Upcoming Event: Music That Listens to Itself

It’s been a while since I did a live event. I think the last one may have been last year when I interviewed Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury at the Algorithmic Art Assembly here in San Francisco. Now I’ve got a new event scheduled, across the Bay in Berkeley. On the evening of Friday, September 29, from 7pm to 9pm, I’ll be leading an in-person session in the Expanded Listening series at the venue Berkeley Alembic (berkeleyalembic.org). I was invited by my old friend Erik Davis (Techgnosis, Burning Shore) to program an evening’s listening after I attended an Expanded Listening session he did last month with Sam Plattner, a sound designer and field recordist. It’s a great format: I’ll speak a bit before the listening session, then we’ll listen straight through for about 80 minutes to music I’ve assembled from a variety of sources, and then we’ll discuss what we heard, as well as our experience of listening to it. It’s a comfortable, airy space, with yoga mats and cozy cushions to lay out on while the music plays.

Here is the official event description:

For this session of the Expanded Listening series, we’ll enjoy a program of ambient and ambient-adjacent artists from around the world that employs techniques to not just slow but to even reverse and revisit time. From reverb to echo to tape loops to granular synthesis, various recording and performance practices give artists the means by which to examine the space within sound. We’ll listen to some of these artists via recordings as they explore what might be called the “poetics of the buffer”: the ability to capture sound, often in real time, and toy with it while it still lingers in the mind’s ear. This is music that listens to itself. Such recordings lend themselves readily to meditative states, to a consideration of music as a time-based art, and to an appreciation of the ways that numerous genres aspire to a state of utmost stillness. The evening will open with some framing comments from Marc Weidenbaum, a music critic and the moderator of the Disquiet Junto, a long-running online community for electronic musicians, some of whose compositions will be included.

There’s an Eventbrite page to get a ticket. Hope to see you there.