FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact for Press: Tamar Fortgang
REDCAT's Publicity and Promotions Manager
fortgang@calarts.edu / 661.253.7724 (Do Not Publish)

Nicolas Collins, Judy Dunaway and Toshi Nakamura Featured in CEAIT Festival at REDCAT

View the event

January 19, Los Angeles -- The annual music festival presented by CalArts' Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT) has been hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "an important contender in the international network of multimedia experimental festivals." This eighth edition of the festival, presented at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), January 28-30 at 8:30 p.m., features renowned composer-performers Toshi Nakamura on live no-input mixing board, Judy Dunaway's Balloon Concerto #1 and Nic Collins' Talking Cure.

For the past seven years, the festival has presented a wide range of performances and installations, many of which integrated other media, such as dance, video, text and computer graphics. Presentations have included works by Todd Winkler, Pamela Z, Joe Colley, Blectum from Blechdom, Bob Gonsalves, Ted Apel, and Douglas Repetto, among many others.

Composer/performers for this year's festival include "see-saw" percussionist Rich O'Donnell, circuit creator/trumpeter Peter Blasser, composers Toshimaru Nakamura and Mark Trayle, composer Kent Clelland and culture creator Andrew Bucksbarg among many others.

Featured Artists Bios

Nicolas Collins is a pioneer in the use of microcomputers in live performance, and has made extensive use of "home-made" electronic circuitry, radio, found sound material, and transformed musical instruments. His recent work emphasizes the spoken word, and combines idiosyncratic electronics with conventional acoustic instruments. New York-born and raised, Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with David Tudor, and has collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world. He is currently Chair of the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Judy Dunaway has composed more than forty compositions for balloons as instruments, her main instrument for improvisation. She has presented her compositions and improvisations throughout North American and Europe at many well-known venues and festivals including Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, the SoHo Arts Festival, the Knitting Factory and the Bang On A Can Festival. She has performed as a balloon player in compositions by John Zorn and Roscoe Mitchell, and in improvisations and/or collaborations with the FLUX Quartet, percussionists John Hollenbeck and Matt Moran and many others.

Toshi Nakamura, starting as a guitarist, has evolved a unique style of sound performance based on the use of a small sound desk with no signal inputs. Instead, this "no-input mixing board" as he calls it, is set up to loop outputs to inputs, running in outboard effects to produce a delicately constructed web of feedback tones and other "accidental" sonic raw materials. Un was a recording of his duo with Sachiko M ("no-no duo," with Sachiko M's no-sample sampler). Since 1996 Nakamura has been a composer/sound designer for the theatrical works of Bagnolet Choreography Concours-winning dancer Kim Ito, which have been performed in Japan, the U.S., England, France, Germany and Israel. Since 1998 Nakamura has also organized, hosted and performed in a monthly improvised music gathering with guitarists Taku Sugimoto and Tetuzi Akiyama in Tokyo, which has become an important meeting point of the Tokyo improvised music scene.

This project was made possible in part by The Japan Foundation.

REDCAT is located in downtown Los Angeles at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Ticket prices range from $18-14; special student tickets available. Seating is general admission. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office -- located at the corner of 2nd and Hope streets, by calling 213.237.2800 or at www.redcat.org.

The School of Music at CalArts strives to create a learning environment optimized to support the informed, creative music maker. We immerse our students in the front-line activities of their fields. High standards, combined with vital, contemporary initiatives that are informed by the achievements of our great traditions, along with tenacious insistence upon strong, individual initiative, are the School's hallmark and its formula for success.

California Institute of the Arts, CalArts, the first U.S. higher educational institution to integrate the visual and performing arts under one roof, is recognized as the nation's leading laboratory for the arts. Housing six schools-Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater-CalArts embraces creative cross-pollination among diverse art forms and traditions, and strongly encourages each artist to pursue his or her vision within a broad context of social and cultural understanding.

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, REDCAT, is an interdisciplinary arts center that introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the performing, visual and media arts from around the world, and gives artists and future artists in this region the production opportunities and creative support they need to achieve national and international stature.

Program for the 2005 CEAIT Festival of Electronic Music and Media At REDCAT

Friday, January 28, 2005

Jonathan Zorn/Rachel Thompson: Live electronic music
Honey Comb Wheels: Engines: 400 V8 250 bhp @ 4400rpm, 325 lb-ft @ 3200.
Rich O'Donnell: A live performance employing his see-saw drumming technique.
Judy Dunaway: Balloon Symphony #1: with video.
Michael Winter: Flux, live performance with computer processing.
Adam Overton: Sitting.Breathing.Beating.[Not]Thinking, Adam sits and meditates while biometric sensors monitor him and manipulate digital sound in real time.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Nic Collins: The Talking Cure, a computer follows the inflection and phoneme content of the spoken voice and generates a piano accompaniment that sounds vaguely like Charles Ives working a cocktail lounge.
Andrew Bucksbarg: Composition involving hybrid textures and plays of sensation that investigate ideas of cultural capital, political-industrial power, technology and fantasy, utopia and play.
Thadeus Frazier-Reed: Grains, Performers count grains of rice which change the sound in the slightest way. Gradually, the sound is transformed, grain by grain, sample by sample.
Sara Gorham: Whoopee, tape music composed from Whoopee Cushion sounds.
David Van Brink/Allen Strange: Shadowboxer, the first of six short compositions comprising the Sideshow suite by Allen Strange, recorded 2002-2003.
Peter Blasser: Live performance on trumpet and his own creation Kin-ten-net-tik.

Sunday, January 30, 2005

Toshimaru Nakamura and Mark Trayle: Live no-input mixing board and lap-top performance.
G. Douglas Barrett: Flux: En Route, live flute with computer processing.
Redux (Cera and RS-232): Heredity Vector
André Vida: Multiple Songs
Erdem Helcaciolglu: Wandering Around the City
Kent Clelland: Berlin-based heavyweight software developer with musical chops to match.

All performances include Installations by:
Margaret Anne Schedel and Charles Woodman: Horse Farm Mixer
Nina Waisman: Quinine
Ursula Nistrup: Drifting

Back to REDCAT media/press room