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.