Review – 10-33cm (ROOM40) 2008 – by Eric Hill, Exclaim

i8u – 10-33cm (MP3 by Room40) 2008
From Holst’s The Planets to Eno’s Apollo, composers have glanced spaceward for inspiration and grandeur. Montreal’s France Jobin goes the extra step by turning outwards then inwards to explore ideas of String Theory, the title being the theoretical size of strings that make up, well, everything. Music, or purely expressed sound, is a logical art form to tackle these complex ideas, as little else exists in time and space quite the same way. The seven pieces have a scientific precision and clarity, placing each tone and texture in an aural description of nearly dimensionless particles. The vibratory interactions of these particles, or strings, stir high end frequencies that snap together like microscopic jigsaws, and waves of drone that describe a closed or looped model. Slipping just out of silence into the auditory field intensifies a reflex to lean towards the discovery of curious phenomena. Whether or not Jobin’s work inspires you to more deeply consider reality it can be enjoyed for its wonderful minimalist construction.
-Eric Hill
Address: http://www.room40.org

New Orleans 04.19.2009 – Sommeil

April 11.09

beginning at 10:00 pm on Saturday April 11th and ending at 7:00 am on Sunday April 12th

$15 including breakfast.  All participants are asked to provide their own sleeping bag and pillow.
You can also spend meditation time in the Sleep Space on April 11th from noon till 9:00 pm: $5 per hour and $3 per half hour. From 6:00-9:00 pm the gallery will participate in the St Claude Arts District Gallery Opening Saturday. All proceeds benefit Antenna Gallery.

Antenna Gallery
3161 Burgundy St
New Orleans, LA
70117 in the Bywater.

in the heart of the St Claude Arts District.
Tanner Menard, Antenna Gallery and Experimedia Records presents Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep, an international collaborative experiment. Sommeil will be an all-night event beginning at 10:00 pm on Saturday April 11th and ending on Sunday April 12th at 7:00 am.

Participants are asked to slowly fall asleep while live ambient and environmental music is performed through the night by Tanner Menard. i8u’s circadian will  start off the evening, alongside Tanner Menard’s piano recordings and Mathieu Rhulmann’s baby cooing.

Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep will be Menard’s reinterpretation of the sleep concert experiment, first created by Robert Rich in 1982 and will be presented at the Antenna Gallery 3161 Burgundy
The concert will be realized with Rich’s permission and guidance. Sleep concerts are all-night events in which the audience is asked to attend the concert with a sleeping bag and pillow and to fall asleep while a slowly unfolding sonic texture evolves over the course of the night and into the morning. People attending
the event are asked to be willing to sleep during the event or at least to remain silent during the course of the nine hour experience.

Not merely a recreation of Rich’s original idea, Sommeil is a conceptual, global remix of a performance type that addresses one of the most basic functionalities of ambient and environmental sound; music by which to sleep.

In the spirit of remix and the Creative Commons movement, Menard, a Louisiana native, has compiled submissions of audio material for the concert from nearly seventy artists across the globe.
These artists answered a call for submissions marketed online by Experimedia Records which asked for music and field recording to be used, remixed and mashed up during this nocturnal event.
Submissions include drones, found sound, recordings of natural and unnatural environments and synthetic music created on synthesizers and computers. Submitters have included radio scientists,
geologists, psychologists, sound artists, musicians, composers, installation artists as well as several well known figures in the ambient music scene. During the course of the evening, Menard
will remix these sleep submissions into a constantly evolving sonic texture that will lull the audience to sleep. A quad-channel surround sound system will be provided by Piety St Studios for maximum sonic enhancement of the sleep space and ambient video lighting will be provided in the form of a video loop by the internationally acclaimed VJ CHIKA. Experimedia Records has generously agreed to release multiple out takes from this concert on its Internet label under a free Creative Commons license.

Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep will be nine hours of uninterrupted music beginning at 10:00 pm on Saturday April 11th and endingat 7:00 am on Sunday April 12th at Antenna Gallery . Tickets to
the evening event will be $15 and will include a light breakfast at waking time. During the day of April 11th Antenna Gallery will be opening the space to allow people who do not wish to sleep through the night to hear the original submissions from the international community of artists. We are asking $5 per hour toexperience the meditative environment of the sleep space and $3 per half an hour from noon to 9:00 pm on Saturday April 11th.

At 6 pm we will also be participating in the St Claude Gallery Opening that falls on the second Saturday of each month. All proceeds will benefit Antenna Gallery. Please visit tannermenard. archaichorizon.com to follow the event as it unfolds.

CURATOR AND SOUND ARTIST

Tanner Menard was born on September 20th, 1978 the same month that Brian Eno published his essay entitled ‘Ambient Music’. Cosmically connected to this conceptual shift in musical consciousness, Menard’s music has always soared over minimalist and ambient landscapes. At the age of 11 Menard composed his first works for piano and quickly established a reputation as a composer of minimalist music for orchestral forces. His work joe’s last mix’ has been performed around the globe at a number
of distinguished festivals and was released in 2003 on Kafua Records in Japan. In 2002 his sonic world was shaken by his experience working with Naut Human, the well known Curator and label owner at Recombinant Media Labs in San Francisco. There he discovered the world of ambient and experimental electronic music. In 2005 he served as an artist in residence at Arizona State University where he collaborated with Jeph Jerman, Gary Hill and Daniel Bernard Romain for his installation ‘envyronie’ which
combined orchestra, live electronics and desert recordings. His collaboration with Jerman inspired a series of environmentally based works and has subsequently marked the departure from
his classical and experimental backgrounds in favor of a world of ambient landscapes and piano inspired sound meditations. Menard’s music is released on Install Records, Archaic Horizon net
label, Friendly Virus net label, Kafua Records and Experimedia (tbr) and his orchestral music has been published by Loose Filter Music. His music has also appeared on the radio, on tv, in plays,
art galleries and major concert halls across the world and his blog ‘Tanner Menard’ is rapidly gaining international notoriety for such collaborations as Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep and reviews and
interviews with an international pool of artists and label owners.

SUBMISSIONS

Tanner Menard and Experimedia Records have assembled a roster of nearly seventy artists from around the globe including radio scientists, geologists, psychologists, sound artists, musicians, composers, installation artists as well as several well known figures in the ambient music scene. These artists submitted material for Menard to remix during the course of Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep.

Submissions include drones, found sound, recordings of natural and unnatural environments and synthetic music created on synthesizers and computers. A complete list of artists will be available
at the concert and will later be published on Tanner Menard’s blog. Select works, remixed by Menard will appear on a release on Experimedia Records in the months following the event.

VIDEO ARTIST

CHiKA is a graphic designer and a live computer visuals artist working within New York’s expanding cinema community and VJ scene. Her videos implement geometric minimalist patterns and
original graphics in unique, repetitive combinations. She has performed at The Museum of Modern Art, The Hammer Museum, Mutek, The Mapping Festival, Decibel Festival, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève , Platform Bohenstrasses, Théâtre Maisonneuve, Asia Contemporary Week, San Francisco
Art Institute, Eyebeam, Monkeytown, The Issue Project, Galapagos Art Space, Tonic, Eyewash as well as private parties, festivals, events, galleries and night clubs. Since CHiKA started performing live in the summer of 2004, she has become very active in the experimental music and video underground scene in NYC. She is a member of the Share community, which is an organization dedicated to supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange in new media communities. The first SHARE evening happened in New York in 2001. There are now about 20 SHARE communities across the world. She was recently featured on Club Chroma (www.Joost.com), Eyewash 3 DVD by Forward Motion Theater and published in Super 10, Art Book in 2008. CHiKA also collaborates with electronic musicians and DJs on various projects. Log Log on to http://www.imagima.com for more information.

GALLERY

Antenna is operated by the artist-run non-profit collective Press Street who’s mission is to promote art and literature in the community through dynamic projects, collaborations and publications.
Antenna is located at 3161 Burgundy St New Orleans, LA70117 in the Bywater.

LABEL

Experimedia is a record label, arts organization, and online record shop based out of Ohio, United States which is involved in the digital and physical publication, promotion, and distribution of
exploratory music and visual arts. The Experimedia catalog covers a broad stylistic palette of exploratory music including ambient, electronica, electro-acoustic, experimental, dance, sound-art, microsound, glitch, avant-garde, abstract, minimalist, and more.

The Experimedia online mailorder shop has recently expanded to include the availability of releases from other select labels and artists. This is intended to make more conveniently available some
of the worlds most innovative experimental music. By including labels from overseas countries such as Japan, England, Germany, Austria, Australia, and many others we intend to make music from
around the globe and within the United States more readily and conveniently available throughout the world. Experimedia also acts as a community based platform for creative and conceptual media projects based upon collaborative research and project development efforts. The projects.experimedia.net domain
and the Experimedia Projects Wiki have been developed to facilitate the collaborative information gathering and organization for these research efforts. The goal is that the Projects Wiki will
become a large resource of relevant information to the exploratory sound and visual arts community as well as a historical account of the collaborative efforts involved with Experimedia related projects.
If you are an artist interested in contributing research datato our Projects Wiki or would like to initiate and curate a project within our framework please feel free to contact Experimedia.