Performance
Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker got in touch, out of the blue, about opening for Negativland (in which he’s been a pivotal member, alongside O.G. Mark Hosler & Sue-C, for the band’s recent run) at Le Poisson Rouge in early May, and it took some not-insignificant amount of mental wrangling to keep two yearsworth’ of excuses & quips at bay; it’s definitely time to start all of this up again &, as such, I have re-instigated the “Events” tab (where you get a nice rundown of all of the things that were canceled over the past two years, and everything before) and will be updating it as invitations & requests come in.
Jon is someone I hold near & dear; one of the best things I did in the before-times (just before, actually) was perform a version of Luc Ferrari’s “Les ProtoRythmiques for 2 Performers (June 2004 – January 2005)” in a duo w/ Jon at the “Stereo Spasms” festival that Thurston & Eva put together (on top of Negativland, Jon’s also been a regular member of Thurston’s touring band) which hopefully will be getting a release on a tangible-media-object at some point this year.
The first semi-public activity I took part in after a good 18-month lapse was a studio-taping (inside a former Top Shop in Rockefeller Center, no less) in something of an ad hoc “Intonarumori Orchestra,” assembled at the behest of (my old Eagles of Hair Metal bandmate) Alan Licht to realize a structure of his devising on Luciano Chessa’s instruments for the Performa 2021 Biennial, and it was interesting to see how quickly the feelings of pure dread upon arrival gave way to a renewed appreciation of community and shared musical languages throughout the day (I was too freaked out to take my mask off during the taping, lest the PTA at my son’s school see it and label me a risk).
I’m very much looking forward to getting back on the horse of live performance in the grander sense, so please get in touch if you want, say, a set of Live Electronic Music played on small, contemporary embedded computers.
Postscript: technical issues aside, this went fairly well, and was a fine start to a Spring / Summer of performing live in NYC again. I’ve started a “Pay If You Must” (i.e. free) Bandcamp Album for recordings of performance-documentation, to which I will slowly add as they come in, so go ahead and add it to your BC collection to be auto-apprised when it’s updated!
