East River from Corlear's Hook


Curator's statement on New York Soundscape
Ear to the Earth 2008

Produced by
Electronic Music Foundation
Ear to the Earth 09

New York Soundscape

O + A
my eyes ... my ears ...

Elliott Sharp
Ganging the Hook



Friday, October 9, 8pm
Judson Church
55 Washington Square South

$15 / $10 students, seniors, and EMF Subscribers


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PROGRAM

World premieres
New York Soundscape commissions

my eyes ... my ears .......................................................................O + A (Bruce Odland + Sam Auinger)
    For electronics and field recordings of urban eco-systems

Ganging the Hook...............................................................................................................Elliott Sharp
    For guitar, electronics, and Corlear’s Hook field recordings
    Performed by Elliott Sharp

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

 

Sam Auinger
Composer, sound designer Sam Auinger collaborates with Bruce Odland in O+A and with Dietmar Offenhuber and Hannes Strobl in the performance group Stadtmusiki. He has received the Kultur Preis der Stadt Linz (2002) and the SKE Publicity Preis (2007). Auinger is currently guest professor in the Soundstudies department at the University of the Arts, Berlin.


Bruce Odland
Sonic thinker, composer, sound artist, Bruce Odland collaborates with Sam Auinger in O+A. He has worked with Laurie Anderson, Peter Sellars, Joanne Akailitis, and the Wooster Group. His Sounds from the Vaults won the AAM Gold Muse Award. His current work includes Harmony in the Age of Noise, a project at Tufts University to map the psychoacoustics of the campus.


Elliott Sharp
Composer, multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp leads the projects Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. He has been featured at New Music Stockholm, Frankfurt Klangbiennale, The Kitchen, and the Venice Biennale. His collaborators include Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, The SEM Ensemble, and Christian Marclay, and he has released more than 200 albums.

ABOUT THE MUSIC

For more than 20 years, Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (known as O + A) have maintained a transatlantic collaboration to create installations that change the way we hear and re-connect us to our environment. They are, as they describe their work, philosophers of modern life who think with their ears to develop a hearing perspective on what they refer to as "our visually insane culture".



In my eyes… my ears..., O + A takes on the politics of the senses, exposing striking differences in the way our eyes and ears perceive space. According to Odland, "we are living in a world where our senses are niche-marketed, our ears colonized by i-pods. my eyes… my ears... explores the urban 'sonic commons', any space where people share an acoustic environment and hear the results of each other's activities, both intentional and unintentional." The live performance/installation helps audiences redefine the act of listening while re-connecting to an urban eco-system.

Field recordings gathered in New York City—for example Wall Street late at night, Washington Square at midday, a sidewalk cafe at breakfast time—will be transformed and combined with re-tuned text and urban images to decipher the cognitive dissonance of New York City's sonic environment.

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In Ganging the Hook, Elliott Sharp performs on guitar and computer to explore the ambient sound of Corlear’s Hook, a neighborhood on the East River where he resides. He modulates the sounds to create something that is not quite guitar, not quite environmental noise, but a new and intertwined sonic reality.