TONSPUR_lost: Hello, How Are You? [For M.A.]

Opening: Sun, May 24, 17:00
Location: TONSPUR_passage
Admission free

Maryanne Amacher was one of the most inspiring composers and friends I have ever known… Both she and her brilliant composing and performing deeply touched everyone.
“Hello, How Are You” is based on recordings I made in 1970 with Maryanne at Harmony Ranch—a commune of artists in Connecticut (USA). The Recording was infact a conversation between the house parrot—Clifford and Maryanne—who daily engaged each other in this parrot-human conversation…
Other field recordings made together with Maryanne and Serge Tcherepnin, were those of ‘peepers’ tiny tree frogs which sing in fragmented choruses all night in the mid-spring… Centered on these two extraordinary soundingmemories of 45 years ago, I have knitted a structure of sequences of these prinicipal recordings—at times pure and at others, sonically altered—with sounds that recall much of Maryannes own musical research—listening and recording in the Boston Harbor (the Nantucket Lightship's Fog Horn, a recording made by me in the early 1980's) and the eternal Brooklyn Bridge.
The sound of electronically processed bagpipes—an instrumental sound dear to both Maryanne and myself, also plays a principal role.
This work is dedicated to the memory of MA and from May 24 will be installed in the TONSPUR_passage located at the MQ Wien. The piece, approximately 24 minutes in duration, is structured in sets of overlapping ambient sounds, placed over an intermittent but constant track of the Maryanne/Clifford-the-Parrot dialogue. The listener then, can at any moment hear a unique but essential part of the work—which even in its short duration will bring one into contact with this personal world of sound that I offer here.
Maryanne was notoriously a night person, and her noctural imagination is reflected in the presence of seven random photos of night skies selected by Georg Weckwerth.

Alvin Curran

Photo by Bryony McIntyre at Arika's INSTAL 06 Festival

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