[microsound] acf/LA Composer to Composer with JOHN OSWALD - 02/16/04

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@xxxxxxxxxx>]

American Composers Forum of Los Angeles proudly presents:

COMPOSER TO COMPOSER WITH JOHN OSWALD:

Plunderphonia, Chronophotics
and rumours about the Spinvolver effect

"Sometimes the attempt is made to associate me with one or another of
the fashionable new categories that arise in discussing art making.
You know, multi media and new media, conceptual, performance or audio
art, digital photography and digital video. I prefer to refer to the
old categories. Currently i'm choreographing a symphony, sculpting an
opera, painting a feature movie, and jazzing it on the side."
--John Oswald


Presentation by composer John OSWALD, moderated by Richard ZVONAR

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney|CalArts Theater)
631 West Second Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Monday, FEBRUARY 16, 2004, 3:00-6:00 PM

$10 admission

Ample parking on site


In conjunction with his performance on the 
Musical Explorations series at REDCAT on February 
20, Composer John Oswald will discuss his work in 
a special ACF Composer to Composer salon (while 
simultaneously displaying a large-screen 
projection of the chronophotic image from his 
brand new DVD feature movie The Arc of 
Apparitions).


Oswald is best known for his invention of 
Plunderphonics, a musical form/process/ethos 
wherein pre-existing recorded pieces are 
transformed into new works by  a variety of 
editing and signal processing techniques. The 
1989 Plunderphonic CD (never-for-sale, remaining 
stocks destroyed by Michael Jackson & CBS) became 
an underground cult classic. The realistic cover 
photo of a nude Michael Jackson revealed as a 
white woman paralleled the musical 
transformations depicted on the disc. Other 
electroquoted artists included Bing Crosby, The 
Beatles, Glenn Gould, Public Enemy & 
(consequently) James Brown. The samples Oswald 
used to create these pieces were studiously 
footnoted with all due credit given to the source 
artists. The disc was not sold but distributed 
freely to radio stations, libraries, critics and 
musicians. Despite this approach, prudes in the 
"Recording Industry" representing Michael Jackson 
destroyed the remaining copies and prohibited 
Oswald from distributing or reproducing the CD. 
In the wake of these events, Oswald was 
commissioned to plunderphonicize recordings by 
the Grateful Dead and artists on the Elektra 
label, and he has continued to explore the far 
reaches of musical perception, culture jamming, 
and sonic transformation (including the CD new 
release Aparanthesi - a 30 minute exploration of 
a single note).

Oswald's February 20 performance at REDCAT will 
include Rascali Klepitoire (plunderphonics-like 
treatments of the performance of obvious choices 
from the Classical Repertoire) as well as 
concert-situation and phenomenal (in multiple 
senses of the word) pieces, composed between 1991 
& 2001.


============================================

For more information on Plunderphonics, see:

http://www.plunderphonics.com/

For information on Aparanthesi, see:

http://www.electrocd.com/cat.e/imed_0368.html

For information on John Oswald's performance at REDCAT, see:

http://redcatweb.org/season/music/johnoswald.html


============================================

JOHN OSWALD BIO

"For the moment, John Oswald is a solo movement, 
the most exciting school of one in music."
	- Milo Miles,  Village Voice.

Oswald begins 2004 with the first commercial 
publication of one of his chronophotics: the 
feature length Arc of Apparitions is produced on 
DVD by Avatar/Ohm editions. And Oswald's own 
label Fony will be rereleasing his albums from 
the nineties, starting with Grayfolded (March) 
and Plexure (May) and Discosphere (August). He is 
also founding an experimental ad agency called 
Veracity.

In 2003 Oswald premiered his new solo dance opera 
Spinvolver, with Susanna Hood, in Berlin in 
February, followed by performances in several 
European capitols. In the fall, Aparanthesi, a 
one note electroacousmatic composition, entailing 
some research in the perception of sonic morphs, 
was released on CD by empreintes DIGITALes.

Last spring his first Chronophotics to be 
exhibited in North America, entitled Jacko 
Lantern, was on display in the window of Pages 
Books as part of both the Images Moving Pictures 
and the Contact Festival of Photography, while 
Stills, his first solo show of images, was held 
over at Toronto Harbourfront's Premiere Dance 
Theatre for eight months, and he was the cover 
boy for the British music mag The Wire. In recent 
years he composed a "Concerto for Wired Conductor 
and
Orchestra", which premiered at Boston Symphony 
Hall. He designed the soundtrack and system for 
Stress, an eight-screen movie by Bruce Mau, 
showing at the Museum of Technology in Vienna. A 
new piece entitled "Oswald's First Piano Concerto 
by Tchaikovsky, (as suggested by Michael Snow)" 
was premiered in Vancouver by Paul Plimley and 
the CBC orchestra. He composed a score for the 
National Ballet of Canada for orchestra, robot 
piano and the disembodied singing voice of Glenn 
Gould. For the past four years he has been 
creating a database of photo portraits for a 
series of "Moving Stills". One of his 
plunderphonie video/photo collages was shown at 
the Royal Festival Hall Hayward Gallery in London 
and was immediately sold as a gift to the Museum 
of Modern Art in New York.

Of recent works, he wrote, directed and produced 
a radio play in four interwoven languages 
(Brazilian, Dutch, English & German); wrote, 
animated, directed & scored "Homonymy" (for 
chamber ensemble & cinema); scored the stage 
version of the silent movie classic "Metropolis"; 
produced the soundtrack album to the gay porn 
feature "Hustler White"; as well as appearing as 
himself in John Greyson's feature film "Un©ut" 
and Craig Baldwin's "Sonic Outlaws", and he was 
the subject of one of Moses Znaimer's television 
documentaries "The Originals".

Other recent activities include: a sonic 
motorcade in Brasilia; and a dance composition 
for 22 choreographers (including Bill T.Jones, 
Margie Gillis, & Holly Small); plus commissions 
from the Lyon Opera Ballet, Dutch National Radio, 
Change of Heart, SMCQ, Pizzicato 5, and Radio 
Canada. Other works are in the active repertoire 
of the Kronos Quartet (they've played his Spectre 
over 300 times worldwide, & another commission, 
Mach almost as often), the Culberg Ballet Sweden, 
the Monaco Ballet, The Deutsche Opera Ballet 
Berlin, The Modern Quartet, the Penderecki 
Quartet, and others. His recorded works have been 
used in productions for radio, stage, concert, 
television, film, Hollywood movies, computer 
media and video.

Oswald is also the founder and co-facilitator of 
Art Wrestling, a Toronto-based contact 
improvisation movement jamboree which has 
occurred weekly uninterrupted for 28 years.

In 1990, Oswald's most notorious recording, 
plunderphonic, was destroyed by prudes in the 
Recording Industry representing Michael Jackson. 
He has since released recordings on Elektra, 
Avant, ReR Megacorp, Blast First, & Swell, 
featuring transformations of the music and 
performances of Stravinsky, Metallica, James 
Brown, Gyorgy Ligeti, Dolly Parton & many others. 
A box-set CD & book retrospective of his 
plunderphonics work has just been appropriated 
from Oswald's ?ony label by Seeland. The first 
disc of his Grateful Dead production GrayFolded 
was selected as the #1 international recording of 
the decade by the Toronto Sun. In the same year 
his album of improvised music, Acoustics was  a 
#1 critic's selection in Coda magazine.  The 
GrayFolded package, completed the following year 
was selected for best of the year lists in 
Rolling Stone, The New York Times and many other 
publications. A recent retrospective CD box-set 
of
Plunderphonic works has been called 
"mind-numbingly amazing" by Peter Kenneth, 
Rolling Stone Magazine, and made Spin Magazine's 
2001 top 10. 2004 will see the founding of an ad 
agency called Veracity. Oswald is Director of 
Research at MysteryLaboratory in Canada. Eye 
Weekly's  '94 year end report anointed him  a 
"God-like being" (in 2003 they have upgraded this 
to "a god proper"). The Montreal Mirror says 
"John Oswald is probably Canada's most important 
composer-musician,"  and the London (England) 
Observer has called him "the maddest man on the 
planet."


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______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com