September – November 2016
In early September, 50 artists and musicians came together for the first ever VERANTWORTUNG 3000, a weeklong self-curated residency in Brandenburg organised by the power trio Andreas Dzialocha, Malte Kobel, and Laura Weber, the folks who run BLATT 3000 out of Berlin. It was an amazing and life-affirming thing that happened at an old distillery near the German-Polish border.
I presented a test run of a 25′ piece I spent a fair chunk of the spring working on while studying with theorist and musician Eldritch Priest in New York. The premise is simple: the protagonist, to whom I bear striking resemblance, finds a scrap of paper on the New York City subway that reads ‘Raymond looking for work’ and that includes a phone number. Following weeks of speculative sleuthing and a couple of emails, he heads off on a wild goose chase across the American south in search of the note’s author and an explanation for the trail of clues it leaves behind. Half film documentary, half music-theatre piece, Who Is Raymond probes the line between truth and fiction, and between staged interventions and real life. Do these binaries even hold water when put to the test? Major thanks to the dozens of festival attendees who took the time to offer feedback on the edit. Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the piece.
Who Is Raymond? is set for a performance-lecture outing in Toronto in November at Eldritch’s Tuning Speculation weekender, and a longer, deconstructed version for Delia Stevens and Abel Selaocoe on percussion, cello and sundry digital devices is on the cards for a wee portrait concert touring the UK in the summer. Finally, a couple more Tired Music shows: at Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn in October with Fede Camara Halac and Jessica Rosen, and at Transpecos in Queens in November with David Meier & company. Woop.
Also just in: a film I made three(!) years ago with Sheffield cultural producers Hand Of, directed by Ismar Badzic, has been accepted for this year’s Aesthetica Short Film Festival, up in York in England. In the film I walk the 26 miles from Sheffield University Brass Band’s lockup to Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s evening rehearsal carrying a tuba rigged with microphones, to record sounds for a brass band commission. It also documents the performance of the new work, at S1 Artspace in Sheffield. The walk happened in early January. (Cold). Here’s a trailer:
So many people came together to make this thing happen. Thanks first to Hand Of, and then to the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Town Trust, Arts Council England, and the Yorkshire Film Archive. Sick to have been a part of it. Check out the film, along with work from all over the world, between November 3rd and 6th.
joesna.pe 