Claudia Meza’s Water is intended as an interactive sonic experience. Housed in the White Box Gallery at UO’s Portland campus, Califone tape recorders hang suspended from the ceiling, speaking both individually and collectively. Intuitive gallery behavior suggests not touching, but the tape players are intended to be used. Each contains an “endless” looped tape that can be stopped and started at will by participants. The sound fills the room until it is unclear which element of the composition is contributed by which tape. The experience is immediately visceral; the surround-sound quality of multiple sources envelops the visitor on both an auditory and physical plane. From outside, the occasional Max train adds to the bass vibrations of the collected loops. Each tape offers a specific auditory layer that feels eerie, metallic, ringing. The collective sounds suggest subterranean movement, hinting at the macabre tones of old vinyl sound effects collections. A few players, I’m told on the last day of the exhibition, are broken; rendered mute through use, obscuring part of the once complete score.

Meza created the individual tracks through capturing field recordings of water, editing them digitally, and then outputting them to individual tapes. She collected the Califone players on eBay, one at a time. Many retain inscriptions from their sources, usually middle or high schools, suggesting technology once cutting edge but now nostalgic.

Meza’s work both acknowledges and rejects the loosely-binding theme for End Things, TBA:12’s visual programming. Curator Kristan Kennedy’s concept of how things matter to humans both as objects and as ideas of objects is directly suggested by the fetishized idea of the tape players, meticulously collected and fragile. Meza agrees that “we are constantly collaborating with our materials or objects at hand.” Conversely, she rejects that objects should have such a hold on human  emotions, asking “…isn’t this is what commerce is all about: the fetishization of objects and our interaction with them? We tend to give objects a lot more power than they deserve.”

Inspired by John Cage’s work and coming from a history of unique projects, Meza pursues an eclectic path as a composer, musician, artist, curator, and (duly noted in her artist bio) surfer. As in her work, there is an element of timeless charm and authenticity in her worldview. She doesn’t distinguish between her attraction to Cage’s work and his life as a person; both are equally inspirational. And we are not meant to make distinctions between her work as a popular musician (Explode into Colors, Japanther) and her more abstract New Musics, Mourning Youth, and Sonic City PDX projects.

Kennedy’s visual programming often points towards the personal; how we make meaning for ourselves, how meaning arises, what it means to be human. Meza’s work in various aspects creates a similar authentic resonance; personal experiences are key. Meza refers to Cage’s quote from Kant: “there are two things that don’t have to mean anything [in order to give us deep pleasure]: one is music, the other is laughter.” Water offers a both singular and collective way for participants to make meaning or to simply experience sound as “music”.

Claudia Meza is PICA’s mid-year Resource Room Resident through September 30:
http://www.pica.org/programs/detail.aspx?eventid=884

End Things closes Saturday, September 29:
Washington High School Thu–Fri, 12-6:30pm; Sat 12-4pm
PICA Thu–Fri, 12-6:30pm; Sat 12-4pm

One of our goals with TBA is to always put local, emerging artists on the same stages as renowned, national and international artists. It’s so important to us that we present our city’s talent in front of all of the audiences and visiting presenters. Each year, TBA has launched artists to national attention, helping them secure gigs across the country and around the world with our peer organizations and festivals.  This year, we’ve got a whole new crop of home-town favorites, just waiting to be discovered by local audiences and visitors alike.

Claudia Meza seems to be everywhere at TBA this year. She’s running not one, but three related projects for the Festival: an interactive sonic collage of tape loops on casette players, a QR code walking tour of unnoticed sounds around the city, and a live concert of local musicians performing compositions in response to this sonic landscape. At the heart of all of these projects is a real love for the everyday sounds of life—the way in which water flows, echoes occur, or traffic rolls by—and the sounds of Portland. For her closing weekend concert, Meza has rallied a great crew of other local musicians and collaborators, including Luke Wyland of AU, Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever, E*Rock and more. Keep your ears open!

38 Things from Team Video on Vimeo.

Andrew Dickson is a familiar local face to long-time PICA audiences. His genuine and sweetly humorous solo performances take the form of well-known (and much beleaguered) presentation styles: seminars, motivational speaking, and the like. For his newest project, Dickson is turning to a more intimate mode of address—the personal life coach—and staging the whole process in a very public forum. Make no mistake: this is the real deal. Yes, it might be “on stage,” but Dickson is very sincere. You can catch more of his smooth stylings as a coach on another UrbanHonking blog, called ADVICE.

What do you like? from Mo Ritter on Vimeo.

In the visual program, multi-disciplinary artist Morgan Ritter has constructed an inter-connected installation in two locations: the galleries at Washington High School and the rooftop deck at PICA’s downtown space. For the project, Ritter marshaled a team of assistants on road trips to rural Oregon, which she dug clay from the earth, which she then pounded down and reconstituted into a malleable material. At WHS, she’ll present a room of “precarious” sculptures balanced on soft beanbag plinths that relate to a separate ceramic fountain form sputtering on the PICA deck. Her works create a dialogue between multiple sites (the galleries and the source of the clay) and multiple scales, investing still sculpture with vibrant force.

THE WORKS always sees our greatest concentration of local talents, from dance to music, to film, and beyond. This year is no exception. We welcome back the beloved Ten Tiny Dances, which will feature a slate of entirely new performances by artists who’ve never graced the small stage, including Carlos Gonzalez; Takahiro Yamamoto; Christi Denton, Renee Sills, and Heather Perkins; Nicole Olson, and Linda K. Johnson. Come out and see what this new corps of dancers achieves in the confines of just 4 x 4 feet!

Parenthetical Girls: The Common Touch from Parenthetical Girls on Vimeo.

TBA alumni Parenthetical Girls return with an expansive evening that charts their many collaborations and musical experimentations. For their performance, they’ll bring to the stage dance by Allie Hankins, music by Golden Retriever, compostions by Jherek Bischoff performed by Classical Revolution PDX, as well as their own brand of pop mischief. While it’s been years since they’ve performed at TBA (’08 to be precise), they’ve stayed close in touch, even filming this music video on the WHS stage during a recent TBA.

Grouper – Hold the Way from Weston Currie on Vimeo.

It seems that the running theme for all of these local artists, musicians, and performers is “collaboration.” I guess that’s just the Portland way. Well, as a native, born-and-bred organization, PICA follows suit, collaborating regularly with our friends and peers in-town. We’ve invited the wonderful folks at The Hollywood Theatre to curate a night at the works of expanded film and video; what they came up is called FUTURE CINEMA, a wide-ranging night of performance, music, and interactive movie-going. They’ll stage performances and videos by a group of “terrifying women” (with homegirls Kathleen Keogh, Alicia McDaid, Angela Fair, and Sarah Johnson among them); B-Movie Bingo of Hollywood cliches hosted by Wolf Choir; and film by Weston Currie featuring the music of Grouper (Liz Harris).

And sometimes, these collaborations span timezones and continents. Local indie-pop group BRAINSTORM has been working with Christopher Kirkley of micro-label Sahel Sounds on a series of collaborations with African musicians. Over the years, Kirkley has been traveling the continent as an amateur “ethnomusicologist,” collecting local cuts on cellphone SIM cards, and releasing albums with the musicians he meets. For TBA, they’ve tracked down the locally-based Somali group Iftin Band for a night of covers and jam sessions between Portland indie musicians, Portland African musicians, and African musicians from the continent via Skype and YouTube. Come out and dance and see how far our local community really extends!

Laurie Anderson. Photo: Lucie Jansch.

From street corners to late-night stages, TBA has filled Portland with avant garde composers and experimental musicians year after year. We’ve hosted improvisational marathons in a gallery window, comic beatboxers, pop cellists, a guitar “orchestra,” and a dance and music suite in public fountains. This year, we’ve invited a few legendary musicians, as well as a few young composers, spanning generations to show the range of contemporary sound art and music.

Perhaps the “grand dame” of contemporary music, Laurie Anderson returns to Portland to complete her trilogy of solo story works, which she presented with PICA in 2002 and 2006. Dirtday! finds Anderson back with her violin and her wry observations on modern life, reflecting on this past decade since 9/11. “Politicians are essentially story tellers,” says Anderson, “they describe the world as it is and also as they think it should be. As a fellow story teller, it seems like a really good time to think about how words can literally create the world.” Luckily for us, she tells these stories with considerable grace and stirring sounds.

Musician and curator Aki Onda returns to Portland with a line-up of legendary experimental sound artists from Japan in Voices & Echoes. With poet Gozo Yoshimasu, guitarist and turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, and sound artist Akio Suzuki, the night will span from improv to conceptual art to literature to performance. These three artists are legendary and seminal figures in the Japanese sound and music scenes, but few audiences in the States have ever had the chance to witness their work: Akio Suzuki has not performed in North American since a NYC performance in 1983, and Gozo Yoshimasu has never given a public performance in the United States, outside of small readings in universities and galleries. This rare concert is not-to-be-missed!

No, we haven’t resurrected John Cage for TBA (though maybe someday we’ll pull off a hologram concert á la Tupac), but his legacy is apparent in so many of the musicians we support. This being the Cage centennial, it’s fitting that we have a trio of projects by local musician Claudia Meza, all inspired by Cage-ian music theories. On the visual program, Meza presents Water at the White Box, an interactive tape collage/installation instrument wherein the viewer can play a series of water-based sound loops on hanging cassette players.

Out in the world, Meza continues her explorations of overlooked quotidian sounds through her Sonic City PDX project. She called upon a diverse mix of local musicians and composers to select their favorite “sonic sites” in town, crafting a digital walking map and audio tour with QR codes. While audiences are invited to wander and discover the sounds all week long, the project will culminate in special concert on September 15 of original compositions (by Meza, Daniel Menche, Luke Wyland of AU, Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever, Mary Sutton, Eric Mast of E*Rock, and more) inspired by the various locations. So grab your smartphone and head out!

Our late-night stages usually see the greatest concentration of musicians—party DJs, afropop, art rockers, and more—but avant-classical compositions are a relative rarity. Thanks to the Parenthetical Girls‘ knack for expansive and ambitious chamber pop, we’ll have some experimental sounds filling the WHS auditorium at THE WORKS. This evening of performances will draw their wide web of collaborators into the spotlight, featuring music by Golden Retriever, compositions by Jherek Bischoff performed by Classical Revolution PDX, and dance by choreographer Allie Hankins. It’s sure to be an idiosyncratic, lushly-textured performance.

Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells, The Quiet Volume. Photo: Lorena Fernandez.

Undoubtedly, part of what makes contemporary performance so compelling is the number of artists working outside of the confines of the theater. Whether performing in alternative spaces, like street corners and office buildings, or interacting directly with the audience both as volunteers and unwitting participants, these artists can realize projects unlike anything from a traditional company. Think about past TBA projects like Back to Back Theatre or Offsite Dance Project or Tim Crouch to name just a few artists from recent years. Each of these artists made us think differently about the spaces of art and the daily world we live in. If you’re one of those audience members who leaps at the chance to step on stage or catch a performance under a bridge, then you’re in good company for TBA. Read on for a few of this year’s projects that take art beyond the proscenium arch and—sometimes—out into the audience.

Local musician Claudia Meza approaches her project as a tool to turn audience attentions back onto the world around them. Riffing on John Cage’s theories of sound and the city, Meza has coordinated a walking tour of Portland’s sonic space, hand-picked by local musicians and composers. Follow a map around town to tune into the sounds we usually ignore, or pick up your smartphone when you stumble upon a QR code, placed at prime spots around the city. Wrapping up the project on the closing weekend of TBA, Meza will host a free outdoor concert in Industrial SE, featuring compositions inspired by the sounds of Portland.

Some of the hallmark projects of past TBA Festivals have been the ones that didn’t seem like performances at all! Through the Festival, PICA has hosted classic novel readings on city sidewalks, headphone performances in a public square, and urban tours of a Dutch city via Portland streets. This year, we’ve set our sights on the central library with a project by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells (a TBA:08 alum!). As a pioneer of what he calls “Autoteatro,” Hampton has staged a series of plays where the ticket-buyer is both audience and performer, thanks to a series of instructions delivered via headphone. In The Quiet Volume, two people at a time will enter the library, where they’ll be guided to a table with a stack of books. They’ll press play and begin to both perform and witness the simple, poetic story unfold.

Along the lines of last year’s Offsite Dance Project, Perforations will track a trio of projects through site-specific performances. Where Offsite focused on Japanese dance, Perforations highlights contemporary performance art from the Balkan states of Serbia and Croatia. Organized by Zvonimir Dobrovic, curator of Perforacije Festival in Zagreb and Queer New York International, the lineup features two performances by Petra Kovacic that draw attention to the audience/artist relationships on stage and in galleries, a satirical political campaign lead by Biljana Kosmogina, and an improvisational music installation/concert by East Rodeo. It will be a rare chance to catch the latest experiments from Eastern Europe and to see how these diverse artists respond to space and audience.

Portlander and Festival alum (’04 and ’07) Andrew Dickson has made a practice out of re-framing his day job as a performance project, somewhere in the vein of a professional development seminar. In the past, he has taught TBA audiences the secrets of eBay “power-selling” and offered an insider’s look at selling out and joining an advertising agency. Now, a few years down the road, Dickson is exploring a new path as a life coach and is training to counsel people in their decisions, big and small. For TBA, he’ll invite a select number of volunteers to put their coaching session on view, hosted like a seminar in a hotel conference room. It’s a performative event, but in Dickson’s hands, it won’t stray far from genuine and sincere counsel.

Provocative, award-winning choreographer Miguel Gutierrez typically performs on stage, but rarely seems limited by it. His powerful performances step into the audience (or pull them into the moment), to provoke strong emotions and explore, in his own words, “group identity and communal experience.” In HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE, Gutierrez invites the audience on stage and proceeds to deliver a disarmingly-simple monologue on his traveling, working life and the attendant insecurities and questions of being an artist. From this introduction, Gutierrez transfixes the audience as he launches into a bold solo dance.

Gob Squad is a wildly fun and inventive theater collective that splits time between Germany and the UK, creating projects that range from a late-night drama in a hotel room to a “blockbuster” film starring the city they’re in, filmed exactly one hour before the “performance” begins. For TBA, they’ve set themselves the odd task of re-creating Andy Warhol’s Factory films live on-stage. The audience enters the theater through the back-stage set and takes a seat on the other side of a movie theater for the action to unfold. Needless to say, everything that happens next is a bit of surprise, so we won’t give anything else away. Instead we’ll leave you with the company’s own words:

“We try and explore the point where theatre meets art, media and real life. As well as theatres and galleries, we place our work at the heart of urban life – in houses, shops, underground stations, car parks, hotels or directly on the street. Everyday life and magic, banality and utopia, reality and entertainment are all set on a collision course and the audience are often asked to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators and bear witness to the results.”

Act 1: Color Film 5 (Madison Brookshire) and Field Organ (Tashi Wada)
“The subject of the work is duration, with color as the medium through which we experience it.” – program guide, New Musics

A wall of color is the backdrop for two simultaneous reed organs. The color field almost imperceptibly shifts, meaning you can’t see the increments of change, just the change itself. As soon as you stop looking, everything is different. Wada’s two-organ duet produces a similar effect with an opposing approach; you hear every sustained note, both melodic and discordant, in real time. Because the musical progression is so fluid, however, the emotional responses generated can only be realized periodically. Brookshire and Wada’s works are a brilliant pair and together produce a realization about perception of time and visceral response that is greater than the sum of its parts. Something previously hidden becomes known: the liminal space between hearing/seeing and responding emotionally is suddenly visible.

Act 2: PART (Grouper)
Grouper’s “tape collage” matched with Flash Choir’s vocal instrumentation puts the central focus on the flickering images on the screen. The result is non-narrative (or at least non immediately so) and alternatively lulling and haunting. The staging, whether intentional or not, made the work somehow less accessible; if the use of tape is inherent to the work, it would be intriguing to make the process at least as visible as the choir.

Act 3: Mourning Youth (Claudia Meza)
“…if time passing can only be experienced and digested through memory…then ‘youth’ as a concept will always be mourned” – program guide, New Musics

Memory and reality collide in Meza’s non-mournful Mourning Youth. Powerful, charged images are slowed to iconic speed and paired visually with each other and sonically with taiko drumming and choral response. Meza’s collaboration with Portland Taiko, Flash Choir, Thomas Thorson, Chris Hackett and Allie Hankins is an evolving work; the movement portion was recently added and seemed less integrated than the other elements of what Meza calls a “wordless opera”. Reminiscent of a Greek drama/music video mashup, the performance is charged by searing visuals and heart-pounding sounds, describing the electric physicality and heightened perception of both experienced and remembered youth.