it is HAPPENING again
a new album by Hal McGee dictaphone assemblage audio folk art featuring Leslie Singer
view the slideshow below as you listen in free streaming audio
click the PLAY arrow above to listen download the album for a $1 minimum by clicking on the album title in the Bandcamp audio player above
the slideshow is also available on my personal website and the pictures are bigger there: http://www.haltapes.com/it-is-happening-again.html
recorded January 2019 in Gainesville, Florida and New York City
with five ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphones photographs by Hal and Leslie "it is HAPPENING again" is intended to be and ideally should be experienced as one continuous 79-minute audio assemblage. For the listener's convenience and to make available access points within the assemblage I have broken the assemblage into four sections at arbitrary points and have assigned titles to the parts. Also, the entire 79-minute piece exceeds Bandcamp's upload limits, dammit! I carry a Sony ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphone (I own four) in my pocket wherever I go and I made recordings every day throughout the month of January 2019. Leslie Singer used a ICD-PX470 of her own to make 28 recordings during January and sent them to me. I loaded her recordings onto one of my four dictaphones (along with recordings I made on that dictaphone). On January 31, 2019 I played all four dictaphones through a Xenyx mixer directly into Audacity on my desktop iMac computer and captured the mix of the recordings collected on the four dictaphones with next to no tweaking of the sounds as the assemblage unfolded and created itself. In this assemblage you will hear many different sounds from my daily life in the month of January 2019, along with spoken and performed and everyday sounds by Leslie. Some of those sounds include: spoken word poems and texts, instrumental improvisations, sounds from Apartment Music shows #32 and #33, Stanley barking (no kidding!), me (and Leslie) taking Stanley on walks, conversations, restaurants, sounds from my job, watching some of Leslie's videos from the 1980s, gadgets and noisemakers, Jiblit Dupree and Leslie jamming on guitars, excerpts from Girls On Fire's first new performances in more than three decades, Leslie reading her recollections of the Apartment Music shows, construction sounds, emergency vehicles, and much more! EC member Adam Naworal contributed some great spoken parts to the assemblage about "collages within collages"!
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Racket Fest was a mini festival of noise, experimental and improvisational music hosted by me on Saturday, October 21, 2017 in an outdoor racquetball court at Liv Apartments (formerly Ventura Apartments) in Gainesville, Florida, in the same spirit as my Apartment Music concert series (2008-2014). All performers were required to use battery-operated gear played through the same small 5-watt Pignose amplifier (with the option to play acoustically).
After having taken a three-year break from my Apartment Music series I started to get the itch to start hosting noise and experimental shows again, but for the first new one I wanted to do something kind of different. From time to time over the years I had made dictaphone recordings in the concrete-block racquetball court near the front of my apartment complex and the acoustics in there were great! I asked my apartment complex manager if he would mind if I hosted a "musical" event there on a Saturday afternoon and he readily assented.
I issued a call to new and old friends and told them that I would like to host an outdoor show in the racquetball court where I live, and I got a great response. There is no electricity available in the racquetball court, so one obvious stipulation for all performers was that they had to use battery-operated or acoustic gear and instruments. Furthermore, I stipulated that all performers who needed amplification would be required to play through the same 5-watt Pignose amp. My hearing had been bad for years (and still is!) and I wanted to avoid any further damage! And besides, a small battery-operated amplifier followed along well with the minimalist aesthetic of my Apartment Music shows. Requiring that all performers used the same small amp and requiring the use of simple plug-and-play gear helped to level the playing field between the performers and put the emphasis on expression and interaction with the other people in the space. High volume is a crutch. I am a big believer in the notion that Noise doesn't need to be loud to be good. Using high volume in one's Noise (music) is really about one thing: assaulting the audience rather than sharing and interacting, and to me that's boring. If I'm going to be assaulted I would prefer to stay home, walk my dog, take a nap, anything other than that. I also limited each performance to 10 minutes. I'm known as the king of stipulations, but there are well-considered ideas and motivations behind all of my stipulations. Bereft of lazy crutches such as high volume (big amps), lots of gear, and an entire century in which to play enabled the performers to concentrate on the use of imagination and being in-the-moment. In my Apartment Music shows and the Laboratory Music improv festival series I had always emphasized that the audience was an important element. By listening closely, deeply, intently the audience members (most of whom are usually performers themselves) complete the loop, complete the performance by engaging with the performer in creating the moment. I am not interested in impersonal, cold, LOUD, in-your-face Noise music in a live performance setting. So, at about 1:00 PM all of the performers walked from my apartment to the racquetball court for an afternoon of fun sound-making. The weather was fairly good, not too hot, somewhat cloudy, and that helped to make it a fun event. It can be HOT even in mid-October in North Central Florida and we were fortunate that the weather was such that we didn't burn up. After every third performance we all strolled back to my apartment to get bottled water and I made my famous crack coffee for everybody! Performers were: Vasectomy Party (Hal Harmon) Orphling (Jeremiah Paddock) Amigos (Timothy Flynn and Kit Clock) Hell Garbage (Dylan Houser) Petit Laffite (Lumen K) Fiver's Stereo (Shatter Wax, Jay Peele) Heirloom (Andrew Chadwick) Bluesharp (Josh Tippery) Oblongata (Mike Berchou) A.J. Herring The Glyph (Aaron Abrams) Hal McGee Here below you can view a slideshow of photos from Racket Fest that were taken by me, and I believe that Lumen K and Andrew Chadwick took some of the photos too. Below the slideshow you will find Vimeo video players of the performances by each of the participants. Most of these videos were filmed by Andrew Chadwick, using my video camera, and I think that Lumen K shot one or two to help out. The videos are downloadable at Vimeo. The duo of Amigos were our special guests from Michigan!
Afterword:
At the time of the event and in my subsequent original promotion and presentation of the event on Facebook I called the event "Racket Music Fest". In the days and weeks following the fest Dylan Houser always referred to it as "Racket Fest". At first this irritated me a smidgeon, but after a while I started to like "Racket Fest" better than "Racket Music Fest"! So, I have retroactively re-named it Racket Fest!
Sunday, January 13, 2019 with performances by
Dylan Houser Penny Grune-Fae DJ Hollow Life Tomokie's Cup Elsie Shiro Hal McGee with special guest Girls On Fire Apartment Music is a long-running series of concerts and sessions of experimental and electronic music, improvisation and noise in Hal McGee's apartment in Gainesville, Florida. photos, videos and audio recordings by Hal McGee unless credited otherwise EC-hosted streaming audio players are 320 kbps MP3 short video excerpts on Vimeo are downloadable Apartment Music 33 is also available as a Bandcamp album. All EC contributors can request a free download code.
streaming audio 320 kbps mp3
Girls On Fire
(Leslie Singer)
DJ Hollow Life
Elsie Shiro
Hal McGee
Saturday, January 12, 2019 with performances by
Unfade Lumen K Fiver's Stereo Jiblit Dupree Shelby Radcliffe Ironing The Glyph Canned Ham with special guest Girls On Fire Apartment Music is a long-running series of concerts and sessions of experimental and electronic music, improvisation and noise in Hal McGee's apartment in Gainesville, Florida. photos, videos and audio recordings by Hal McGee unless credited otherwise streaming audio players are 320 kbps MP3 short video excerpts on Vimeo are downloadable
This Apartment Music 32 page has been upgraded/improved,
and there is now a AM32 Bandcamp album. All EC contributors can request a free download code.
Unfade
Rachel Kinbar and Jonas Van den Bossche
listen in streaming audio to Unfade
Fiver's Stereo
Jay Peele (Shatter Wax)
Jiblit Dupree
Danny McGuire
Shelby Radcliffe
Ironing
Andrew Chadwick
The Glyph
Aaron Abrams
Girls On Fire
Leslie Singer
Canned Ham
A.J. Herring, Mark McGee, and Hal McGee
Editor's Note: I will eventually create a Bandcamp album for Apartment Music 32
On Thursday, January 10, 2019 I received a package from Rafael González emblazoned with rubber stamp letters wishing me "HAPPY BIRTHDAY".
Inside I found art that my amigo created just for me for my 61st birthday! I shot high resolution scans of numerous sections of the art, some very small. I isolated these pictures from the larger works and enlarged them, in effect creating new emphases and aspects of the originals, including scanner distortions and glitches, plus changes in exposure, contrast, and saturation. Rafael's work is very rich in details and imagistic wonders to begin with, but I was happy when new, unexpected images emerged, some reminiscent of of the satellite-viewscapes of Don Campau. |
Electronic Cottage
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