10 pm
$5
If you could grab electricity in the air, and turn it
into music - what would it sound like? Todd Merrell and Patrick Jordan create immersive,
otherworldly, musical soundscapes from electromagnetic
radiation in the atmosphere and earth, using single
sideband shortwave receivers and electronics. Merrell and Jordan pull sounds from the
sky, make intruments out of machines, and music out of
noise.
Merrell has performed and recorded extensively, both
solo and with Aidan Baker, Pilotram, Bunny Brains, and
with Patrick Jordan, as the Single Side Band. He has
performed at Knitting Factory, Galapagos Art Space,
Free 103.9's Tune(Out)))Side, ABCNoRio, The Tank,
Share, Brownie's, The Cooler, and East Village Radio
(New York); HotHouse, Club Lower Links, Cafe Voltaire,
WBEZ, and WFMT (Chicago); The Berklee Performance
Center (Boston); and Real Art Ways, The Webster
Underground, The Municipal, Lincoln Theater, UConn's
von der Mehden Hall, WRTC, and WWUH (Connecticut). He
has produced recordings for the Silver Apples' record
label Whirlybird, as well as his own material, and his
original work has been premiered by artists such as
Chicago A Capella and Double-Bassist Robert Black of
the Bang On A Can Allstars. His piece "Jnny: A Love
Song" has been performed over sixty times worldwide by
Michael Barrett's New York Festival Of Song. His
latest work will be released in early 2006 on
Dreamland Recordings in Australia, and Transient
Frequency in New York. The Hartford Advocate calls his
work "Brilliant".
Patrick Jordan has worked in a variety of media, and
collaborated with Todd Merrell, Aidan Baker, Jake
Bell, and Dan Gardopee, among others. His frequent
collaborations with Todd Merrell have garnered
critical praise from The New Art Examiner, P-Form
Performance Art Magazine, and The Hartford Advocate.
Press from a performance of Todd Merrell, Patrick
Jordan and Aidan Baker:
"They take shortwave radios and use a variety of
effects to transform the signals they pull out of the
air into music. But that's like saying Rachmaninoff
wrote music for orchestras. Playing at Real Art Ways
on Saturday night, they looked like -- and sometimes
sounded like -- spies in a submarine, engineering the
next missile crisis. No sooner would a rhythm become
familiar than one of them would tear it down with a
piercing squawk or an eruption of bass. Baker's
chiming guitar offered respite from the storm,
multiplying upon itself in minimalist phrases until
these, too, were almost too much to bear; he then
deftly pulled the plug, letting the listener fall back
onto a cushion of ambient white noise. And through it
all, echoes of human voices and glimpses of broadcast
music wove in and out like tentative reminders that
we, indeed, are the stuff their music is made of.
Brilliant."
-Hartford Advocate, Dan Barry, November 18, 2004.
Press from a performance of Todd Merrell with Patrick
Jordan:
"Merrell and Jordan construct and traverse a
fascinating soundscape: choral undulations, mechanical
grindings, distant swoops and plunges, waves of white
noise. As one vein is exhausted, they find another to
mine, moving the piece along at just the right moment
and settling momentarily, at just the right place."
-P-Form Magazine, Lou Mazzolli, The Art Institute of
Chicago.
More press from a performance by Todd Merrell and
Patrick Jordan:
"SWR is a two movement composition by Todd Merrell and
Patrick Jordan that employs one shortwave receiver as
both the sound source and the "score". The rich
variety of strange hums, whistles, and hisses that lie
between the programmed broadcasts of speech and music
are influenced by unpredictable and naturally
occurring solar and atmospheric events, as well as the
receiver's proximity to manmade influences such as
power lines, buildings, other radio transmissions,
even the prescence of our own bodies. As a result SWR
is very much a site- and time-specific work, a work
that resides in contingency. This also means that as a
composition, the performers do not follow a chart of
predetermined manipulations, but a "score" embodied in
an instrument (the radio) which determines the range
and limits of the performers' actions. Accepting the
instrument as a "score", Merrell and Jordan must
follow the sonic events they find in a very specific
and controlled way.
What we hear is the gradual and judicious
establishment of musical themes and variations in the
classical sense rather than a cacophonous display.
This sensibility is reminiscent of the cool, ego-less
rigor of late '60's Minimalism without the negation of
expressive, emotional potential latent in any sound
located in a musical context. Minimalism demanded
participation of its audience in a repetitious,
cyclical process focused on simple relationships and
phenomena in pursuit of a change in awareness and
perception in the listener or viewer. Merrell and
Jordan recognize the importance of this approach but
break with its strict, sometimes excruciating results
through their own use of dramatic narrative which
draws their listeners into the experience.
The performance requires a somewhat lengthy time-frame
for its sonic range and limits to be established. The
artists carefully isolate a set of particular sonic
materials with a range of variation and stability that
will provide interesting results for each 30-minute
movement. Processing gear enables them to maintain
volume within a listenable range and, not
unimportantly, to add reverberation, creating the
sensation of a three-dimensional acoustic environment.
Within these parameters the aesthetic challenge
becomes a matter of steering a course between cold
clinical process, on the one hand, and sentimentality
on the other.
The composition requires that Merrell and Jordan work
at the control panel of this large receiver as one
performer, each carefully touching a switch or knob,
slowly nodding to the other for acknowledgement or
approval in the process of following the dictates of
this carefully tuned instrument. The narrative begins
with a quiet and ethereal field, a thin wash of
textured noise rasping from some unworldly throat.
Eventually the aural landscape becomes more robust,
small things seem to flutter about, then fly away.
Pitches and volume slowly rise and fall; homogeneous
sounds appear then differentiate into separate
entities; textures range from warm and smooth to harsh
and prickly. The abstract nature of these sonic events
changes over time to take on associative qualities.
One discerns both remote and striking resemblances to
the familiar sounds of chorused voices, falling rain,
and wind rustling through autumn leaves.
SWR is a meditative work. It evokes a sense of having
returned from a journey without recollection of
particular things, people, or places. For some this
may seem like having been nowhere. Thanks to the
composers' sensitivity to sonic nuances, they remind
us that this old and still ubiquitous technology -
this radiophonic nowhere - can be a pleasant place to
travel."
-New Art Examiner, Eric Leonardson, audio artist and
founding member of the Experimental Sound Studio in
Chicago.
For information visit: http://www.toddmerrell.com or
Contact: toggle67@yahoo.com
Phone: 860-869-6787