First in the lineup is “(Damper) Coaster” composed by Martin Arnold. Next is “Soccer” by Scott Godin. I believe the full name of the piece is “Soccer: In Memoriam Hugh Kenner”. Although, I’m not sure what the links are between the world’s most popular sport and a Canadian literary critic. (See if you can hear them for yourself; you can find an excerpt halfway down this page.) You can hear the third work, Michael Oesterle’s “Assume Sometimes,” in its entirety on the composer’s site. The fourth piece has shared its title with the night’s event: “Four Seasons One Tree.” It’s by Rodney Sharman who writes the following on the work:

The piece is a meditation on magical, “seasonally complex” trees I have seen on North America’s West Coast, in Canada, California and Mexico. These extraordinary trees exhibit features of their entire life cycle at the same time, sometimes on a single branch, from smallest bud to fullest fruit, falling leaves and bare twig.
The music is a set of constantly changing variations, contrasted with four solos for each of the sustaining instruments of the ensemble: trumpet, violin, bass clarinet and double bass.

The final piece is “Stare at the River” by Linda Catlin Smith, which she has described as “gazing with the ear.”

The main focus, for me at least, of this concert is not the five musical pieces per se, but the conductor, Gregory Oh. The folks at Musicworks magazine have set me on a profile of Oh, who is also a pianist and member of the group Toca Loca. I’ve been theorizing as to where I should sit so that I have the best view of the conductor: not a common concert-goer’s goal. Any tips?

After the event, I’ll shoot of the Spadina Line to see if I can get home before Spielberg presents the best motion picture Oscar.

The LoK8Tr project has started. If you are keen on checking it out, as I am, you should become Facebook friends with Lo Katr and check out CMC’s page on the project. Also, don’t forget that LoK8Tr and the cool cats at Mannlicher Carcano will be performing an on-air collaboration this Saturday at 3pm on CFRU (93.3 FM if you live in Guelph, Ont.).

The performance is called Double Blind (Love) is being performed simultaneously in three spaces: the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Centre, in Asheville, NC, USA; Living Room espace de création contemporaine, Montpellier, France; and online at selfworld.net. The performance started at noon Eastern Standard time or 6 p.m. Central European time. The pair’s plan is to sing together for as long as they can. Yesterday, Cloninger figured the performance will go for close to five hours.

“Annie is hardcore,” he said.

Cloninger himself is quite hardcore. Not only does he have a background in punk and speed metal bands, but he’s sung a line from a pop song, for six hours, three times before. The Pop Mantras, as Cloninger calls them, involved “We ride tonight/ Ghost horses” from Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army”; “For a minute there/ I lost myself” from Radiohead’s “Karma Police” and ” and “Tonight/ Wait now” from the Ramones “I Just Want to have Something to Do.”

For Cloninger, these micro-focused music marathons, including Double Blind (Love), can be an attempt to communicate something to an audience.

“If there was a way to cause people feel what certain songs make me feel,” he said, “that would be valuable, but of course this is impossible. So then it’s this stupid brute force kind of Samuel Becket–inspired attempt to just continue to repeat that thing over and over and over as if that was going to do it. But of course it doesn’t. And something else happens.

“It’s a way to fail rigorously,” he adds. “You can’t just fail because it’s boring. Anybody can fail. But it’s valuable to try and achieve something that you know is not going to be achievable and just to push on that.”

The main challenge that Cloninger and Abrahams face is the delay inherent in sending audio/visual signals over the Web. Their improv is not in sync, and the time delay shifts because of buffering. Cloninger wrote about this challenge to their collaborating in an email to Abrahams:

We don’t have the luxury of being “in” the same time, and so much traditional composition is based on the assumption that the performers have the luxury of being in synchronized time. Our compositional variability (changes/differences) will have to be based on blunt phases (loud/soft, complex/simple, monotonous/erratic, a cappella/instrumentally-accompanied, etc.) Who knows what others we will develop. Each of these phase shifts can be initiated by either of us. We will just have to be attentive to the each other. And these phasings in and out will be sluggish and gradual, because we share a time with each other that is similar, but not exact.

We have given ourselves enough “time” to negotiate and explore this odd timescape. It is a time of “desire” (we only remain in it as long as we want to). And hopefully our changes will be motivated by desire rather than by mere “musical innovation.” In other words, we will change what we are doing not because we want to “entertain” anybody, but because we are personally bored and we desire to do something else, or because we are in communication with each other and we desire to connect, or because we are curious, or because we are following a flow to see where it leads, or whatever. And we can’t change the melody or the lyrics. We can only change the affective things that we can change. So we have taken most of the “elements” of music (rhythm, melody, harmony) and rigorously modified them. But I think the performance will still wind up functioning as a piece of music (at least in some sense, although that won’t be all it is doing).

And of course our faces will be doing whatever they are doing, but that will be a residual effect. We will be attentive to the audio and not as attentive to the video. Usually in new media art it is the other way around (visuals first, then audio as residual).

Over the past four hours the singing has shifted through various modes. The pair has just mumble sung, and other times, just drawn out phonemes from the word love. They’ve wailed and caterwauled. Sometimes it’s a dirge, other times it’s a fight.

Tomorrow I plan to speak with Cloninger to get his thoughts on this online collaboration. How did he feel in that moment when Abrahams disappeared. (She disappeared again as I was writing this.) I’m hoping Cloninger’s thoughts on online collaboration will give me some more insight into my search for LoK8Tr. Cloninger and Abrahams may be singing blind, but I’m writing in the dark with respect to my assignment.

I met Porter Hall, the host of the Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, at the University of Guleph campus radio station. He arrived just after 3 p.m., a few minutes after the scheduled start time for his weekly show on CFRU. As the automated public-service announcements, commercials and eventually the show’s intro were being broadcast, Porter Hall hooked up a sound processor and unloaded his backpack. The bag held a bunch of cassettes, including a Musicworks compilation (No. 28); a Buddy Greene record called Praise Harmonica (”sappy Christian tunes,” Porter said); ukulele player Tiny Tim’s 2nd Album; CDs, some with spoken samples that Porter had compiled; and a collection of instruments, such as an electronic toy piano (Piano Fun!), a trumpet mouthpiece on a 1/4″ piece of PVC pipe, a McDonald’s Happy-Meal prize that went “boing” and other hose-y bits. There was an electric toothbrush in that bag, but Porter didn’t bring it out for the show.

“My bag of tricks changes over time,” Porter Hall said. The host, whose pseudonym is taken from Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, then added: “Sometimes it’s quite random.”

All these “tricks” were for the Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour, an improvised sound-collage set. Once the gear was ready, Porter threw on a record, looped some spoken component from one of his CDs, and had whatever was on BBC World Service thrown on for good measure.

“What was that?” Porter asked when a sound caught his attention.

“Sometimes I don’t know what’s going on,” he admitted. Then the sound came through one of the myriad channels on the mixing board once again.

“Yeah. See? Where did that come from? Where did that come from?” he asked as he fiddled with the machines to try to catch and manipulate the sound.

The in-studio gizmos and media are only a part of the show. Porter Hall and his two long-time collaborators Really Happening and Gogo Godot form the core of Mannlicher Carcano (MC). Really, in L.A., and Gogo, in Winnipeg, call in most weeks, over the phone or Skype, and add their musical gestures to the mix. Porter looked on Skype for Rock Hill from Montreal. Some weeks there can be eight people in eight different cities. Pilot K9 in Peterborough, Ont., broadcasts the CHRU Web stream over Trent Radio and jams along with it too.

The three members of MC have known each other for years. Porter and Really have been friends since Grade 7. The trio started performing as MC with live, Fluxus-style, performance-art events that featured improvised audio collage around 1988 when all three were art-school students in Winnipeg. In 1990, Porter moved to San Diego, Calif., and in 1991, Really moved to L.A. The three collaborated occasionally following the moves, but it was in 1998, when Porter settled in Peterborough, that the group focused their artistic output to radio. Porter helmed the show at Trent Radio for four years. Then, in 2002, with Porter’s move to Guelph, the show came to CFRU.

I travelled to the university to learn more about Mannlicher Carcano because the radio show is going to mix in the LoK8Tr project when the latter is performed sometime in March 2010. I thought maybe MC could offer me some insights into the mysterious LoK8tr. At the very least, I could see how a musical/sound collaboration employs Skype, an application common to both endeavours.

But, the odd thing about Saturday’s show is that no one showed up to jam. Really Happening didn’t call. Neither did Gogo. Rocky Hill didn’t appear on Skype and there was some technical snafu that prevented Porter from streaming the Trent broadcast back into the Guelph broadcast for a kind of feedback jam.

At the start of the show, Porter generously invited me to join in with the audio collage. I was hesitant. Sure, the format was anything-goes, but still, I didn’t want to do anything that sounded dumb. About two thirds into the show, I felt comfortable enough to make some noise. I spun a record around with my hand, getting a slow-mo drone out of that devotional harmonica music. I couldn’t resist the Piano Fun! with notes that came out like electronic wheezes. I even shoved my voice recorder up to a mic and played what I had recorded from earlier in the show. Porter mixed and matched everything at the mixer. And, man, now I really get a kick out of hearing what came out of that session.

(To download the show, head to the archives at the CFRU site. Select Mannlicher Carcano from the drop-down menu, then click on the show with Saturday’s date. My contributions start at about minute 40.)

After the show had finished, we went to Porter Hall’s studio, where he works on his art installations, and discussed MC. (One installation, Robochorus, is now on at Gallery Lambton in Sarnia, Ont.)

The MC sound collages can be jarring at times, but they often enter the realms of trippy or hypnotic, especially when elements are looped and layered. Although the MC process is anarchic, there is an aesthetic operating.

“Various participants have favourite ways of processing sounds and there are favourite sounds that get mixed in different ways,” Porter said. “Also, we like to refer back to other times and events in our Mannlicher history. It’s like an extended, abstract conversation. I can reference some performance we did five years ago, something that had particular resonance, and just by dredging that up from our archives, it will send a recognizable link to the rest of Mannlicher. It’s a non-verbal means of communication. So, someone can bring in one thing and it will inspire the others to respond in kind, which is a way of saying ‘I get your reference.’”

For those who don’t share the MC vocabulary, I wondered if there were conventions or modes similar to those found in jazz improv.

“More formless kinds of jazz improvisation have to do with intense listening,” Porter said. “Whenever I hear jazz musicians speak of this type of improv, they all say the most important thing is to listen. It’s the same with Mannlicher and I don’t know if intense listening is work or a kind of meditative withdrawal. It always works best when the separation between yourself and the sound is lost. You become the sound.”

I admitted that my contribution to that day’s show felt a bit random even for a random process. I just made noise, not really sure how it fit into the existing sounds. I guess I was like a toddler just starting to babble. Porter, ever generous, said the studio set-up isn’t exactly conducive to proper collaboration, with me on one side of the table and him surrounded by players and computers. But I have a feeling I need to work on my listening if I were to jam with MC again (which I fully intend to do).

As for my mission to try and find out more about LoK8Tr, it wasn’t furthered along much. The person(s) behind LoK8Tr are as much of a mystery for Porter as he/she/they are for me. Months ago, Porter got an email from LoK8Tr asking if MC would be interested in participating in a project. Porter was receptive to the proposal even though, at the time, he had few details.

“I basically said that as long as we are allowed do anything with the sounds or samples we are given, then we’d be quite happy to use them,” Porter said.

I told Porter that at the beginning of my research, I had thought LoK8Tr was simply a new MC project. He, on the other hand, had thought I was the person behind LoK8tr coming to look into Mannlicher as part of my project.

“But I’m pretty sure you’re not,” he said.

But with a blog, you let it all hang out—the dumb assumptions that you abandon, the head scratching, the raw data. Of course,  I could leave those bits out, but then, what’s left to keep a blog going?

In the case of the LoK8Tr project, my going Web is appropriate (so I’ve convinced myself) because I’m meeting the participants in their medium: the only place they operate right now. There you have it—I can blame them. Also, going meta on the article-writing process, another thing that makes me cringe, is justified because this project seems keen to go up that self-referential route. (”Self-referential”?! Crap. I haven’t used that since third year.)

Thank you LoK8Tr for sending me in this direction. Is it meta for you?

The Canadian Music Centre (CMC) runs a program called New Music in New Spaces, which promotes the work of CMC’s associate composers by staging musical events in novel places, such as the Bonnechere Caves, Eganville, Ont. and in the trees in Toronto. An event coming up in January is called LoK8Tr. (I’m not sure what the ‘T’ is for. Doesn’t the numeral 8 imply a ‘T,’ à la Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi?”) A CMC press release describes LoK8Tr as:

a project inspired by and written directly for performance using Internet media and social networking tools. It will include music, poetry, graphics and video distributed via the Internet on a set performance date to those who sign up to receive the Twitter, Facebook, email and Skype messages that will make up the piece. LoK8Tr will be accessible via cellphone, computer and radio (with on-air presence as part of the Mannlicher Carcano radio remix program)….The artists for the LoK8Tr project will not be announced until after the conclusion of the performance date to emphasize the project themes of identity/self, location, loneliness/facelessness and virtual interconnections that can be amplified or obscured by the distortions and dissonances that mediated relations create.

It is that last part, about the artists not being announced until after the performance, that is a bit of a challenge. I’m working on an article on LoK8Tr for Musicworks magazine and so far all the details I have are, well, the press release above. If this were any other topic, I wouldn’t hesitate to find out all that I could on the subject and include it in the article, but who wants harsh on a project whose themes include the facelessness of virtual interconnections? It would be a little like spoiling the ending of a movie, no? But then again, movie critics do get to see the movie and are trusted to dole out the right amount of information.

I’ll see what I can LoK8. (I wonder how much mileage one can get out of that spelling?)