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.

Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, El Rumor del Incendio. Photo: Anne Vijverman.

It’s natural that in any given cultural moment (local or global), certain ideas will percolate. You know how at certain moments it seems like Hollywood releases three asteroid blockbusters in a matter of weeks? Call it zeitgeist, call it coincidence, but we’ll come out and call it significant. This year, we were struck by the number of artists who are working at the borders of art and activism, exploring big political shifts in societies around the world. In 2011, the first inklings of these political leanings were already present in artistic practice, not least in our visual art program, entitled Evidence of Bricks. Following a year that spanned from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, it’s small wonder that so many artists are now unveiling projects that reflect revolution and protest and uprising and political renewal.

Perhaps central among these projects at TBA:12 will be a world-premiere dance piece by Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero Performance. Developed in-residence this spring at PICA , Turbulence (a dance about the economy) attempts to make sense of the global economic collapse through improvisation and deliberate failure. The performance references images as disparate (but eerily related) as circus performance and Abu Ghraib, while exploring the many ways that our language and ideas about economies are literally “embodied.” Through a June symposium hosted around their residency, the company explored the problematics of queer identity and performance, of alternative economies, and whether art can truly be political. Their questions and investigations will continue at the September TBA premiere.

Big Art Group also asked a lot of questions during their pre-TBA residency, some quite literally. Their time in Portland centered on a week of community interviews by Portland residents of their friends and neighbors. The questions they posed covered everything from census-style information to deep and challenging issues at the heart of democratic society. Can you wage a war on behalf of democracy? Is terrorism ever justified? What makes a community? Together, these videos form the digital “Greek chorus” of The People—Portland, a multi-city serial project that loosely examines the tragic Oresteia, often cited as a founding text of civic society. Big Art’s performance will span a monumental video projection on the facade of Washington High School and engage with some of the core values underlying our political system.

Seminal artist, musician, and storyteller Laurie Anderson has developed a new piece entitled Dirtday! to cap off her story cycle trilogy. Over a varied career spanning countless subjects and themes, Anderson has consistently tapped into the present and the echoes of our recent past. From the legacy of 9/11 to the impact of last year’s Occupy movement, Anderson is an astute chronicler of the American political consciousness.

Moving beyond American soils and concerns, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican company investigating the political heritage of their country and the society their generation has inherited. In two bold “documentary” plays at TBA, Lagartijas will expose two overlooked aspects of Mexico City’s history—the armed revolutionaries of the 60s (El Rumor del Incendio) and the destruction of its natural aquifers and water sources (Asalto al Agua Transparente). Through a mix of archival text and footage, video, and original theater,  the company will set out to, “document the truth within the fiction, not to interpret it.” A worthy goal for any politically-minded artist, to be sure.