MUSIC FOr (F)ALL SEASONS

Le Petit VersaillespresentsMUSIC FOr (F)ALL SEASONSSeptember 27 Saturday 3 - 11pm( RAIN OR SHINE.)6:30pm Radio Wonderland - Joshua Fried3pm & 8pm - The New York Oratorio - Richard KostelanetzRichard Kostelanetz in person at 8pm.Come enjoy the garden earlier as we will present New York City Oratorio twice @ 3pm & 8pm.Le Petit Versailles Garden346 East Houston St (btwn Avenues B & C)F/V - Second Avenue & J/M - Delancey/Essexcontact: 212 529 8815 petitversailles@earthlink.netwww.lpvtv.blogspot.comAdmission is FREE but donations help provide food & refreshments!RADIO WONDERLAND is me, Joshua Fried, performing solo live soundprocessing controlled by old shoes I drum on with sticks (I'm adrummer) and a steering wheel (I'm a, er, wheel player).RADIO WONDERLAND turns live commercial FM radio into recombinant funk.All the sounds originate from an old boombox, playing radio LIVE.Nothing is pre-recorded; anything picked up during theperformance is fair game until the end. All the processing islive custom DSP programmed by me in the MaxMSP programmingenvironment. But I hardly touch the laptop. My controllersreally are a vintage Buick steering wheel, old shoes mounted onstands, and some gizmos. You'll hear me build grooves, step bystep, out of recognizable radio, and even UN-wind my grooves backto the original radio source.I walk on with a boom box, playing FM radio LIVE. Once onstage,I plug it into my system and start slicing up radio. I arrangethose slices both rhythmically, and, by playing them at differentspeeds, melodically as well, all according to what I hear. Icall this process the RE-SHUFFLER. With another algorithm, whichI call my RE-ESSER, (studio nerds will recognize this as a jokeon de-esser), I isolate the sibilance, so I can compose on thespot with those S, T, K, Sh, etc. sounds, just like programming adrum machine. The ANYTHING-KICK uses FFT-based cross synthesisto morph a bit of radio in the direction of a kick drum.The sum total is dance music. I ham it up like mad, using thetheatricality of the shoes and wheel. It's great fun, and moremusical than the video suggests. Every show is rather different,naturally, because the source material is entirely different eachtime.So what's it all about? What is the art-speak that goes withRADIO WONDERLAND? I want to show that we ALL can interrupt andinterrogate the never-ending flow of commercial media. So mytransformations, taken individually, must be clear and simple--mostly framing, repeating and changing pitch--although wheneverything is put together it does end up complex. My controllersare simple too: the wheel merely a knob to take things up anddown (frequency, tempo) or play radio loops like a turntable, theshoes just pads I hit softer or louder. The surreal quality ofusing such ordinary objects underscores the absurd disconnectbetween digital controller and sound, as well as the congenialnature of the aural transformations themselves. So, too, my riffsmust be vernacular and not elite. (We need the funk.)The New York Oratorio - Richard Kostelanetz---statement excerpt---As a native New Yorker, who haslived here my entire adult life (and dislikesleaving it, even for an afternoon in “the coun-try”), I have always treasured and even writ-ten about the literature and art of my hometown, most recently in SoHo: The Rise andFall of an Artists? Colony (Routledge, 2003).Nonetheless, it seems to me that though thegreatest books appear to capture much ofNew York City, the place still evaded as wellas exceeded the capacities of either authors?imaginations or their medium. Not only wastoo much left out, but one recurring problemapparent to me is a failure to acknowledgehow unprecedented and how extraordinarythis City was--how it has become a kindof second nature that had all the coherenceand comprehensiveness of primary natureand yet was completely apart and differentfrom it. Too many authors in writing aboutNew York seemed too eager to connect it tosomething old, such as birds and trees--tosee the old in the new--rather than accept thecity as a wholly unprecedented environment.Appreciative of this New York literature,yet aware of its inadequacies, I had cometo regard New York City as one of the mostfertile and challenging subjects for art.My ?rst thought, which seems evermore odd in retrospect, was to write out ofmy own head a New York replica of DylanThomas?s Under Milk Wood (1953), whichsurvives in my memory as a model warmevocation of one?s home town. I conceivedof indigenous characters and outlined char-acteristics of their speech; but once I tried towrite their lines, I realized the futility of thisapproach. The trouble was not just that thelanguages of New York are not as univer-sally appealing as Welsh English; I cannotwrite like Dylan Thomas and, though awed,would not want to. Moreover, the more Ithought about Under Milk Wood, I realizedthat it represented the climax of a certainperiod of creative radio, when most showswere done live (or initially in live time, evenif they were recorded for later broadcast),because the only recording technologyavailable at the time was wire that, thoughit could but cut, could not be reconnectedwithout leaving an audible noise. Workingthirty years after Thomas, I had necessar-ily become familiar with audiotape editingand multitracking; so I decided that insteadof writing my New York City on sheets ofpaper, it would be more appropriate for mecollect the materials of my piece--to gatherthose sounds that make New York Cityaudibly so different from everywhere elsein the world. From the elements of this col-lection I would then compose, along certainprinciples suggested not only by the mate-rial but by my knowledge and experience ofthe city, a kind of symphony that would, likeUnder Milk Wood, be a warm radio portraitof one?s home town.LPV events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc.,Citizens for NYC, Green Thumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts;NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, NYC Dept. of Sanitation & NYC Board of EducationFilm & Exhibition support from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.Additional support, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.