Happy Valley Band + Carolyn Chen’s Signs of Struggle (Experimental Music Yearbook)
The Experimental Music Yearbook’s 2016 issue is celebrated with a performance of Carolyn Chen’s Signs of Struggle as well as a special Los Angeles appearance by David Kant’s Happy Valley Band.
Carolyn Chen’s Signs of Struggle is a piece for people listening and reacting to different degrees of uncertainty when given a series of variably cooperative, weight-sharing tasks. Using Antonioni’s Blow Up and Coppola’s The Conversation as sonic and procedural references, a choreography of sound, listening, and movement is explored by a frequently-blindfolded quartet. Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday to retune habits of our ears through sound, text, light, image, and movement. For a decade she has studied the guqin, the Chinese 7-string zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, which has informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Recent projects include a marble chase, an ASL interpreter strung to chimes at a distance, and commissions for Wild Rumpus and Klangforum Wien.
The Happy Valley Band is the Great American Songbook heard through the ear of a machine. Composer / bandleader David Kant uses custom-built machine learning software to “unmix” pop songs and transcribe them back into musical notation. Imagine James Brown backed by a simmering Sun Ra Arkestra, Madonna with a jittery freak-out synth rhythm section, and Herb Alpert with a Tijuana Brass that must have been led by Charles Ives. The machine analysis has no concern for the limits of human performance, and the resulting transcriptions are extremely complex, literal, and often impossible to play. The Happy Valley Band, an ensemble of Bay Area and New York City musicians, plays what comes out.
The Experimental Music Yearbook is a repository for composers, performers, and the public to glean the methods and styles of various artists working in the experimental music tradition. As the modes of experimentation in the sonic arts change from year to year, the Experimental Music Yearbook’s annual issues will build into a comprehensive, and varied, database of experimentation in music/sound. Since the inaugural edition in 2009, the Experimental Music Yearbook has featured contributions from such artists as Tom Johnson, Bill Dietz, Tashi Wada, Cat Lamb, Vinny Golia, Jessie Marino, Julia Holter, and many, many more. Along with the three permanent editors (Casey Anderson, Scott Cazan, and John P. Hastings), each year features a guest editor who provides curatorial direction. The 2016 edition features guest editor Jessie Marino (On Structure, Ensemble Pamplemousse). Former guest editors have included Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Laura Steenberge, Olivia Block, and Travis Just. Live performances of contributions have occurred in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Cologne, Germany.
David Kant:
The Great American Songbook
Carolyn Chen:
Signs of Struggle
Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday to retune habits of our ears, through sound, text, light, image, and movement. For over a decade her studies of the guqin, the Chinese 7-string zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, has informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Recent projects include a marble chase and commissions for Klangforum Wien and the LA Phil New Music Group.
Described by The New York Times as “the evening’s most consistently alluring … a quiet but lush meditation,” Chen’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, Stanford University Sudler Prize, ASCAP, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, commissions from MATA Festival, impuls Festival, and Emory Planetarium, and residencies at Djerassi, Hambidge, and Kimmel Harding Nelson. The work has been presented at festivals and exhibitions in 24 countries, at venues including Carnegie Hall and the Kitchen (New York), REDCAT and the Geffen MOCA (Los Angeles), the Menil Collection (Houston), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Guggenheim Bilbao, PODIUM Festival (Esslingen), CYCLE Festival (Iceland), Tel Aviv Marathon, and the Institute for Provocation (Beijing). She has been fortunate to work with ensembles such as SurPlus, Southland, Pamplemousse, Mocrep, Talea, Curious Chamber Players, Chamber Cartel, Die Ordnung Der Dinge, Asamisamasa, orkest de ereprijs, S.E.M., red fish blue fish, and Wild Rumpus.
Recordings are available on Perishable, the wulf., and Quakebasket. Writing appears in MusikTexte, Experimental Music Yearbook, Psychiana, and China Academy of Art SIMA Journal. Chen earned a Ph.D. in music from UC San Diego, and a M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature and B.A. in music from Stanford University, with an honors thesis on free improvisation and radical politics. She lives in Los Angeles.