Sarah Belle Reid‘s work centers on experimental electroacoustic performance, improvisation, and human-machine interaction. Performing with trumpet, voice, modular synthesizer, and custom electronic instruments of her own design, she creates interactive performance systems in which performers, technologies, environments, and listeners continuously shape one another. Often praised for her ability to transport audiences through vivid sonic worlds, her musical language has been described as ranging from “graceful” and “danceable” to “silk-falling-through-space” and “pit-full-of-centipedes” (San Francisco Classical Voice).
Notes on tonight’s performance: Over the past year, my performance practice has taken a new direction, shaped by growth, new life, and the kinds of loss that accompany transformation. During this time, I found myself listening differently: drawn toward unfamiliar sounds, moments of harshness and unexpected beauty, textures that evoke childhood memories, and fragile melodic fragments that seem to appear out of nowhere. It has also required a different kind of patience, making space for uncertainty, for healing, and for things that reveal themselves gradually. Presented in quadraphonic sound, these ideas unfold through improvisation as feedback, breath, pops, clicks, noise, and melody collide—moving between fragility and intensity, density and stillness.
Marcin Pączkowski (pronounced marr-cheen pawnch-koav-skee) is a composer, conductor, digital artist, and performer, working with both traditional and electronic media. As a composer, he is focused on developing new ways of creating and performing computer music, and his pieces involving real-time gestural control using accelerometers have been performed in the United States, Poland, Canada, and South Korea.
For this performance, he’ll be using a custom motion-sensing system to manipulate both live and pre-recorded audio in real time. Continuing his exploration of the space between movement, improvisation, and live electronics, the performance brings together a variety of instruments with recently captured found sounds. The set centers on the concept of place – whether geographical, cultural, or musical – distilling the sonic signatures of the spaces he’s inhabited into an immersive soundscape.
Curated by Haley Freedlund for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.
(photo: Etta Gerdes)