Film “Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise” by Ken Jacobs/John Zorn (2005) Often the most forward-looking art is that which reaches into the distant past for inspiration. Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise, recorded in 2004 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, is culled from a set of performances by avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and musicians John Zorn and Ikue Mori. These performances derive their means of production from an era predating the existence of film, and the effect is startling. The viewer is guided on a voyage through forests, caverns, and galaxies. Trees transform into cloud formations; craters on the lunar surface become droplets of rain on a windshield—the possibilities for an interpreted narrative framework are limitless. If Jacobs’ work evokes the dream state, then Zorn and Mori’s improvised score interprets it as a nightmare; with its pervasive sense of dread, the music imposes inferences on visual phenomena that are, in fact, quite beautiful. Machine-like drones gradually intensify, threatening to overwhelm the imagery but never doing so. Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise is a vital release. It captures the emergence of an exciting visual medium, one that may entrance, perplex, or disturb its viewer, but one that refuses to be ignored.
Trio Echoes (Milana Zaric / Leo Svirsky / Adam Jeffrey) Harp, piano and percussion trio ‘Echoes’ originated as a part of a Master’s research project at Koncon. The improvisation project is about transformations of timbre between stringed and percussive instruments, exploring their inner sound spectrum and resonances and obscuring the boundaries of separate instruments identities. The ensemble members are Milana Zaric, harp, Leo Svirsky, piano, and Adam Jeffrey, percussions. The Ephémère performance will consist of a composed/improvised piece by Leo Svirsky, which deals with resonance sustaining for non-sustaining instruments, and one freely improvised piece.
Duo Alberto Novello / Flavio Zanuttini The duo we present is a live electronics for computer and flugelhorn, inspired and dedicated to the cosmological vision and composition stye of O. Messiaen. Two elements clash with each other in his vision of the world: time, seen as an oppressing and implacable force, and the birds, the most free and musical of all beings. Men dwell in between these elements longing for freedom but eternally caged in the grid of time. In this structured improvisation, we attempt at evoking these two opposite entities, trying also to go further and create a dialectic pace with time in the form of rhythm. Alberto Novello a.k.a. JesterN is a scientist, composer, sound and video artist. He studied sound synthesis with J.C. Risset, and obtained a PhD working at the Philips Research, Eindhoven, the Netherlands in the field of Music Perception and Music Information Retrieval. Since 2004 he produced several electronic audio and video pieces, performed mainly in France, Netherlands, and Italy. His pieces can be found on his website. Flavio Zanuttini graduated in flugelhorn and trumpet at the Conservatory Tartini, Trieste, with Glauco Venier, Klaus Gesing, Stefano Bellon and Marcello Tonolo, and continued his studies with Kyle Gregory. His interests are improvised music and free jazz, traditional music of central europe and the practice of lead trumpet which he’s experimenting in various bands and big bands.