Saturday April 11th 09 saw the the third installment Duane Pitre’s Artist in Residency performances at ISSUE Project Room. This show involved a 17-piece string/woodwind ensemble performing the long-tone composition, ED09 (Ensemble Drone 2009). Duane simultaneously conducted and played bowed guitar at times, while he also “mixed” the performers in real-time.
I describe Duane’s drone compositions as minimalist symphonies. They are incredibly melodic with a strong narrative. For me, the most compelling part of the ED09 piece is the second movement – the quarter tone cluster.
Duane conducts his performers in a unique score approach of classical notation and hand gestures. The quarter tone cluster begins when Duane’s interlocked hands are above his head. What follows is a delightfully unsettling period in which every performer plays a different pitch, each exactly one quarter tone apart. Inspired by Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, the sound scape is remisinscent of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick sound tracks. This comes as no surprise, considering Penderecki wrote the score for ‘The Shining’.
For a teaser of the show check out the ED09 performance at Roulette, SOHO.
Listening to the grunts and battles this beast has with the web cam, as well as the overall effect of the ‘dog’s eye view’, results in a playful and engaging video experience.
A set of aerial photographs by Jason Hawkes featured on Boston.com’s “The Big Picture”.
These shots were taken from a twin-engine helicopter using two separate gyro stabilizing mounts, mounted together into one larger mount to get the stability required for incredibly crisp images.
“I have specialized in aerial photography from helicopters for 19 years so am used to the other difficulties, i.e. cramped and very noisy condition. You fly with the door of the helicopter open wearing a headset to direct the pilot. In daylight without a mount you have to shoot at 1000 sec because of the vibration caused by the rotor blades, so having to shoot at very low shutter speeds at night it takes quite a while to change your habits in order to correctly use the gyro. Flying over cities you need a twin engined helicopter that costs £1100 ( GBP ) per hour, so its a very expensive technique to perfect.”
Schultzy stock? Schlepper’s stock? Well, now archived by General Projects, Schtock “was launched to look like a viral marketing effort put out by stock photography company, Corbis”.
“RjDj is a music application for the Iphone. It uses sensory input to generate and control music you are listening to. RjDj is mainly consumed with headphones. Think of it as the next generation of walkman or mp3 player. The consumer experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj. RjDj is a mind twisting hearing sensation.”
more info on http://www.rjdj.me
“LucyandBart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body. They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression.”
Their website has a great flash landing page, in which the user morphs the image of a face between one of Bart or Lucy, depending on the mouse position.
“For me, the most important thing for people to learn from our work is that you can actually enjoy making art or design. I think that many people get really stressed about producing work, and they forget what creativity is all about.” – Bart Hess
I guess we started working together because we were talking about a lot of ideas, and it was not possible to realise these ideas in the brief of an electronic tattoo, which we were working on at Philips in the probes team. The Philips work is a far future design reseach programme looking fifteen to twenty years into the future. The programme explores the human body and suggests that our bodies are increasingly becoming a platform for sensitive and interactive technology, the project accelerates a vision for next generation sensitive technology mounted under the skin, where subcutaneous display could be augmented by human sensation, gesture and touch (www.design.philips.com/probes). So anyway, we started collaborating one evening doing fun things, wrapping our heads in sticky-tape and from there it all began… creating work together just in our spare time.” – Lucy McRae
“Duane Pitre (originally from New Orleans) is a Brooklyn-based, avant-garde composer and performer. His current works explore both chaos and discipline—and the relationship that exists between the two. Pitre primarily works with long-tones and utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonality, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships.”
I have now seen three performances/compositions of Duane’s. Last night’s program, one of four of this Artist in Residence @ ISSUE Project Room, entailed:
(taken from Duane’s program notes)
A sine tone “tape piece” that utilizes ISSUE’s 16-channel overhead sound system. The listener’s seating location in the space will vary the results of this work as the sound will be transferred, randomly, between speakers at a rate that allows the listener to perceive movement, also giving a sense of amplitude change, though this is not programmed into the piece itself.
A solo contrabass performance from comrade James Ilgenfritz. James will be doing his interpretation of a graphic/word score I created for him last summer (which was from a series of five, titled “Words and Lines for…”) – view page two of James’s graphic score
James will then join me for a planned-improvisation duo performance. I myself will man a table of guitars strung with multi-unison heavy gauge strings to be excited via bowing and a high-speed rotary tool. James will again man the contrabass, although detuned for this piece. This work will focus on low-end frequencies and relatively higher register string harmonics.
The first piece was very immersive, and had the effect of a small herd of animals moving over head. The sounds would build and travel, and at times move through you. I felt as though the space had been visited by beautiful sound creatures, who were not inhibited or thrown by the audiences’ presence.
The second piece was very abstract, and was a response to a very unique score. The piece successfully journeyed through several sound scapes, but I must say my favorite part was the simple and continuous sound made with repetitive strokes of the musician’s bow.
The third piece, which was very much the finale, was incredibly engaging and vibrationally consuming. The amplified contrabass had a sound reminiscent of Buddhist chanting, this is is because of “the low end frequencies and overtones, similar to those heard in throat singing” explains Duane. After a session of almost brutal bowing on an electric guitar, the frequencies let loose to bounce off the walls, had the effect of electric seagulls flying above.
“Tilt-shift” photgraphy encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), creating the part of an image that appears sharp. Shift is used to control perspective, usually involving the convergence of parallel lines.
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Saturday April 11th 09 saw the the third installment Duane Pitre’s Artist in Residency performances at ISSUE Project Room. This show involved a 17-piece string/woodwind ensemble performing the long-tone composition, ED09 (Ensemble Drone 2009). Duane simultaneously conducted and played bowed guitar at times, while he also “mixed” the performers in real-time.
For me, the most compelling part of the ED09 piece is the second movement – the quarter tone cluster.
To celebrate the reopening of the Whitechapel gallery in London, five top contemporary artists took over the 
