familytime.

Above: Brainiac. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard that Timmy Taylor was dead. Bonsai Superstar was easily my favorite record of 1994 (and 1995), and I'd been eagerly awaiting a live show. I still use the Timmy Taylor Defense whenever it doesn't make financial or geographical sense for me to go see a live show that I will one day regret not seeing.

+++

So, Family Tapes gig 2 was better than the first one, but still mostly helped us realize what we don't want to do.

But OK, also what we do want to do, some of which I think is to play compositions. This is part of a new piece that we tried for the first time on the day of the gig (like, with at least one person seeing their written parts for the first time that day), where two notes in a row are rarely played by the same guitarist (in this section we each play every 5th note). In its original context, this bit (loop 4) lasts for about 10 seconds, this is an experiment to see what happens if it lasts a little longer.

The Family Tapes: The Happy Days (4/13).

And this excerpt is not actually composed, but we knew we were going to do it: this is us blowing on the strings with amps turned up very loud.

The Family Tapes: Blown.

+++

extract of invitation.

This is a seven minute edit of our hour-long piece this is hardly an invitation. The edit (not done by us) does an amazing job of not giving you any context for anything that happens onstage, but luckily includes a full minute of us taking bows afterwards. I imagine that we'll have our own comparatively useful edit up here in the next couple of weeks.

And here's the first bit of unfinished music I'm posting from the piece, this would be The End:

Morsanek: perishing party (5:54)

+++

arrangements in public.

This is Kenzo Kusuda at the Jewish Historical Museum last week performing to a (now rather old) DJ mix of mine called Arrangements, all of which is also part of the My Name is Spinoza festival. For some of the clip you can hear the audio as the headphoned audience could, and for some of the clip you're in the position of non-audio participant, at least I think that's what's happening...I wasn't there for the performance myself unfortunately.

+++

this is hardly an invitation.

this is a perishing party...
this is a festivity lab...
this is hardly an invitation


+++

a performance by/with Hillary Blake Firestone & Morsanek
i.k.v. My Name is Spinoza Festival

Grand Theater Groningen May 19 @ 20.30h
Frascati Amsterdam May 22, 23 @ 21h

Light design: Floriaan Ganzevoort
Thanks: Keren Levi, Mara Tomanek, Jeroen Kimman, Jordis Jabuzichek

Made possible with the support of SKOR, Grand Theater Groningen, DWA and the Violet Bureau

+++

We need maracas
We need mutton
We need garish
We need gaudy
We need a reason to get drunk on a Tuesday
We need a reason to be childishly guileless
We need a reason to get in a fight
We need a reason for ABBA
We need a reason for orange
We need to practice being a corpse
We need a reason for marzipan teeth
We need fringe
We need food fights
We need a reason to think about decay
We need a reason for love letters
We need a reason for lapdance
We need a reason for limbo
We need a reason to get in over our heads
We need seduction
We need surrender
We need a reason for human target practice
We need a reason to spike the punch

this is hardly an invitation is a collaboration between sound artist Morsanek (aka Mark Morse) and choreographer Hillary Blake Firestone. Commissioned to create a performance inspired by Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, the two distilled from the text the unlikely combination of festivity as theme and laboratory as location. Joined by light designer Floriaan Ganzevoort, the group inaugurated a Festivity Lab, a liminal space devoted to testing the mechanisms of celebration.

The performance itself takes place within this oddly clinical disco. Exploring the imaginative flow and reconstructive energy that define festivity, the performers propose dry-humoured experiments where various hypotheses are tested…some of which are bound to fail.

The result is equally visual, musical and physical: a solo parade; a funny-sad spectacle; a lonely party for two people and their public, tinged with the recognition that within every celebration, along with the eternal, there is an inevitable suggestion of the perishing. Hoera.

+++



Hillary Blake Firestone (USA, 1974) is a choreographer, performer, and teacher, based in Amsterdam since 1999. After studying Dance Performance/Composition and Literature in New York, she began making her own work, first with the dance/theatre collective Unexpected Company. Since moving to the Netherlands, she has worked in collaboration with choreographers, composers, musicians, and visual artists. The relationship between movement and sound is one of the primary focuses of her work. To this end, she often makes use of simple objects and complex music.

Mark Morse aka Morsanek (USA, 1969) is an improvising guitarist, DJ, and sound editor who builds his own source material through a variety of prepared guitars, customized software, and feedback generators, and then painstakingly assembles dense narratives that draw on techniques from film editing, field recordings, and DJ mixing. His new LP on the Dutch label Kazemat has been called "a fascinating puzzle" (Gonzo Circus).

+++

thirds.

A couple of people have asked about other Kebab recordings, this is the last one I have I think. The first sound you hear is the last tune of my DJ set, Gilbert Altman's great "Urban Sax Part 3", which we then fade in over. This recording is from 13 December 2006.

Minister Kebab: Heresy's Syrup (43:02).

Hilary Jeffery: trombone, tromboscillator, voice

Mark Morse: feedback, samplers, electric guitar, analog synths, voice

Alan Purves: drums, bells, mallets, whistles, tubes, etc.

+++