Grateful Dead

Kurouzu

Anthony Donovan - fretless-half guitar & electronics
Ian Simpson - prepared lap steel
Charlie Collins - percussion & metal

at the Mopomoso free improvisation afternoon event at the Vortex, London, on 19 April 2015

filmed by Kostas Chondros

Lisa Mezzacappa

ORGANELLE

ORGANELLE is a “set" of compositions, inspired by diverse scientific processes – some enormous and unfathomable, others impossibly microscopic – that form a whole through the insights and explorations of master improvisers. The modular work draws its musical ideas from the different ways that the human body, the natural world, and the cosmos mark and “experience” the passing of time. The notes, rhythms, musical relationships, melodies, and structures in each movement of ORGANELLE are connected to theories of cell biology, astrophysics, paleontology, zoology, or neuroscience, exploring these otherwise-imperceptible phenomena through sound.

The first iteration of ORGANELLE premiered in Europe in spring of 2016, with musicians in Köln, DE; Naples and Rome, IT; and back at home that fall, in Berkeley, CA at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In each presentation, the music is revised, re-imagined, and expanded to embrace a new set of musical personalities and a different performance context. New movements will be added, and old ones discarded or re-worked, to suit different configurations of musicians as the work continues to develop in the coming years.

ORGANELLE also reflects my fascination with the challenges of notating musical ideas for improvisers to play (with), which for me has an interesting parallel with the ways science tries to visually represent complex, multi-dimensional systems and processes with flow charts and graphs and diagrams. The practical concern of wanting this score to be playable by any kind of improviser - a laptop electronic musician, an experimental koto player, a guitarist with nontraditional tunings - meant I often needed to find ways of visually representing musical ideas and relationships that were not confined to the traditional music staff. Many of these new graphic notations ended up having poetic connections to the scientific diagrams I was discovering in researching the content for the piece.

Part I: Syzygy
Lisa Mezzacappa, contrabass + Wayne Grim, electronics/sonification

Part II: Percussion Quartet
Gino Robair, Kjell Nordeson, Mark Clifford, Jason Levis

at Exploratorium, Pier 15, The Embarcadero & Green St., San Francisco, CA

Dead Kennedys

Jello Biafra - vocals
East Bay Ray - guitar
Klaus Fluoride - bass, vocals
D.H. Peligro - drums, vocals

at DMPO's On Broadway Nightclub, San Francisco, Saturday, June 16, 1984

Maja S. K. Ratkje

Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje - vocals, electronics, live processing
Tord Knudsen - live visuals

at Punkt Festival 2013, Kick, Kristiansand, Norway

Neneh Cherry & The Thing

Neneh Cherry - vocals
Mats Gustafsson - tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, electronics
Ingebright Håker Flaten - double bass, electric bass
Paal Nilssen-Love - drums

at 47th Heineken Jazzaldia
Festival de Jazz de San Sebastián, 23 July 2012, Plaza de la Trinidad, Donosti, Spain