Contributors

Joel Chadabe

On "Micro Fictions":

This composition was first presented on Friday, February 27, 2008, at Judson Church, in a concert shared with Trevor Wishart, as part of The Human Voice in a New World, a three-concert series produced by Electronic Music Foundation.

The following were program notes for the concert:

"The Micro Fictions project began a few years ago when Richard Kostelanetz called me to ask if I'd be interested in working on a composition with him. Richard, who I've known for some time, has been called the world's most experimental writer. His interests during the past many years have included a great variety of literary forms, including extreme minimalism, one example of it being stories and narratives told as or within single words, each of which suggests a narrative. The specific project he had in mind for me to compose a series of settings for his Micro Fictions. I thought of it as an interesting idea. In fact, as an opportunity. I understood my task to be that of composing musical settings that would complement the words, enhance the narrative, and expand the experience of each word with the sounds that I composed."

Further notes:

Of the 45 words that Richard recorded, I finally chose seven. My settings for these seven words were all based on the audio of the words, using techniques such as cross filtering, analysis-resynthesis, and granulation, as well as a variety of other more complex approaches. At the same time, I found solutions that in musical terms dramatized the words in different ways. The dramatic quality for "freedom", for example, was exuberance. For 'self improvement' and "dieting", humor. For "menacing', the sound suggests a growling animal. For "deluge", a rainfall. For "infinity", the suggestion of time passing without nuance, without content. For "mesmerizing", a hypnotic sound.

Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.

Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen's work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synth, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.

Recently, her primary focus has been her SOLO project but she is also involved in many various collaborations. Among musicians, she has worked with Phil Minton, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jerome Noetinger, C. Spencer Yeh, Alessandro Bosetti, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, Gianni Gebbia, plus many more. Some current projects include: duos with Phil Minton, Frederic Blondy, Robert van Heumen, Katt Hernandez, Nate Wooley, and Id M Theft Able. Trio with Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh. Plus three new quartet projects with Jeff Carey/Morten J. Olsen/Raed Yassin, Miya Masaoka/Hans Grusel/Kenta Nagai and also with Frederic Blondy/Michael Johnsen/Jerome Noetinger.

Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD USA but primarily maintains an active touring schedule throughout Europe.

SOLO sound on myspace

David Flood is an artist living in SoCal. His work has been shown and heard in galleries in Boston, Baltimore, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Responding to the hypothetical film/comic and cinematically (or theatrically) abstract, he's a Context Remover, detaching key descriptives. Backgrounds and Scores to Hypothetical Films / Installation Music for Virtual and Impossible Spaces. (Real and Unreal)

In regards to "Unconscious Language":

"It is a haunt.

The postponement of a gong, or a sound's long exposure. The beautiful comfort of the extended come home.

If one could enter the pot or pan just as a child's spoon makes contact. Then pause. Or if only we could hear what moves through rooms, or the hallways we always thought were empty: that sound would pursue all directions. Here, as rightly as in a cummings poem, the snow carefully everywhere descends."

* Elizabeth Murphy,

Editor, the Straddler Magazine

www.thestraddler.com

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz's work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

Mannlicher Carcano is an improvisational audio collage group that formed in Winnipeg in the mid-80's. The core members of the group are Really Happening (Los Angeles, CA), Porter Hall (Guelph, ON) and R.F. (Gogo) Godot (Winnipeg). MC's sound has affinities with post-punk DIY experimentalism, avant-garde classical, experimental turntablist, and plunderphonic traditions. The group uses traditional and invented instruments (spring-strung bass, Ventor, cast aluminum cello), trickle-down electronics, portable record players playing warped Montovani at the wrong speed, stuck religious tirades or anything else on vinyl, children's toys, radios, live phone calls, tape loops, field recordings of environmental soundscapes and contact miked appliances (plus frequent visual components) in their ongoing quest to come to terms with the contemporary urban acoustic ecology. In addition to their weekly telephone-linked live radio program/webcast The Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour (www.cfru.ca - since 1998) MC have issued numerous self-released recordings, appeared on experimental music and radio art compilations, produced soundtracks for experimental film, and created installations for gallery and museum spaces. Mannlicher Carcano is a seriously playful experiment in anarchistic collaborative creativity.

On "What the Arthur Fuck" (notes from our self-released best-of anthology 'Trouble Comes in 3s'):

WE FILLED A 90-MINUTE CASSETTE WITH THIS LOOP AND WOULD SOMETIMES LET IT PLAY FOR HOURS UNINTERUPTED. TRY IT. A CHANCE COLLABORATION BETWEEN MANNLICHER AND AN APPARENT SHUT-IN WITH THE HANDLE 'POPEYE' WHO WAS ILLEGALLY USING CITIZEN'S BAND FREQUENCIES FOR FRIVOLOUS BANTER. HIS FREQUENT RANTS FIRST SURFACED DURING THE CASSETTE DUBBING OF A MICROTONAL PIANO COMPOSITION BY REALLY HAPPENING, AS HEARD HERE, BUT RECURRED SPORADICALLY FOR SEVERAL MONTHS. GOGO BELIEVED HE WAS ABLE TO COMMUNICATE BACK THROUGH THE STEREO SPEAKERS TO THIS PHANTOM - "NO, YOU'RE THE FUCKING CLOWN" I RECALL HIM OPINING.

Chris Martin is the author of American Music, chosen by C. D. Wright for the Hayden Carruth Award and published by Copper Canyon. His second book, Becoming Weather, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. He is a purveyor of choral rap.

"I'm a Joke Too" has been performed live at several venues with the help of Ted Mathys, Ed Berrigan, Courtney Martin, Chris Fischbach, Macgregor Card, Samantha Anders, Ben Polk, Amanda Nadelberg, Arlo Quint, John Coletti, Dobby Gibson, Jess Fiorini, Alex Achen, and many others.

"Electric Circus Tree" has been performed live with Macgregor Card at the Poetry Time series in Brooklyn.

James Sanders is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group. The group publishes an online sound poetry magazine, aslongasittakes. The piece in this issue of Textsound is an excerpt from a long work called "Eyes". The work strips down to a single pronoun some recorded language from three American icons, John Cage, Elvis Presley, and Keanu Reeves. You can tell a lot from a little pronoun.

Randy Thurman is an artist and musician/composer living and working in the southern United States. His music has been featured in exhibitions in New York, California, Denmark, and Australia. Notable publications featuring Thurman's visual and written work include The Pedestal, Tifferet and Ars Medica, Randy Thurman is also a music editor for The Madhatter's Review. Thurman's musical compositions incorporate traditional and non traditional musical instruments, recordings of otherwise inaudible sounds from computer components, and common household items.

Rodrigo Toscano's latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater. Toscano is the artistic director and writer for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His polyvocalic pieces, poetics plays, and body-movement poems, have been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet's Theater Festival, Poet's Theater Jamboree 2007, and the Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival. His radio pieces have appeared on WPIX FM (New York), KAOS Public Radio Olympia, WNYU, and PS.1 Radio. His most recent CPT piece "Feel Your Media - Bitch" (an hour length body-movement poem with music and text) is currently being labbed and tested in several cities. Toscano works in Manhattan at the Labor Institute, and lives in Brooklyn.

Notes: The instrumental sounds for 'techno funk' track were made by using my mouth and nothing else. A total of four tracks were used. The tracks/sound-streams were laid down one at a time, one "fitted" on top of the other during improvisation. Such sounds have been vocally employed during my poetry readings over the last 6 years. These explorations are the basis of my newest body of poetics theater work work, as in "Feel Your Media - Bitch", whose score (and music) will be published in its entirety in 1913, a journal of forms in the spring of 2010.