Re-Sonic in the Illuminated Forest

Featuring performances by Christopher Willits, Joshua Churchill, Thomas Carnacki and a special presentation by Alyce Santoro

Re-Sonic recalibrates our minds to sonic recycling, reinvention and reusing. Artist Alyce Santoro is the creator of SONIC FABRIC, a beautiful, audible textile woven from salvaged audiocassette tape dubbed with multi-track collages of meticulously collected, looped, and layered samples. Santoro creates shaman/superhero-style garments and flags made of SONIC FABRIC and performs by wearing or carrying garments while holding with a portable “reader” device that consists of a tape head to run over the garments’ surface. Santoro’s performance of SONIC FABRIC explores the issues of recycling, adapting and creative repurposing of a ubiquitous material that is quickly becoming outmoded. It is also about stored memory, savoring the sounds of a planet in peril, and the strange and subtle harmonies that exist all around us. Alyce is no longer able to attend Soundwave in person. Please read this special message and presentation to you from Alyce.

Musician Christopher Willits has long explored organic sounds and images with his electronic art and music. Christopher will be presenting new work that will recalibrate our minds of nature and the human experience.

Artist Joshua Churchill explores an immersive audio environment comprised of various field recordings collected over the last decade in combination with deep resonant drones. As the recordings play, they will be sampled live and replayed using multiple tape recorders in a continuous cycle, causing the previously recognizable sounds to gradually distort and abstract as the performance enfolds.

Experimental artist Thomas Carnacki tackles the concept of repurposing in a new green performance.

Christopher Willits creates patterns of vibrations with sound and light. He occupies a unique corner of the electronic-art-music universe—hovering above the intersection of electronic production’s nuts and bolts, new media art, and a wide-open creative mind. “i am a conduit of the process, a kind of gardener,” he says. “I simply imagine, intuit, respond and do the work laid before me.” Willits’ tireless responding and doing and working has produced 20 albums in 10 years—solo and in collaboration with artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Matmos, Zach Hill, and Taylor Deupree—and an organic, multi-faceted sound that expands like the vines of an electro-acoustic kudzu plant. Christopher Willits is a teacher, a label owner (the experimental hub Overlap.org), a meditator, a tech geek, a visual/new media artist, and virtuosic musician in one. In other words, there’s no one out there quite like him.
http://christopherwillits.com
http://overlap.org

Thomas Carnacki is a pseudonym for the recording and performing activities of Gregory Scharpen, a Bay Area-based sound designer and film editor. Carnacki performances are fairly rare but when they materialize, they are frequently aided and abetted by a rotating cast of co-conspirators, including Jesse Burson, Gregory Hagan, and James Kaiser. The first Thomas Carnacki cd, Far Voyage From a Placid Island (in collaboration with Jesse Quattro, Jesse Burson, and Jon Brumit) was released in 2006 and the long-threatened follow-up, Oar of Panmuphle, is due out this year. Scharpen has performed internationally as a member of that happy-go-lucky entity irr. app. (ext.), and was a co-founder of the moribund Oneiromantic Ambiguity Collective, whose death rattle may yet reach wider ears.
http://www.myspace.com/thomascarnacki

Joshua Churchill is a San Francisco based cross-disciplinary artist that is currently involved with a number of experimental sound/music projects, including solo noise project T/R, an ongoing performance collaboration with filmmaker Paul Clipson, and doom/drone/noise trio Riqis. Churchill’s installation and photographic artwork have also been widely exhibitedboth nationally and abroad including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), National Showa Kinen Park (Tokyo), New Media Scotland, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Post Gallery (Los Angeles), and Galeria Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal). Joshua Churchill’s immersive site-specific sound and light work takes the form of both installation and performance, very often blurring the line between the two. Utilizing resonant frequency drones, field recordings, induced feedback, and reactive lighting, Churchill’s dynamic works compel one to become critically aware of their surroundings by exploring the aesthetic, emotive, and structural qualities of the environments in which they are situated.
http://joshuachurchill.com/

Alyce Santoro, an internationally noted conceptual and sound artist with a background in science and scientific illustration, is a kind of archivist – a compulsive collector of snippets of the natural environment (auditory and otherwise) – who incorporates her specimens into her art. Her multimedia “philosoprops” and “subtle reality technologies” employ sound and video, assemblage, and performance as part of a grand investigation into everyday phenomena. Santoro is best known as the inventor of SONIC FABRIC, an audible textile woven from recycled audiocassette tape. SONIC FABRIC has been the source of exhibitions and performances in museums, festivals and galleries around the world with features from the New York Times to the Sundance Channel to People Magazine. Her works are in private collections of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, FIT Museum New York, FIDM Los Angeles and that of Phish percussionist Jon Fishman and legendary performance artist Laurie Anderson.
http://www.sonicfabric.com
http://www.alycesantoro.com