything in the first place.

Theory lessons for me, inevitably, always turned into: let's play the melody of the song. Where did that melody come from? Where's the song from? It had lyrics. Go back and listen. Oh there's this whole other phrasing. It is all about relation. What is the trail of breadcrumbs? In any given piece of art—what is the melody? What is the theme? Then as you create around that, that's why the melody sounds like it does and it becomes so malleable and simple in a way. You can add more color wherever you want to. But it has so much more to do with the relation of the colors next to each other. No color exists purely on its own. You don’t know red until it's next to blue.

Many of these conclusions that Mike speaks about are kind of like musical exemplars: phenomena that happen while making music that can be abstracted in order to understand non-musical situations. How can we approach our fears that arise from lack of knowing? How can we shed perspectives that do not arise from direct experience? How can “the unfamiliar” in fact be a place of learning? How can all that knowledge that we share and confirm with those around us be used to connect to people far away from us who have different ways of receiving information? How do you communicate with other people when speaking languages that complement rather than denote or specify? How can “room for error” be a positive thing? Perhaps these questions are only for the world of ideas and philosophy, but only if you wish for them to remain there. Music, clearly, is a limitless resource. Music, in anybody’s hands, can be a champion of communication, a point of connection, a way to understand humanity and a method to negotiate one’s fragile place in it all. The context of music is people, in other words.

Trever Hagen, PhD is a writer, researcher and trumpeter living in Minneapolis. A former Fulbright Fellow, JSPS Fellow, and Leverhulme Trust Fellow, Hagen’s work targets how the arts function in societies. Hagen's newest book, "Living in the Merry Ghetto: the music and politics of the Czech underground" will be out on Oxford University Press in 2019.

Visit this link to purchase tickets for When Isn’t Yet April 17 & 18, part of Liquid Music’s New Music & Dance Duos, also featuring Dustin O’Halloran and Fukiko Takase: 1 0 0 1.

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