10 November 2016. For ITINERANT INTERLUDE #40771, composer/performer Liz Allbee presented three very different pieces for mutant trumpets which bend, stretch, truncate and re-shuffle the instrument. Planned as an ephemeral counterpoint to the installations of NEXUS, a common thread in all of the performances is the disassembly and reconsideration of the trumpet as an object, instrument, and idea. As the artist herself explains, “In my working imagination, the trumpet is part animal, part machine, part me, and part wholly unknown.”

In The Mouth Is A Dirty Whole (2016), the trumpet’s valve system has been re-configured with tubes, hoses, bells, a homemade reed, whistle, and sound-maker system to become a multi-channel acoustic entity. The main bell has a lung-balloon; as a feedback machine – the air goes both ways – the instrument plays the mouth. As a jellyfish, with its leg-mouths splayed around the room, it moans, lurches, wheezes and sighs, providing a potential audio track for the imaginary sounds of Edith Kollath’s “Thinking that I’d last forever” and “Draft of Air”. Imaginary Beings (2015), performed here as a counterpoint to Hanna Hartman’s “Early Warning”, is an electro-acoustic quadraphonic composition which utilizes a custom 4-channel trumpet and a trompete concrète interface. The trompete concrète sounds are derived from an extensive personal animal language – sourced from the interplay of trumpet, extensions, and voice – as well as scientific, medical and musical tuning fork pitch sets and field recordings. The live quad trumpet also serves to disseminate/spatialize the voice and extended trumpet techniques (which, as Allbee notes, often have a rather beastly quality). Finally, The Lost Pause (2016) is an improvisation structured around the sounds of the dismantled trumpet and its shaky shift towards reassembly. In this iteration, Allbee performed a duo with Tamaki Watanabe and Walter Zurborg’s kinetic sculpture “Sophist’s humming”.

The number of this evening’s iteration of ITINERANT INTERLUDES – 40771 – refers directly to the production number stamped on Allbee’s trumpet, the instrument that has accompanied her for the last quarter century.

NEXUS, curated by Douglas Henderson. Works by Hanna Hartman, Cecilia Jonsson, Edith Kollath, Chelsea Leventhal, Tamaki Watanabe & Walter Zurborg.

The post #40771 appeared first on itinerant interludes.

Gregory Corso (1930-2001) was a key member of the Beat movement – along with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs – a group of convention-breaking writers who came to prominence during the 50s and early 60s. Typographically published as a pull-out centerfold in the shape of a mushroom cloud, “Bomb” (1958) is considered by Henderson to be Corso’s magnum opus, “a truly iconic poem of that age, a monument that I place firmly in the pantheon with Ginsberg’s “Howl”. And to build such a work around a topic so dreadful, so unimaginable and yet ever-present; I find it breathtaking. Dante was fortunate to have the Bible and generations of assorted visions of hell to fit out his research for the “Inferno”. Corso had to build his poem from the naked fear of his fellow citizens and grainy newsreels of nuclear tests. Throughout the poem he nimbly and steadfastly sidesteps the pitfalls of national politics, to keep us focused on a global topic. While it reads as a bold, reckless, rough-edged exhortation, its underlying structure is robust, careful, systematic. He observes the bomb from every angle, and paints that armature with a furious riot of colors.”

Following the thread of ii #67, Hedwig Gorski’s “Could not get Gregory Corso outta my Car” (1985) lobs a metaphorical hand grenade into the events of the evening, a reminder that for all the ‘convention-breaking’ ascribed to the Beats, their regard for women remained pathetically retrograde. As Gorski writes: “My poem about Gregory is a news article, a piece of journalism, about the night I realized wonderfully passionate poets could also be backward males… I think the poem’s appeal goes beyond the anecdotal narrative because post-beat women poets are more powerful than the so-called “minor characters” portrayed in 1950s Beat literature. The Beat car metaphor for freedom and independence is well-represented and turned on its head in the aesthetic icon of my beloved 1967 turquoise Ford Mustang with multiple implications about a literary movement that liberated male poets from academic standards while reinforcing the weakening stereotypes of women.” Hedwig Gorski (b. 1949) is an artist-poet poet who describes her aesthetic as “American futurism.” She has published and performed her poetry widely and is especially renowned for her work with the East of Eden Band. Her upcoming anthology “Texas: The Beatest State in the Union” will soon be available through Lamar University Press.

The post #67 appeared first on itinerant interludes.