20.01.05 WOW Theatre 59-61 East 4th Street @ Bowery
January 10, 21 and 22
Elegy #1: A little of the Sea A dance/physical theatre piece is inspired by Zen monks and Haiku poetic tradition of writing their last words on the edge of death. Elegy # 1: A little of the Seais a death poem that reflects the ambiguous and ephemeral nature of mens existence; an elegy as a farewell to life and a salute to death.
Conceived and Directed by: Ximena Garnica and Juan Merchan
Music by: Grundik+Slava and Benjamin Marcantoni
06.01.05
Diapason Gallery - 1026 Sixth Avenue, # 2S New York (between 38th & 39th Street) subway: F, N, R, W, Q, 1, 2, 3 to 42nd Street
January 8, 15, 22 & 29 6pm - Midnight
Grundik+Slava: sound installation
Shige Moriya: video installation
The space of sound installation Diapason Gallery, NYC January 2005 is divided into three partitions (room A, room B and virtual space C). Room A (the big room) is sub-divided into thirteen sectors. Each sector contains a sound source (speaker). Room B (the small room) is sub-divided into five sectors. Each sector contains a sound source (speaker). The virtual space C is sub-divided into two sectors. Each sector contains a sound source (headphone).
Each sound source is connected to the bank of sounds and silences. Each bank can contain from 11 to 349 sounds and silences. All sounds are taken from our earlier works or from occasional field recordings. Each bank stores specific type of sounds (music boxes sounds, flute sounds, sine waves, small noises etc). Every sound has a silent attachment (period of emptiness of certain duration attached to the end of sound file).
Each bank of sounds and silences is played by an audio player. All the audio players play sounds and silences simultaneously with random repeat mode on. The title of this piece simply indicates the time and the place of its realization.
Igor “Grundik” Kasyansky and Slava Smelovsky are Russian Jews based in Israel, and have three previous releases on Israeli labels, but this is their first to have international distribution. It’s perhaps a little surprising to discover that this album’s title means what it says: the pretty ambient electronics produced by its creators do accompany sampled birdsong on many of the tracks. The album starts with pretty xylophone sounds and the occasional muted beats under birdsong, with synthesised sounds and occasional glitches adding to the mix. Things turn around on track 3, where the wailing vocals of Victoria Hanna are added to the mix. For some listeners the ambient nature of the music will be too uneventful, but there are some gems if one’s patient (such as the panned bells on “Music Box”). Meanwhile, at the beginning of “Pianka Do Golenia” one wonders if suddenly ambience has given way to cheesy background music, but the synthesised accordion and violin are fragmented in a bizarre and charming way. It’s hard to know what to make of this album, but in the end the beautiful passages outweigh the weird bits of burping farm animals. A fascinating experiment.
Peter Hollo
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