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October, 2003 – Third Coast
Festival Audio Cabaret with Gregory Whitehead, Anna Friz and the Books
This year's Third Coast Festival Audio Cabaret, held Friday, October 17th at
the Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall, offered three very different but
equally intriguing audio performances, including the first-ever live
performance by public radio's new favorite band the Books, Gregory Whitehead's
boot camp chant lampooning Donald Rumsfeld and Anna Friz's composition for
accordian, replete with sonar bleeps and radio static.
Gregory Whitehead , who served as master of ceremonies, is an
internationally renowned playwright and performer in the Theater of the
Invisibles, and director ad absurdum for the immensely influential Laboratory
for Innovation and Acoustic Research (LIAR). Recent BBC broadcasts include
American Heavy, Resurrection Ranch and The Loneliest Road. Whitehead has
received the coveted Prix Italia, which he was relieved to discover is not an
automobile racing event.
Anna Friz is a sound artist and curator; radio artist,
broadcaster and pirate. She has produced and curated original works for
international, community and local festivals, radio stations and other audio
peformances. She is the founder of the Thereminions Theremin Orchestra, and
Central Dispatch improv groups, and since moving to Montreal in 2000, she has
been part of an arts collective that makes work for CKUT FM. Anna recently
completed a Masters in Media Studies at Concordia University.
The Books (Nick Willscher Zammuto and Paul de Jong) make
'sample' music, with source material consisting of vocal and instrumental
fragments from anywhere and everywhere, found sounds and field recordings mixed
with their own recordings of acoustic instruments (guitar and cello etc.). The
Books are attracted to sounds that are alive and candid, sounds that are rich
and versatile, and sounds that are odd but somehow familiar.
Nick Willscher Zammuto grew up in the suburbs somewhere in
western Massachusetts, USA. He studied chemistry and the visual arts, and
eventually moved into sound sculpture and then music composition. After
graduation he worked for a while as an art conservator, then moved to New York
City to pursue art, where he met Paul de Jong in 2000. He has recently returned
to Massachusetts, where he makes sandwiches and teaches art classes. All the
while he has been working on music, more or less.
Paul de Jong grew up in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he
started studying the cello at age five. These days he tries to negotiate a
workable situation between the endless complications of sound and the direct
simplicity of his own musical intuition, through incessant experimentation with
a variety of musical and electronic devices, including his cello, reel-to-reel
recorders, commodore-64's and atari computers, and more traditional equipment
for sound recording and manipulation. De Jong currently lives in New York City.
The TCF Audio Cabaret was produced in collaboration with the Art Institute of
Chicago with additional support from the
Guild Complex . |
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