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25/4/2011

Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound

Different venues, Kitchener

The Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound features the use of unusual venues and a very eclectic range of musics from new classical music to electroacoustics, musique actuelle and sound installations. Innovative and collaborative, the Festival works closely with other organizations to co-present activities or to include activities within our schedule. For the latter be certain to check out Associated Events following the listing of all scheduled performances.

The focus of all events is the act of listening. Featuring a mix of local, national and international artists, concerts have featured ensembles from traditional ensembles such as string quartet, orchestra, choir to turntable art, musique actuelle, outdoor electroacoustic events, multi-media and dance. A late night series concentrates on cutting edge work from the world of live electracoustics and improvised music. Concerts are presented indoors and out, in traditional concert halls and churches as well as alternative spaces, including several buildings that had been abandoned for long years and brought to life for the festival. Guest composers and performers have included international artists such as Brian Eno, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Diamanda Galas, Negativland, DJ Spooky, Ikue Mori, Bob Ostertag and Pauline Oliveros as well as Canadians Murray Schafer, Martin Tetrault, Gordon Monahan, Michael Snow, John Oswald, Tim Brady and Hildegarde Westerkamp. A priority of the festival is to also feature local artists — these have included the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, NUMUS Concerts, the Canadian Chamber Ensemble, Dancetheatre David Earle and the Penderecki String Quartet.

Sound installations are an integral part of the festival. The 'inner Ear' festival-within-a-festival presents a variety of work in collaboration with the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and local galleries. Public workshops, symposia and sound walks as well as in-the-school educational events are also an important part of Open Ears, whose outreach involves a huge community effort with literally hundreds of volunteers and professionals involved, from students of local public schools and universities through to professional orchestra musicians, city counselors and local business people.

The festival promotes cross-disciplinary enhancement and the strengthening of the artistic community through joint projects. It has encouraged urban renewal through the reinvestigation of alternative spaces and experiencing the city’s architecture in a different context.

Installations

Wed April 27 to Fri April 29 | 4:00 to 6:00 pm
Sat April 30 to Sun May 1 | 1:00 t0 6:00 pm

Bill Viola: The Darker Side of Dawn (2005)
City Hall Cube, 200 King St W

Co-presentation with the Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area

The Darker Side of Dawn is a study of an old California oak tree on a hillside in the mountains north of Los Angeles from the first light of dawn to full sunlight and beyond. A fixed camera registered the subtle shifts of color and luminosity of the changing natural light from daylight to complete darkness over several days. The recordings were edited to create a condensed time-lapse document of the continuous passage of time at dawn, moving slowly into night, with the goal that there be no apparent movement of light or shadow visible. The changing illumination and subtle shifts of color in the image are felt rather than seen, and it is only the occasional gust of wind through the branches that visibly animates the tree. The work continuously cycles from night to dawn to night, and in between each cycle the extremes of light and dark are attained.
Paul Walde: Snowdrift
Artery Gallery, 156 King St W

Co-presentation with Artery Gallery
With the end of broadcast television approaching, the snow or electronic noise on now otherwise useless vintage television consoles is warped and folded using high powered magnetic fields to drift the "snow" into shapes resembling landscapes and snowfall patterns. This effect is accentuated through installing the sets to suggest a large three dimensional landscape. Additionally, the magnets also alter the sound waves emanating from the consoles- en masse these shifts in pitch , when combined resemble the sound of wind drifting snow across a frozen landscape.
Althea Thauburger: not afraid to die
KW Art Gallery, 101 Queen St N (Centre In the Square)

Co-presentation with Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Running March 27 to June 5, 2011
Gallery hours Wed Apr 27 | 9:30 am to 7:30 pm
Thurs Apr 28 | 9:30 am to 9 pm
Fri Apr 29 | 9:30 am to 8 pm
Sat Apr 30 | 10 am to 8 pm
SUn May 1 | 1 pm to 5 pm

KW|AG is pleased to present Althea Thauberger as part of the 2011 Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound. Recognized as one of Canada’s most diverse and adventurous musical events, the Open Ears Festival celebrates the act of listening through innovative programs, from guided sound walks to multi-media performances.

Vancouver-based artist Althea Thauberger has internationally produced and exhibited work which typically involves collaboration with a group or community. The end result of these collaborations usually takes the shape of performances, videos and photographs. Thauberger gravitates towards groups of people who often exist in some form of social seclusion. Through the constraints inherent in her work, Thauberger illuminates the tension between the coercive and voluntary actions we undertake in our everyday lives. Utilising almost-exclusively nonprofessional performers such as Canadian tree planters, U.S. military wives and male youth in the German civil service, Thauberger creates complex documents of self-expression and isolation.

As a part of the Open Ears Festival, KW|AG will present Thauberger's not afraid to die, an early video piece which first introduced the tense relationship between sincerity and performance so palpable in her current work. Central to this piece is a young woman seated in front of the Northwest Rainforest Diorama at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria. She is clad in a gore-tex jacket, dressed for adventure despite the static representation of nature behind her. The "silence" that we typically expect of museum spaces is replaced with a series of artificial ambient sounds, birds chirping and planes flying overhead. The young woman remains silent, except for the sounds she makes while she consumes a snack. A haunting voice, the artist's own, interrupts the near-silence with a folk-song. A portrait of both a vital subject and the strange world that surrounds her, not afraid to die offers us a delicate balance between uncertainty and fearlessness.

Thauberger's work has been commissioned and exhibited by major museums and galleries across the world. In 2009 she participated in the Canadian Forces Artists Program and travelled to the CFB in Kandahar, Afghanistan where she worked on a collaborative photography project with military members there.

KW|AG will be working with Thauberger on a new commission as part of KWAG's ongoing Parochial Views series. Visit http://www.kwag.ca for further information on how you can participate in this project.
Matt Rogalsky: Discipline
City Hall, 107 King St W

Discipline focuses on the electric guitar as the iconic instrument of the 20th century and as an object of obsession. The twelve guitars used in the installation are invisibly played by wiring their pickups in reverse, with the driving signal being a live classic rock radio station. The piece has several reference points, including the "boy culture" of guitar-store shredding and ubiquitous all-too-familiar riffs, Robert Fripp's "guitar craft" approach to mastering the instrument and the apostle-like devotion which is often accorded the electric guitar and the canon of classic rock. Kingston’s Matt Rogalsky is active as a performing and exhibiting composer and media artist who often focuses on the exploration of abject, invisible/inaudible, or ignored streams of information. This is the world premiere of Discipline.
Veronika Krausas: The Player Piano Project
The Walper Terrace Hotel Gallery, 2nd floor, 1 King St W

Several years ago Los Angeles-based composer Veronika Krausas asked a number of composers to write new works or arrange old works for her newly inherited player piano. What resulted was an eclectic collection of 23 pieces by 22 composers from 6 different countries including James Tenney, Thomas Adès, Chris Dench and Veronika Krausas. The works were premiered in 2008 at the University of Southern California in conjunction with a CD release. At the Open Ears Festival we are presenting this series of a work as an installation, inviting gallery goers to “perform” the works by pumping the player piano.
John Oswald: Stillnessence and Whisperfield
Zero to One Gallery, 107 King St W

This endless cinematic spectacle features hundreds of people of all ages participating in a literally skin-deep portrayal of a ghostly crowd which goes nowhere and does nothing but is nonetheless always gradually becoming constantly different. Standstill is the third of a series of chronophotic moving stills (Janéad O'Jakriel/Jacko Lantern, the Arc of Apparitions) in which Oswald perfectly blurs the properties and aesthetics of photography, movies, and televisualisation in a counter-Koyaanisqatsi universe. During Oswald’s residence at the Open Ears Festival, he is inviting interested participants to be photographed to “join the crowd”.
Marc Couroux: Strange Homecoming, A Structural Comedy (2010)
Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts Lobby
Wed Apr 27 to Sat Apr 30 | 7:30 to 8:00 pm

Prior to the invention of mechanical recording, references to the now commonplace phenomenon of a tune-running-thru-the-head appear absent from literature. (Paul DeMarinis)

A psychological situation made possible by recording technology. Happening upon a long forgotten TV movie called Strange Homecoming, dwelling on a central scene where the character (Robert Culp) returns to his hometown after 18 years of degenerate behavior. Rewinding and fast-forwarding the DVD to re-listen to the strangely elusive theme music, trying to learn its modus operandi. Stupidly leaving the DVD at home when travelling to the country. One week of attempting through various mental procedures to recover the theme song, to surface it, to no avail. On returning, maniacally scrubbing over the same music, again and again. An earworm made possible by recording technology, subsequently impossible to dislodge. Except through systematically applying centrifugal force to the content, and centripetal force to the structure, producing multiple variations neither exactly the same, nor legibly different. Resituating the original as only one of a potentially infinite set of fractal variations. A process of structural listening (which Adorno contends was a dying art, no thanks to recordings and their repeatability) overheats into fractal listening, while the image degradation, immediately palpable, continues on its merry way. The viewer’s eye remains glued to the image, even while it is being scrubbed back and forth, while the music drops out, only to return after every landing subtly altered: same form, different melodies and harmonies. Listening to the recursive rhythms of the möbius strip, a sedimented state where it is no longer possible to tell when the flip to the other side occurred.

An abstracted illustration of a desperate process of re-covery, addiction and provisional therapy.
Marc Couroux: In a Sendimental Mood (2010)
Conrad Centre for the Perfomring Arts Lobby
Wed Apr 27 to Sat Apr 30 | 7:30 to 8:00 pm

In a Sedimental Mood is a work of “musique d’ameublement” – in the tradition of Erik Satie and Musak – and is meant to be played at low volume in your place of residence whilst being occupied with something else – i.e. not meant to be listened to attentively, but to be overheard occasionally, tuned into once in a while, but mostly coating the room in which you are in like so much wallpaper. You can try and listen to it at regular volume, but as you will find out, it tends to insist that it is not to be listened to…go figure. It was made in a strange way. I recorded each layer without listening to the previous – it’s a “deaf” recording in other words – any fortuitous harmonic/melodic encounter is purely coincidental. I also thought of this work as a set of fractal instances of a same general idea, a set of non-repetitive repetitions – you are always hearing the same contours, instruments and general affects, but the melodies and harmonies are different each time….a slow downwards trawl to a sedimented listening….
Octaphonic Soundscape installation
City Hall Rotunda, 200 King St W

Seth Cluett, Betsey Biggs, Jascha Narveson and others tba

A tradition of the Open Ears festival since its inception, this event features an octaphonic sound system in the beautiful acoustics of the City Hall Rotunda. Each year the Open Ears festival chooses a different person to curate a series of electroacoustic works for this installation followed by a free concert in the Rotunda on Sunday afternoon. This year’s installations are curated by Jascha Narveson.

Betsey Biggs: TON YAM I (FOR BRIAN WILSON)
Ton Yam I (For Brian Wilson), is a live improvisation deconstructing and reshaping fragments of the Beach Boys' God Only Knows into a sea of floating harmonies, feedback, and glitch: destruction and reconstruction manifest. The original stereo version was premiered at the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planeterium in 2008. A 15-channel overhead version commissioned for ISSUE Project Room's Floating Points Festival in 2009. This 8-channel version created for Open Ears in 2011.

Betsey Biggs is a Brooklyn and Providence-based composer and artist whose practice in music, sound, video and installation aims to explore the resonance between sound and image, to actively engage the audience, and to explore the relationships among sound, memory, and geography. Her work has been described by The New Yorker as "psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears." She has collaborated with musicians and artists including Margaret Lancaster, Evidence, The Now Ensemble, The BSC, So Percussion, Tarab Cello Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble and filmmakers Jennie Livingston and Amy Harrison. Her work has been seen and heard at venues as disparate as ISSUE Project Room, Abrons Arts Center, the Conflux Festival, MASSMoCA, Sundance Film Festival, and on the streets of Oakland, Red Hook, Williamsburg and the Gowanus. Biggs holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University.

Jascha Narveson: Sine of the Times (2011)
This installation takes a surround-sound recording of Times Square and slowly moves the recording in and out of a parallel sound-world by decomposing it in to sine waves. This is done using a quirky, homegrown technique I first hit upon while writing a piece for flute and interactive electronics in early 2010, and I loved the effect (and affect) of hearing a complex sound morph in to these basic, elemental wave forms.

festival-long event
Thursday, april 28 to Sunday, may 1 | 5:00 pm

Dissocia
by Adam Cowart

29 King Street East

Performed by University of Waterloo Drama Department students under the direction of Andy Houston, with music by Nancy Tam and film/video design by Mark Walton. Dissocia examines the role that addiction plays in the 'performance' of everyday consumerism. The show focuses on digital gambling addiction, but it approaches the issue through the idea that gambling as an exploitative business is not unlike other businesses that claim to provide entertainment — for a price.

Thursday & friday April 28 & 29 | 2:00 - 3:30 pm
Open Ears Symposium
The Registry Theatre
122 Frederick Street

The Open Ears Symposium is an open forum for discussion amongst artists involved in the festival, invited guests and the general public. Each of the sessions combines an eclectic array of festival artists and other experts who have, in the past, expressed ideas around the general theme of that session. This year’s symposium centers around the creative interplay between popular musics and experimental sound genres.

Informations:
Cheryl A. Ewing, Festival Manager
519.579.8564 | 1.888.363.3591 fax: 519.743.6773

David Jensenius will present several process driven experimental sound compositions in celebration of the upcoming Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound.
Cambridge Galleries in concert with Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound presents:
David Jensenius
Tuesday, April 26, 7-8 pm
Queen’s Square 1 North Square Cambridge, ON N1S 2K6

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