High Zero Foundation presents a new festival series focused on electronic and multi-channel sound works. The first of five in the festival, Chris Madack and Max Eilbacher present live octophonic computer music to inaugurate the permanently installed multi-channel system.
There will be two shows because seating is very limited. Advance tickets purchase recommended.
First show: doors 7:30pm, concert 8:00pm
Second show: doors 10:30pm, concert 11:00pm
Chris Madak: Bee Mask presents Marbles in Scenes from In the Houses of Joy
At press time, it feels shamefully absurd to admit that I’ve spent much of the last three years not stockpiling canned food and ammunition, nor constructing a fortified bunker, nor even enjoying long walks “in nature” while those things that we think of as nature still exist in walkable form (or indeed while we still exist to do the walking), but rather consumed in sisyphean tinkering with an increasingly hermetic and self-referential musical project.
And yet for better or worse, here we are. In the Houses of Joy comprises nine “scenes”, made up of musical and textual fragments and strategies for their permutation, as well as three new musical alteregos (The XEA20s, earthly avatar of the abstract principle of contingency, which speaks through its oracle, Marbles, at the request of Naming Rights, an ensemble of traveling petitioners), and a set of overlapping conceptual and quasi-narrative frameworks including an apocryphal account of the birth of sonic weaponry, a catalog of possible records, a descent into the occult infrastructures of Torino and (wait for it) New Caanan, and a parable concerning the improbable success of an anti-civilization opera.
My (ahem) prerogative and the perhaps inherently unfinished nature of the work being what they are, the above should not be taken for a guarantee that any given realization of this material will necessarily include any specific element of the “entire ball of wax” in discernable form. The program to be presented at the Red Room represents a first public airing of In the Houses of Joy as such and will feature bespoke realizations of scenes one and nine as “multichannel diffusions of electroacoustic music, with or without accompanying text.” For practical purposes this entails my using a computer to manipulate sounds generated through various analog, digital, and acoustic means. By way of addressing your likely and wholly appropriate ambivalence regarding the use of computers in live musical performance, I offer only “just imagine how I feel; I’m the one who actually has to do it!”
Philadelphia, September 6th, 2017.
Max Eilbacher
is an intermedia artist. NPR NYT WSJ RWK N RWL GRM MPRC NIDA EMEGO UMBC NNA ANOMIA EU USA CA MAC MICA VAN CAR
