In this stunning Soundwave season opening event, Green Sound takes you beyond the city streets and into the wilderness for a sonic event like no other. Up in the hills of the Marin Headlands, amongst the gorgeous ocean and parklands, lies a structure steeped with history, Battery Townsley at Fort Cronkhite (http://www.nps.gov/goga/historyculture/battery-townsley.htm). Built in 1940 during WWII, this strongest and most secretive harbor fortification was a marvel in technology outfitted with battleship guns to defend the western shores against the Japanese navy. After the war, the outpost was a military testing site but by the 1980s, it was largely abandoned. National Park Service took authority and historians, contractors and Volunteers in Parks helped restore a historic site.

Green Sound retreats to the Battery for a special performance event in this metallic highly resonant structure. From war comes art as artists are commissioned to re-interpret the environment in the Battery’s gun well and hallway with sonic sculptures and music. Performances will be without electrical power and using only the extreme resonant spaces to amplify their sounds. Featuring musician Danny Paul Grody (acoustic guitar and various soundmakers (melodica, bells, bows, voice, tapes), Sound artist Gregg Kowalsky (tape recorders) and free improv duo Jacob Felix Heule (drums) & Kanoko Nishi (koto).

Soundwave is offering bus transport from The Lab Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District to and from the Marin Headlands site to limit carbon emissions. The gallery will act as a bus station (box office, refreshments, merchandise sales, waiting area).

Note: This is an outdoor event on top of hill overlooking the ocean and can be quite windy and foggy. Please bring warm clothes and proper shoe attire. We highly recommend our SF bus service, but if you are not using it, please park in the Rodeo Beach Parking Area and arrive at least 30 minutes before performance time. There is a 20-minute mild uphill hike from the Rodeo Beach parking lot to the Battery. There will be partial chair seating on a first come basis.

Danny Paul Grody is a founding member of San Francisco-based bands Tarentel and The Drift. A self-taught guitarist, the melodies at the core of Danny’s songwriting bring to mind his love of West African kora, Tacoma style fingerpicking and all things minimal, repetitive & hypnotic. His debut solo album Fountain came out in January 2010.
http://dannypaulgrody.com/
http://www.myspace.com/dannypaulgrody

Oakland-based sound artist Gregg Kowalsky completed an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College. Gregg’s compositions range from drone & noise pieces to meditative psychedelia. Following his debut album, Through the Cardial Window, he began working with cassette tapes, sine oscillators and mixer feedback. His recent series Tape Chants (2009) explores the acoustics of performance spaces through the placement and manipulation of cassette players. Gregg has performed throughout Europe and the United States and participated in numerous festivals, including such as WDR’s SoundArt-Köln Festival, Sonar, ERTZ Festival and the Ideal Festival. His recordings have released on Kranky, Rootstrata, Arbor and Important Records.
http://greggkowalsky.net/
http://www.myspace.com/greggmkowalsky

The music of drummer and electronic musician Jacob Felix Heule follows from the traditions of free improvisation and noise. Jacob creates music that directly expresses sonic texture and timbre and spans the extremes of physicality and intensity. Jacob works in a variety of musical styles and settings. In 2004, he founded the acoustic grind duo Ettrick that combines free jazz and black metal. His growing interest in free improvisation and electronic music led to his forming Basshaters in 2008 with bassist Tony Dryer. Heule and Dryer also perform and record in trios featuring clarinetist Jacob Lindsay (debut album, Idea of West) and saxophonist Jack Wright, (Deburring Tool).
http://www.heule.us
http://www.myspace.com/jacobfelix

A classically-trained pianist, Kanoko Nishi has turned her attention to free improvisation in both solo and group setting. She is exploring techniques to extend the sonic vocabularies of the piano and her second instrument, the koto (Japanese zither). Inspired by her studies with prominent improvisatory musicians and composers, such as Fred Frith, Joelle Leandre, and Kazue Sawai, Kanoko is working to push the limits of musical expression. In her collaborations with musicians, dancers and visual artists, she strives to find ways to communicate with other forms of performance art.
http://www.myspace.com/kanokonishi

Green Sound takes you inside hallowed grounds exploring the magnificent beauty and resonance of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Unweathered Embers explore the acoustics of the architecture with 15 Bay Area vocalists and acoustic musicians featuring the orchestrations and compositions of the haunting Baltic folk-inspired chamber sounds of Myrmyr (Marielle Jakobsons – violin/voice, Agnes Szelag – cello/voice). The all-acoustic musical event creates a uniquely spatial and dynamic performance without power or amplification. This magical performance in this Romanesque Revival building, built in 1895 and designed by architect Henry Geilfuss, utilizes the architecture and movement within it, and features voices, bells, percussion and other instruments for strange acoustical properties and long reverberations. Clusters of performers surround audiences in different areas and nooks, some even hidden from view, creating a reverberant other-worldly sound that will change as the audience members move through the space.

Performers include Alee Karim (baritone, resonator guitar), Ben Bracken (tenor, bells), Caroline Penwarden (mezzo-soprano, accordion, singing bowls), Damon Waitkus (tenor, dulcimer), Jason Hoopes (baritone, upright bass), Jennifer Harper (alto, glockenspiel), Jon Porras (tenor, guitar), Kate McLoughlin (alto, bassoon), Lisa McGee (soprano, harmonium), M Mara-Ann (alto, mbira), Michael Elrod (tenor, symphonic gong), Sarah Elena Palmer (mezzo-soprano, guitar), Shayna Dunkelman (marimba), Suki O’Kane (bass drum, orff instrument), Tom Duff (bass voice), Vanessa Beggs (soprano, guitar)

Myrmyr is Marielle Jakobsons & Agnes Szelag from Oakland, CA. They first began to perform together in 2004 while pursuing their MFA’s at Mills College, combining improvisation with creative electronics and experimental song forms. Since then they have performed at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and Project Soundwave Festival, and toured across the West Coast and North Eastern USA. With the violin and cello as their basis, the duo creates an intimate chamber music atmosphere, augmented by live electronics, sampling, and an arsenal of instruments including ocean harp, voices, psaltery, harp, glockenspiel, bass. myrmyr’s debut album, The Amber Sea entwines folk, improvised, and electronic music into songs inspired by Agnes & Marielle’s common Baltic roots. Featuring many Bay Area musicians, many tracks exhibit the highly collaborative nature of myrmyr’s work. Released by Digitalis Recordings in October 2009, the album has been hailed as “one of the most unique and absorbing albums we’ve heard this year” by Boomkat Music.
www.myrmyr.net
http://www.myspace.com/myrmyr

Download Compositions for your iPod/MP3 Player: http://www.basoundecology.org/listen/2010/06/phantompower/

Bay Area Sound Ecology (BASE) realizes “Phantom Power,” a free site‐specific concert superimposing potential and vanished soundscapes over the existing urban soundscape at Yerba Beuna Gardens, in the heart of downtown San Francisco. Amidst the myriad contemporary sonic identifiers present in the garden today, the audience is invited to experience a phantom image of other soundscapes which were lost to history, which never came to be, or which may yet come to pass. BASE co-chairs Aaron Ximm and Jeremiah Moore curate a selection of artists to create a concert envisioned as a transient “intervention,” reminding listeners that the familiar soundscape of the places we inhabit, like sound itself, is ephemeral and contingent. Composers will present short works that introduce a subtle layer of sound to the existing environment, evoking how the site sounded years ago, or how it might someday sound. Yerba Beuna Gardens has many layers of history to explore, and for its unique situation amid the cultural institutions and life of the city.

A moment of focused listening will be set aside, to consciously reflect on the soundscape as it currently exist. Artists will then introduce their work and discuss their vision. A Q&A session will convene after the event to discuss the project’s contrasting visions.

Note: This is a low-environmental impact event using a crowd-sourced “sound cloud”. Attendees are asked to bring ipods, CD players, small portable speakers, boomboxes (we will have a limited supply as well). The compositions are distributed to audience-participants beforehand via the internet http://www.basoundecology.org/listen/2010/06/phantompower/, and at the event on CDs.

Bay Area Sound Ecology is the local chapter for the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, currently co‐chaired by Jeremiah Moore and Aaron Ximm. Founded in 2007, BASE encourages dialog about sound making and appreciation across disciplines and all walks of life, primarily through its BASEbot listening salons.
http://www.basoundecology.org/

Aaron Ximm is a San-Francisco-based field recordist and sound artist. He is best known for his composition, installation, and performance work under the name Quiet American. From 2001 to 2005, Aaron curated and hosted the Field Effects concert series, which, like his own work, sought to showcase the quiet, fragile, and lovely side of sound art, particularly working with found sound and field recordings. In 2009, Aaron was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. He has performed at numerous musical festivals and symposiums, including the San Francisco Tape Music Festival and the Embertide for Binaural Audio Art Symposium in the United Kingdom.
http://www.quietamerican.org/

Jeremiah Moore is an artist and sound designer based in San Francisco. He has produced works exploring human perceptions of time, examining the interface of humans, nature and technology, engaging the beauty in the everyday, and transforming commercial culture into meaningless bliss. He is currently mixing and designing sound for documentary films, interactive works, radio and exhibits at his independent post-production sound studio. His work can be heard at Prehistoric Journey at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and at the Detention Barracks at the Angel Island Immigration Station Museum. He lives in the Mission District with his partner and two children who, like him, never sleep.
http://www.jeremiahmoore.com/

Andrea Williams is a sound artist and composer currently living in San Francisco. She utilizes site-specific elements and perceptual cues to reveal the unseen connections between people and their environment. Her compositions make use of field recordings, instruments, computer technologies and the sound of the performance space itself. She has led soundwalks in New York and San Francisco, and has shown and performed both solo and with the Glass Bees and SleepWalks at galleries and alternative spaces, most recently the Diapason Gallery, NPR, Fountain Miami Art Fair, and the Mamori sound artist residency in the Amazon rainforest. Andrea is a founding member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, currently a member of BASE in San Francisco, and is attending Mills College for her MFA in Electronic Music.
http://listeninglistening.tumblr.com/

In the late 1960’s, Bernie Krause began his ground-breaking life work in bioacoustics and the recording of environments throughout the world, much of which has been accomplished with techniques and technologies for recording, analyzing, and presenting habitat-and species-specific sounds that Krause has developed on his own. His album, In a Wild Sanctuary (WB, 1970), earned a place in history as being the first recording to use environmental sounds as both a central component of orchestration and as a statement about the environment. Under the company name Wild Sanctuary, Inc., Krause continues to share his compelling field experiences through his musical albums and dramatic sound installations in public spaces such as museums, zoos, and aquaria. Krause holds a Ph. D. with an Internship in bio-acoustics from Union Institute, Cincinnati.
http://www.wildsanctuary.com/

Inflorescence 2010 is a free site-specific sound and performance installation by artist Brett Ian Balogh. Balogh will create a composition by installing invented audio devices (“florets”) that are programmed to respond to and participate in outdoor processes. The florets are hung from Civic Center trees around the entire plaza. The florets collect solar power until sunset, when they will then “bloom” by emitting light and transmitting an impressive sonic tapestry via low-power FM transmissions.

Inflorescence 2010 asks us “What is the sound of leaves breathing, or of decaying compost?” Balogh aims to bring these natural processes to the ear. Each floret’s sensor interacts with the environment, creating an electric signal. These signals are amplified and/or used to modulate a sound producing circuit. The nature and the quality of the sounds are composed by Balogh and will be chosen to complement the surrounding soundscape.

Transmitting power will be low in order to create micro-environments that require movement and exploration by the audience. After each performance, Brett will lead an artist talk about his work.

Note: Audiences are encouraged to bring FM radios to listen to the compositions created by the installations. We will also supply a limited number of radios.

Artist and composer Brett Ian Balogh works at the intersection of objects, sounds and spaces. He is a founding member of the experimental sound performance collective, Clairaudient, and performs with the Chicago Phonographers. In his sound compositions, Brett employs sound, radio and digital fabrication technologies to explore the use of broadcast media (sound and radio) as a medium and instrument. A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, Brett has exhibited and performed his work at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Experimental Sound Studio, andd P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Balogh received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and his B.A. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania.
http://www.brettbalogh.com

Soundwave partners with Rock the Bike for this incredible free environmental music event. Rock the Bike is group that has created a pedal-powered stage, using off-the-grid electricity in the form of bike pedaling human energy to power amps, mics and instruments.

Pedal power is not only environmental but also community-building: an ice-breaking, fresh social activity that connects strangers in an electrifying new way: working shoulder to shoulder, rocking the party as a team. The musicians and Rock the Bike crew magically arrive on cargo bikes loaded with sound equipment, set those same bikes up to power the sound system, then load the bikes back up and vanish, all without consuming any fossil fuels.

Green Sound rocks Sunday Streets with the wicked sounds of Kemo Sabe on the Rock the Bike Stage with a pre-show bike-powered musical parade and a post-show dance party. Come down and watch the spectacle, or help power the performance by pedaling away.

Rock The Bike has been Pedal Powering music stages since 2007 and Bike Culture events since 2003. A dynamic crew of entertainers, inventors, and bike people, they live to load up cargo bikes with audio gear, turn the beats up as they cruise through town to gigs, still leaving room for passengers they meet along the way. Once arrived at a gig, they quickly convert their bikes to pedal power mode and encourage the general public to assist them in amplifying bands, speakers, and rallies, and more. Their event highlights include the Maker Faire, West Fest, Bicycle Music Festival, SF Marathon, Earth Day at Central Park, the Yes Men, and more. Rock The Bike has appeared on National Public Radio, the Jay Leno Show, and the BBC.
http://rockthebike.com/

Part Ralph Stanley, Calexico and The Reverend Horton Heat, Kemo Sabe is a wild acoustic trio that play what they call “modern-day campfire songs” with the bare-wire energy of punk rock. There’s mandolin, a beat-to-shit upright bass, acoustic guitar, and calamity. At times fast and furious, at other times soft and sweet, they kick around a variety of genres from bluegrass to klezmer, to rock n’ roll. Playing such diverse venues as street corners, Taco Bell, musical saw festivals, and punk rock clubs, they’ve developed a reputation for zany stage antics and solid picking and slapping
http://www.myspace.com/kemosabeband

Green Sound moves to the de Young for this special performance part of “Cultural Encounters: Friday Nights at the de Young”. Nestled inside a grass-covered hill in de Young’s Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden is world-renowned artist James Turell’s installation “Three Gems”. This “skyspace,” is a subterranean installation that features a view of the sky altered by L.E.D. lighting effects, and that highlights changing light and weather conditions outside. In this incredible sonic event, contemporary experimental music duo Myrmyr (cello, violin, objects, voice) will create acoustic compositions in and around “Three Gems”, using no electrical power and only the resonance created by the sculpture to amplify and reflect Turrell’s work.

Note: This special performance takes place in the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden – Entrance off the de Young café. “Three Gems” entrance is on the far right side of the garden (facing out from the de Young café).

Myrmyr is Marielle Jakobsons & Agnes Szelag from Oakland, CA. They rst began to perform together in 2004 while pursuing their MFA’s at Mills College, combining improvisation with creative electronics and experimental song forms. Since then they have performed at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and Project Soundwave Festival, and toured across the West Coast and North Eastern USA. With the violin and cello as their basis, the duo creates an intimate chamber music atmosphere, augmented by live electronics, sampling, and an arsenal of instruments including ocean harp, voices, psaltery, harp, glockenspiel, bass. Myrmyr’s debut album, The Amber Sea entwines folk, improvised, and electronic music into songs inspired by Agnes & Marielle’s common Baltic roots. Featuring many Bay Area musicians, many tracks exhibit the highly collaborative nature of myrmyr’s work. Released by Digitalis Recordings in October 2009, the album has been hailed as “one of the most unique and absorbing albums we’ve heard this year” by Boomkat Music.
www.myrmyr.net

James Turrell, one of the most important contemporary artists, is a major figure in the Earth, Conceptual, Minimal, and Process Art movements. Turrell’s works are included in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In Soundwave Festival’s most ambitious presentation ever, Green Sound mounts a special month-long exhibition and performance residency at The Lab. The Illuminated Forest is an imaginary world inside the gallery walls of San Francisco’s preeminent experimental art space that features a large immersive multi-media and interactive exhibit and performance installation from the collaborative minds of Agnes Szelag, Ben Bracken, Jorge Bachmann and Alan So, and environmental artist works by Vaughn Bell, Alyce Santoro, Sam Easterson, Reenie Charrière, Suzanne Husky, Elin Øyen Vister and Jessica Resmond.

See The Act of Illumination: Notes from the Artistic Director about the Illuminated Forest.

The main installation is manufactured by projections, sensors, MAX/MSP, sound, sculptural shapes and light/shadow where visitors become its inhabitants and part of its ecosystem: their presence activates both visual and auditory sensations, and leaves an imprint on the environment long after they are gone. It demonstrates our own connection to the environment and how we are all interconnected. Our presence in the environment affects this space and is forever changed (for better and for worse) with our temporal presence. This experiential exhibit actively reminds people what we do has impact: on our own lives, on others, and the world around us, both in the present and the future. It is a human reminder of the life existing outside our urban borders, its importance, and the power it can play in our lives while raising questions about a natural world lost.

The Forest will host experiential performances by some of the most compelling local, national and international artists and musicians. Inspired sound purveyors from across the sonic spectrum will explore themes of reinvention and recycling, real and imagined natural environments and creatures, endangered species, water, environmental awareness and responsibility, plantlife/animal life, and other artist imaginations.

In various eddies around the forest, artists re-imagine a place with Suzanne Husky’s textile trees and soft rocks, Sam Easterson’s animal-borne imaging, Vaughn Bell’s moving and wall mountains, Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric, Jessica Resmond’s birds nests, and Reenie Charrière’s Washed Up waterfall.

Join us in celebrating the opening of The Illuminated Forest featuring sound selections by Luc Meier.

Note: Due to the limited amount of space within the installation (50-60 people in the environment at once), we highly encourage you to RSVP and arrive early to ensure that you will have an ample amount of time to explore and experience the Illuminated Forest. In the event that the Illuminated Forest reaches capacity, we will have a RSVP priority entrance line and a walk-up line outside the door. All RSVPs must be received by 2 PM the day of the event. Any replies received after this time will not be recorded.

Born in Vevey, Switzerland, Luc Meierhas entertained an actively peripheral relationship to sound over the past decade. As a journalist, he has reported on contemporary music practices for magazines, newspapers and websites in Switzerland and elsewhere. At the same time, he has helped stage musical encounters and events in Switzerland, Japan, Korea and the U.S. Luc currently manages the art + technology programs of swissnex San Francisco (www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org) and has organized several sound art events in this capacity. Along the way, Luc has occasionally provided background music for the tinnitus crowd, with DJ-sets showing a clear bias towards accidental coherence over planned linearity. His collages typically run the gamut from the inaudible edges of electro-acoustics to Mexican techno via a a shabby gotha of wayward tunesmiths and hauntologists.
http://www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org/

Jorge Bachmann is a photo-based, multimedia and sound artist. He has collected field recordings exploring the strange, unique and microcosmic sounds of everyday life. He creates sound atmospheres meant for deep listening and often composed in symbiosis with the sculptural installations exploring social and sensual constructs and experiences. [ruidobello] has exhibited and performed in North America, Europe, Japan and South America for the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, MoBu Dance Group, and Soundwave Festival, amongst others. He has been Soundwave’s Technical Director and Resident Artist since 2005.
http://anihilo.com/
http://ruidobello.ch/

Agnes Szleg’s music, video and installation art has been featured in national and international festivals, on the radio, television, and in podcasts. Whatever medium she is working in, Agnes creates work which focuses on change and transformation – the glue can be as important as the pieces it holds together. Agnes received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College and her BA in Radio/TV/Film from Northwestern University. Her solo EP No Summer or Winter on Aphonia was hailed as “a distinctive voice in the electro-acoustic field” by Textura, and “gorgeous” by XLR8R. Agnes currently lives and works in the Bay Area.
http://www.aggiflex.com/

For the past 15 years, Ben Bracken has been creating a unique sonic language utilizing electronics, acoustic sound sources, guitar, and field recordings. Interested in the possibilities of echo-relocation in sound-based art, his work has oscillated between performance and installation, often blurring the lines between the two. The location of the event becomes an active participant, intimately shaping the nature and direction of each work. In the spring of 2006, Ben received his MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. He currently resides in Oakland, CA and works at Cycling ’74, the developers of Max/MSP and Jitter.

As an artist, designer, producer and curator, Alan So has created and supported innovative art for over 15 years. Alan founded ME’DI.ATE in 1998 to provide a forum for diverse artists to showcase works to a world in desperate need of innovative ideas. In 2002 he began his exploration of sound as an artistic medium and, in 2004, launched the Soundwave festival. Soundwave has been featured in numerous media outlets, including San Francisco Magazine (Best of 2007 Award), Resonance FM (United Kingdom), PBS, and BBC. Alan has exhibited his work in the US and Canada and is concerned with issues of identity, social structure and place with an interest in the experimentation of form and concept. He has organized exhibitions and events Online, in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area and his native Canada where he received his BDesign from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.
http://www.me-di-ate.net

Bay Area multimedia artist Suzanne Husky obtained her MFA from Ecole des Beaux- Art of Bordeaux and has participated in artist residencies in Europe and the United States. Her art addresses environmental problems related to the exploitation of natural resources, landscape use and globalization. Suzanne’s sculpture, drawings and photography question the environmental, social and political agenda of the mainstream media. Her work observes and analyses in an inventory form that allows the nature of the subject to unveil and reveal its complexity. In the Bay Area, her work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum, Southern Exposure, Intersection For The Arts, The Lab, Headland Center for the Arts.
http://www.suzannehusky.com/

As a video naturalist, Sam Easterson is best known for his animal-borne imaging. His work has been exhibited in numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and featured on television networks, including the Sundance Channel and CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman. Sam also works as a museum professional; recently he developed video content for the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity at the Royal Ontario Museum. A graduate of The Cooper Union, he also received an MS in Landscape Architecture (University of Minnesota), and has received grants from the Durfee Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and others. Sam is a recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Prize.
http://www.sameasterson.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

Reenie Charrière: I am an investigator of the environment surrounding my everyday actions. Art is a way to be present and reveal what may be blurred and discarded. I am a tourist wherever I go. I invite others to tour unadvertised locations, which may be right around the corner. I am most interested in the potential of under-noticed sites, and the juxtaposition of what is natural to what is synthetic. I look for what has gathered over time, and what continues to develop. Light, and line motivate the way things are situated in space. Living in the West but not being originally from here has broadened my sense of vastness and the potential of open spaces. Being overly curious and having my studio in Jack London Square has led me to collect from the Oakland estuary and compelled me to experiment with what is there, the tides, the salty water, and the tremendous washing up of plastic. I am deeply concerned about the pollution accumulating all around me. As a mixed media artist my work may take on a multi-sensory form in sculptural installation amplified by video or digital projections.
http://web.mac.com/rcharriere/

Vaughn Bell creates interactive projects and immersive environments that deal with how we relate to our environment. She has exhibited her sculpture, installation, performance, video and public projects internationally. Most recently, Vaughn created a commission for Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and another for the Edith Russ Site for New Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. Her work has been featured in Artnews, Afterimage, and Arcade Journal, among others. Vaughn received her MFA from the Studio for Inter-related Media at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA and her undergraduate degree from Brown University. She currently is based in Seattle.
http://www.vaughnbell.net

Jessica Resmond is a French American artist who received her BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Resmond’s work is conceptual and tactile. Its main interest lies within the existing tensions between biological rhythms & organisms, and the fast pace technology/economy driven global landscape. With a scientific background in molecular biology and a deep interest for nature’s ever evolving creative designs, her process, is one of constant research. Borders and boundaries are where exchanges take place, where transformation is possible and new understanding arise. Her work includes site specific installations, interactive or multimedia sculptures and experimental collaborations.
http://www.jessicaresmond.com
http://www.meicollectiv.com

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

Water breathes life and destruction to the world. Water stories looks into the power of these forces in our lives. Innovative chamber ensemble REDSHIFT on piano, violin, clarinet, cello, takes the audience on a sonic journey into the Colorado River “Red River” (2007) featuring its composer Mason Bates on live electronics. Combining chamber with the rhythmic power and drama of electronics, Red River traces the river flows, from its source in the Rockies, through a landscape transformed by human activity, until it arrives exhausted at its final resting place in the vast emptiness of the Sonoran Desert. Mason Bates’ unique musical voice skillfully unlocks the environmental lessons drawn from the history of one of America’s great rivers.

Called the finest string-band in America by the Boston Herald, the Crooked Jades Trio bring to the surface the past trials and tribulations of how water effected rural life on this planet, floods, the transportation of slaves, ocean migration, sinking ships and drought and on the other side exploring the early ritual songs of Baptism- submerging the body in the beautiful pool to wash away the sins of the world, rebirth and salvation.

Composer Theresa Wong concocts a world turned upside down through her unique melding of video projection, text and performance on voice and cello. Part play, part science lecture and part opera experiment, Wong will present a new work examining the fragility of the ocean’s biosystems by illuminating the lives of a few legendary Bay Area grains of sand.

The mission of classical ensemble REDSHIFT is to promote experiences of live contemporary classical music that foster appreciation of the music’s artistic value. REDSHIFT presents music from a wide range of composers with a casual style and artistic intensity that invites audiences into a visceral and intellectual experience. Their recent performances have been described as “a knockout” (San Francisco Classical Voice). REDSHIFT is: Jeffrey Anderle (clarinets), Rose Bellini (cello), Keisuke Nakagoshi (keyboards), Andie Springer (violin).
www.redshiftensemble.com

Awarded both a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and an American Academy in Berlin Prize, Mason Bates composes for a wide variety of forces, with a portfolio of symphonic, chamber, theatrical, and electronic works. A composer who often includes live electronica in his orchestral and chamber music, he has become known as an artist who moves fluidly between those two worlds — performing on electronic drumpad and laptop, with The National Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, or The Berlin Philharmonic at the Volksbühne in the former East Side. His work is performed across the country, from the New York Philharmonic to the Chicago Symphony (where he currently serves as composer in residence) and has been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony (“The B-Sides”), the renown chorus Chanticleer (“Sirens”), and the Oakland and California Symphonies. Mason also stays busy as a DJ of trip-hop and electronica in San Francisco’s many clubs, lounges, and artspaces.
www.masonbates.com.

San Francisco-based folk revivalists The Crooked Jades are called the finest string band in America by The Boston Herald and hailed as one of the 10 bands representing the best of Americana by fRoots Magazine (UK). Presenting its trio configuration of Jeff Kazor (co-founder), Lisa Berman (co-founder) and Erik Pearson, the Jades are on a mission to reinvent old-time music, bringing their soulful sound (brilliant arrangements of obscure old tunes mixed with hauntingly beautiful original compositions played on an eclectic array of vintage instruments) out of the bluegrass & folk ghettos to brand new audiences. With an old-time foundation they create a unique and original modern sound by exploring the roots of Americana and interweaving the diverse musical influences of Europe and Africa. With a live show lately described as Emmy Lou singing with Nick Cave, they were chosen by Sean Penn to be part of the soundtrack of his Oscar-nominated film “Into the Wild” (2007) and are profiled in an upcoming BBC & BBC America co-production representing the cutting edge modern folk scene.
www.crookedjades.com.

Theresa Wong is an improviser and composer whose work encompasses music, theater and the visual arts. Her recent works include O Sleep, an improvised opera exploring the conundrum of sleep and dream life and Disasters of War, a duo for cello, violin and two voices inspired by the etchings of Francisco Goya. As a cellist and vocalist, she has collaborated with kindred spirits such as Ellen Fullman, Dohee Lee, Fred Frith and ROVA Saxophone Quartet. She has performed at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria and at The Stone in New York City.
http://www.theresawong.org/

Ground/Shift explores the Earth’s shifts and swells, from natural phenomenon to our inherent human connections. Artist Jim Haynes creates ‘Terminal’, based upon thermal vents, boiling springs, and geyser activity at the Lassen Volcano National Park. Haynes explores the beautiful alien and profoundly unsettling Lassen’s thermal vents, which effectively eradicate the Sierra woodland and replace it with a unique self-contained ecosystem of lichens, bacteria, plants, and insects tolerant of these seemingly inhos­pitable locales. Haynes amplifies the sublime nature of these sites, presenting a phenomologi­cal piece of expressionism with a variety of found objects like sand, rocks, rusted metal.

Sound and Video Artist Lissom conjures ‘Intrinsic’, a plurimedia meditation on the illusory boundaries between our environment and ourselves. Drawing from a collection of sounds and images that explore organic form and emptiness, it is designed to envelop us in a space where we can examine, and perhaps dissolve our dividing perceptions.

Shores (percussion, guitar, bass, effects, cymbals, vocals, electronics, turntables, didgeridoos) will be collaborating with filmmaker Jaakko Vilpponen to perform an audio-visual documentary on environmental experience. Set to film footage from Bay Area shorelines, this score will explore the relationship between human consciousness and natural environments. Its first movment “Reflection” explores preserved environments, and the effects they have upon us; the second movement “Refraction” surveys how polluted environments affect us, and we them. Shores conceives these processes as fundamental to the process of learning how to listen to Nature, how to open our electric selves and consciousness to the organic experience of an environment.

Using shortwave radio static, electric field disturbances, controlled feedback, and textural scrapings, Jim Haynes’ sound installations manifest a broken minimalism in which magnetic drones give the impression of timelessness within an active environment. Jim has exhibited at The Exploratorium (San Francisco), Westspace (Melbourne), Diapason (New York), Jack Straw Productions (Seattle), Works (San Jose), Eyedrum (Atlanta), The Fugitive Art Center (Nashville), and Varnish (San Francisco). As Editorial Director for 23five, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the developing increased awareness of sound art, Jim co-curated the 2003 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and the Activating The Medium Festivals (2007 – 2010). He also has written extensively on sound art, noise culture, minimalism, and general music experimentation.
http://www.helenscarsdale.com/

Tana Sprague (Lissom) is a sound + video artist, transfixed with micro details. With focus fluctuating between digital and organic, her work creates a space where one complements the other. Inspired by the elegant complexity of organic forms, she utilizes various electronic and digital devices to synthesize a similar enveloping intricacy manipulating the awareness of time, space, place and scale. Her foundation in electronic music, and new media theory and practice was constructed at the University of California at San Diego with a BA in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts and at Mills College with a MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media. Since 2004, Tana has worked alongside Recombinant Media Lab’s founder and Director Naut Humon and most recently as its Associate Director. With RML and Grey Area Foundation For The Arts agreeing to merge, Tana is now Director of Operations at GAFFTA.
http://www.sensory-perception.net
http://www.myspace.com/01lissome

Founding Shores member Jude Morris had been exploring its electroacoustic concept for over a decade. In his solo work under the artist name “Mythyc”, Jude had been developing an approach to soundscapes that integrated experimental turntablism, sampling, and electronic compositions. In May 2009, Jude approached his friend and bassist Will Pritikin (The Thralls) with jazz and improvisation background, with the idea of forming a full band. Soon thereafter, Alex Darr, didjeridoo and percussion player, joined with experience in outdoor performances and a keen interest in experimental instruments. Guitarist Nathan Ladd (Neon Freeze, Dream Distortion) filled out the original band shortly after and recruited its final member Sean Degaetano (Dora Flood, Mellow Drunk, Also Round) to perform on drums, percussion, saw, and acoustic guitar bow.
http://weareshores.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/weareshores