Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blocks recording club, fake albums, free music archive
Halfway through designing the CD sleeve for what was going to be my second, mass produced release I stopped and thought: something about this does not seem all that interesting. I used to make CDs as art jokes. That said, I took those jokes seriously and I remember the pain and fun of hand cutting and gluing Digi-packs together and building a home shrink-wrapping unit all just to see how far into real existing culture I could hurl these things. With the shrink-wrap, surprisingly far. (I’m looking at you Wired and Pitchfork.)
As well, these are live recordings of instrumental sound works. Over the last couple of years I’ve been making art jokes in front of actual people, in galleries and performance spaces. That is far more satisfying than anything else I’ve done and putting it on a CD and then sending it off on its way to navigate the increasingly brutal waters of music retail would be myself losing track of the joke. So where do I go? Death-spiral artisanal irony, like releasing an 8-track cartridge, or something not even an object at all?
So thanks to the Blocks Recording Club, who are promoting this as much as a physical release (okay, stop giggling) and to the Free Music Archive for creating the tools to make this a very easy thing to do.
Filed under: News | Tags: alvin lucier, drone, Mercer Union, music on a long thin wire, steve kado
Filed under: Uncategorized
Nixon’s secretary demonstrates how she improbably erased 18 1/2 minutes of the Watergate Tapes by reaching for the phone at the same time as hitting the wrong button. Coming as part of the tapes project in late 2009, “10 Watergate Tapes Erased, Then Played.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
Johnny was created by Brian Joseph Davis from over two years of film watching and dialogue collecting. Every line had the name “Johnny” in it. This script was then performed by actress Jane Moffat for a recording. A former student of Lee Strasberg, Moffat’s credits also include Whale Music, Jane Moffat’s Gink, The Dick’s a Dame, and Queer as Folk.
Johnny is hosted by the Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art.
Johnny webpage at Mercer Union with full text and player:
http://www.mercerunion.org/default.asp?page_id=42&parent_page_name=JOHNNY
Download the mp3 directly:
http://mercerunion.org/media/4.mp3
At the Free Music Archive:
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Brian_Joseph_Davis/~/Johnny
Filed under: News | Tags: free music archive, Mercer Union, New York Minaiturist Ensemble
Congrats to the Free Music Archive for launching! While Ubu.com contains most of my audio works, the FMA has a select number in higher quality files. So if you’re the type to discern whether or not you hear full stereo imaging in a stylus ripping across charred vinyl, then go here. Dig that picture of me at Betalevel! Yes, my life involves that many wires on any given day.
Also, thanks to the New York Minaiturist Ensemble for a great concert(see photo) and great hospitality. The recording turned out perfect and expect it on the new instrumental works CD coming out in October or so.
“Johnny” is in the can and being mastered right now. Thanks to Jakob Thiesen for another fantastic engineering job and to Jane Moffat, one seriously talented performer. That should be on the Mercer Union site sometime in late April.
And somewhere in the midst of moving studios I finished the new book. Updates on that soon.
Because I still have nightmares about scouring Queens for cheap TVs I have four smaller scale (and lighter) recording projects happening .
New York, March 31st: Piano for 17.6 Hands as performed by The New York Miniaturist Ensemble at The Players Theatre in Greenwich Village. All the minimalist details are here and it looks like I will be in attendance.
Late April: A web commission for Mercer Union, “Johnny” is a sequel of sorts to Voice Over. Here, a narrative has been created just using lines of dialog that contain the name “Johnny.” More details soon.
Toronto, May 21st: “Alvin Lucifer” at Mercer Union. In collaboration with Steven Kado, Alvin Lucifer is a 6 hour, 6 minute, 6 second “metal” version of Alvin Lucier’s “Music On a Long Thin Wire.”
Toronto, June 2nd: “Hardcore 89” at Somewhere There. 8pm, Cover TBA.
Performance for nine boomboxes and hardcore intro loops. Working with guitar and drum intros from Negative Approach, Discharge, Bad Brains, Rudimentary Peni and others—all looped to cassette—a 50-minute work is mixed live on genre specific playback devices: portable tape players.
This is a 20th anniversary recreation of my first sound experiment. At age 14 I utilized the questionable “pause-record” technique to loop dissonant parts of hardcore songs. I attempted to assemble friends with their tape players for a live orchestration of these cassettes. It never happened.
Talent and digital editing vastly improve this iteration of the idea. Expect aggressive washes of nostalgia for beginnings, and motorik-like movement/stasis.
Coming soon, info about the Joyland Fiction Fall Tour to New York, Chicago and Montreal
The New York Miniaturist Ensemble is one of the freshest ideas in chamber music in years— the ensemble performs works of only 100 notes or less. I was very chuffed/terrified to receive an invite from them for a composition. As it turned out, composing in notation for traditional instruments, despite (or because ) of my non existent reading skills, was a blast. The result is Piano For 17.6 Hands. It should be very heavy and very funny looking. Somewhat like The Keystone Cops covering Swans. With luck (they have to find a few extra hands) it should be performed at NYME’s March 31st concert. Info here.
Filed under: News | Tags: 10 banned albums burned then played, brianjosephdavis.com, free music archive, ubu.com
With any luck, brianjosephdavis.com should be pointing here within the next 24 hours. This is an entirely new site and webspace and while I tried to minimalize link failure there were some victims. For the time being, the 10 Banned flash page is sleeping (audio, as always is still available in the downloads section).
This move has been precipitated by Ubu.com and the Free Music Archive taking on my entire sound and music catalog. As much as I loved my built-from-scratch html page, there was no need for my old fashioned media sucking site. Other benefits include this blog, so news and events will appear more frequently. If you’ve come here looking for a file and can’t find it, please feel free to email and I’ll send you in the right direction.
Filed under: Events, News, Uncategorized | Tags: Betalevel, I Tania, Issue Project Room, ReR Megacorp, Slate
EUROPE! I’M AVAILABLE
The Definitive Host and limited edition Original Soundtrack CDs are now available in Europe from the very good folks at ReR Records distribution.
ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK NY
Thanks to all at WFMU and ISSUE Project Room. Expect MP3s of the show soon. For now enjoy this very insightful write up on the New York Press website by Andy Seccombe.
Excerpt:
“The beauty of it though, was that as soon as I tuned out, I in fact, tuned in. When I stopped any focus on the performance I entered into some sort of light hypnosis. There was a kind of magnificence to it, there’s no doubt. The 50-minute piece was anything but boring–more like a peaceful, unstructured audiovisual meditation. It was just so nice to absorb something without having to do any work, and to find the subtle musical wonders in fact quietly, harmlessly, mystically, working me over… Its essence wasn’t defined by experimentation, the avant-garde or artistic snobbery: the piece was all about abandoning expectations, pretensions and artificiality. Because the magic of Davis’s performance was that it really did make you think. Or not.”
Free mp3s of the first Original Soundtrack concert now up. Ltd CD also available. Check on the Original Soundtrack page.
Reviews for I, Tania
SLATE “When I first pulled Brian Joseph Davis’ I, Tania from the new arrivals shelf, I narcissistically wondered if it was an elaborate hoax. Its apparent themes coincided so perfectly with my personal obsessions—the Symbionese Liberation Army, 1980s sports stars, Marxist-Leninist linguistics, kidnapped heiresses, suicidal rock stars—it seemed like a custom Build-a-Bear of a novel created just for me. Actually, it’s not exactly a novel—more a freaky bouillabaisse of teases, jokes, and intellectual puzzles very loosely disguised as the memoirs and mad confessions of Tania. (Patty Hearst is never mentioned, but if you don’t recognize her SLA nom de guerre, chances are this book isn’t for you.) Rarely have the rules of narrative been more imaginatively ignored—the book is full of guest lists for parties that never happened, urban guerrilla fashion tips, and a glimpse at what a truly revolutionary sex-toy catalog would look like.I, Tania is for people who like comic books but don’t care for the drawings, for readers who enjoy ’70s television and Donald Barthelme, and for fans of The Bad News Bears. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to argue the merits of punk rock versus Detroit techno with Katie Couric live on daytime TV, it may well be the book of your fever dreams.”
Philapelphia Weekly ” If punk rock was a book, this would be it. Brian Joseph Davis’ I, Tania—a (super)fictionalized (auto)biography of Patty Hearst—is fast, hard and totally about screwing over the Man. Davis manages to mock the rich, the pig middle class, revolutionaries, the media, Bad News Bears, Don DeLillo and Katie Couric without breaking his stride, all while serving a heaping plop of Marxism for Dummies. But be warned: I, Tania only really appeals to four groups—Weather Underground fugitives who now watch a lot of VH1, pinko-intellectual college students who did a lot of coke in the bathrooms of their elite high schools, terrorists and super-smart post-hip PW readers who use Pop Rocks as their infallible guide to all that’s truly supergroovy in the increasingly balkanized melange of insanity and inanity that is modern pop culture.”
LA Weekly on the Betalevel performance
” Toronto-based sonic artist Brian Joseph Davis has an amazing head for aural experiments–creating expansive compositions out of found sounds and computer manipulations–that are smart on paper and fascinating in execution.”
Thanks to Randall Roberts at LA Weekly and to LA City Beat. Thank you to all at Betalevel–one of the best spaces I’ve worked with!
