Digging will be presented by Kate Corby and Dancers along with music by composers Tim Russell and Ryan Ross Smith at the Chicago Cultural Center October 24-27th. All events are free, and the shows are at 6:30pm, with the exception of Sunday’s show, which begins at noon. More information can be found here, and an excerpt can be heard below.
Composers Nat Evans and Ross Simonini have created a new score for dance in collaboration with Chicago-based choreographer Kate Corby. The new piece, Digging, was derived entirely from experiences in intensive meditation sessions over the summer - a direction from Corby that she and her dance troupe also followed. Since Evans and Simonini were already both daily meditators, as an alternate meditative activity they decided to create a chant to recite every day as a way to transform a phrase they found disagreeable. After deciding on the phrase, “kill two birds with one stone,” they broke the words down syllable by syllable to create a chant and began practicing daily over the course of a few weeks. Although Evans and Simonini live in Seattle and New York respectively, they were able to work on this project together remotely by recording all of their various experiments with this invented chant and experiments in ritual as related to sound and the breath. They then took this cache of recordings as source material to create a new electro-acoustic composition that builds and folds over on itself through processing and editing. Digging will be presented by Kate Corby and Dancers along with music by composers Tim Russell and Ryan Ross Smith at the Chicago Cultural Center October 24-27th. All events are free, and the shows are at 6:30pm, with the exception of Sunday’s show, which begins at noon. More information can be found here, and an excerpt can be heard below. This Thursday (3/22/12) is the debut of a new piece for choreographer Catherine Cabeen at Velocity Dance here in Seattle by my myself and Ross Simonini. Ross and I have been working together under the moniker 'Nat and Roos' since 2006 doing scores for dance, a film score, and currently we're working on music that we'll release as an album and use for sound installations in galleries in the coming year. Ross lives in New York, but came out here last fall a couple days before his tour got under way with NewVillager. With a basic framework of ideas we spent two days recording ideas we had been discussing, improvisations, wandering the neighborhood collecting sounds and wondering what the hell we were doing sometimes but making new sounds anyway. We sent a whole heap of sounds off to Catherine Cabeen to get an idea of what she felt might fit her vision for the piece she was working on. After that, Ross did an initial assemblage of sounds and added some tweaked sounds, then I went in and added additional layers of percussion, a five-part falsetto choir, and some conch shell. We passed the track back and forth and kept checking in with Catherine until we felt like it was done, but only knew for certain when I went to a rehearsal a couple weeks ago and observed the incredible clarity and detail with which Catherine had perceived the music and the quartet that she had choreographed in response. It's an honor to be able to collaborate with both Ross and Catherine, and I highly recommend coming out to one of the shows this weekend. For more information on the shows at Velocity Dance click here, and to hear the music we wrote for the dance, see below. _ Everyone is in the throes of writing year-end lists (including lists of top 10 reactions to Loutallica), and complaining about them, but amongst it all there are some curious, important and non-holidays-related things going on. For instance, there’s been a rash of Tuba thefts lately in LA, the slightly vomitus term ‘alt-classical’ has popped up in regards to Portland (first west-coast sighting?), and John Zorn released a Christmas album. Also, in case you’re wondering, yes, last night in LA Jay-Z and ‘ye set a new record...have a look. Lastly, if you’re feeling as though your reviews are bad, try this one on for size.
On the composing front, at the moment I’m in the throes of working on a few different compositions of both the electro-acoustic and fixed media (i.e. ‘tape’) with live players variety. Ross Simonini and I are in the throes of doing an electro-acoustic work for choreographer Catherine Cabeen - in October we recorded hours of barely-composed and briefly discussed improvisations and now we’re in the process of slicing, dicing and mashing everything around to make the piece. There has also been some additional recording for the piece on my part which yesterday involved me becoming a five-part falsetto choir. Besides that I’m finishing the electronics half of the piece for electronics and indeterminate number of winds for a concert in New York in April and Seattle in May. Thus far the electronics part is mainly comprised of tea kettle, goat hoof shakers and conch shell sounds. My music, apparently, is not vegetarian. Listening List Wes Montgomery - The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery John Cale - The Island Years Duke Ellington - Far East Suite Brian Eno - Another Day on Earth Arvo Part – Tabula Rasa El Michaels Affair - Enter the 37th Chamber Gang Gang Dance - God’s Money Philip Glass - Glassworks |
Nat Evans
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October 2022
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