EchoDen is a duet improvising ensemble with vocalist Carol Genetti and dancer Asimina Chremos. We work with our bodies, voices and breaths; creating improvised events that are deeply emotional and often inscrutable. Our hair, our skin, our bones, our flesh—we bring it all with us. There is an animalistic quality to much of what we do. Often we move erratically, edging along between poles of easy intimacy and howling isolation. Our performances take place mostly in galleries and places that support experimental music and dance.
Go to www.myspace.com/echoden to view videos and performance listings.
"Consanguineous" —Noé Cuéllar, artist
Send Help is a work that involves the human voice and eight cassette players, each with a four second tape loop sounding out a single letter of the phrase 'send help.' The performance combines the sound of her voice with the disembodied vocal fragments on the cassettes, which are time-aligned so that the phrase 'send help' can be understood. However, over the week, due to the subtle differences in the player speeds, the phonetic letter sounds become misaligned and no longer have textual meaning. with performance at enetti performs vocals and cassette tape loops with movement she direcn ited, performed by dancer Asimina Chremos. Then during the week, Genetti will leave her voice recorded onto eight cassette players to sound out each letter of the phrase SEND HELP. At first, the phrase SEND HELP is understood with the time-aligned cassettes. However, with the effects of physical stress on the cassette loops played by low-technology tape players, SEND HELP becomes unintelligible, creating a composition of shifting textual fragments documenting the disintegration and mutation of a message.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
220 East Chicago Avenue (in the 12 x 12 gallery)
Live Performance: July 10th @ 7pm (with Asimina Chremos)
Sound Installation: July 10-15 (on display starting the evening of the 10th and then during museum hours)
24 Hour Fade is a 24-Hour sound installation investigating the process of decay in sound recordings. A turntable repeatedly plays a 6-minute lathe-cut recording composed of source material from a dilapidated piano and voices. (A lathe record is individually cut from polycarbonate plastic, which is more fragile than vinyl records and tends to deteriorate from repeated playing.) The slowly fading lathe-record will be heard through the speakers but will also be recorded over and over again onto a single cassette tape, resulting in a process of decaying sound layered onto decaying tape medium. 24 Hour Fade is part I of a larger project called "Palingenises: A Strategy for Decay", which was awarded a 2004 Artist Residency from the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Engineer: Jacob Ross Lathe Cut Engineer: Aaron Williams Thanks to: Adam Sonderberg, Neal Jendon, Patrick Scott, Aaron Williams and ESS.
Palingenesis: A Strategy for Decay is a sound composition project for Experimental Sound Studio residency 2004. Part I: Sound compositions where created using sound sources from my mothers piano which I had an intimate experience with as a child. This piano, a 100 year old upright, has been decayed through aging and neglect. Many of the hammers are missing and it has been detuned dramatically (sometimes more than 1/2 step from its original notes). It represents a lot personally for me, a reflection of my mothers relationship to life, my relationship and interest in experimental sounds and tuning systems. These piano sounds, which I had previously recorded, where combined with my extended vocal sounds recorded at E.S.S. I used the facilities at E.S.S., with an engineer (Jacob Ross) to create a number of sound pieces for decaying. Part II: These various compositions were then decayed in various ways. One piece I repeatedly recorded onto a 1/4” reel-to-reel tape loop. This exhausted the tape medium and created a strange layering effect with morphing time fluxuations. Another piece I had hand cut onto a lathe-record which I used for a 24 hr installation at the Spareroom Gallery called “24 Hour Fade”. A turntable repeatedly played this 6-minute lathe-cut recording (A lathe record is individually cut from polycarbonate plastic, which is more fragile than vinyl records and tends to deteriorate from repeated playing.) The slowly fading lathe-record was heard through the speakers but was also be recorded over and over again onto a single cassette tape, resulting in a process of decaying sound layered onto decaying tape medium. This was a very satisfying process and I plan to create more installations in the future using this set up. Part III: These resultant decayed artifacts were combined with the orginal compositions from Part I to into larger sound pieces. The peices were aired on WNUR radio as part of the Outer Ear Sound Art Festival in 2005.