The 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit

Every summer since 2002, the New Music Summit spends a week in July showcasing some of the most innovative and pioneering new music that is happening in California and beyond. At first a celebration of the eclectic vanguard artists on the DIY Edgetone Records Label, the Summit now features a broad range of artists from across the US, Europe, Australia and Japan. It features world premieres and exclusive debuts, raging free improvisers to microtonal composition to experimental electronics to harsh noise, reflecting an incredible range of genre busting exploration and sonic creativity. The Summit promotes intermedia, fostering cross-pollination between disciplines of music, sound art, visual and media arts. It is committed to bringing highly innovative music and art to a growing audience seeking a new experience. The festival concludes this Friday and Saturday.

The Outsound New Music Summit marked its 10th anniversary in 2011 with a night of wildly imaginative vocals backed by experimental electronic musician bran…(pos); a performance by East Bay improvisatory ensemble Grosse Abfahrt accompanied by German multimedia artist, Alfred 23 Harth (or A23H); a night of new compositions, featuring Gino Robair’s Aguascalientes Ensemble; and a second edition of “Sonic Foundry,” a true “summit” of some of the most inventive new instrument builders, performing five original collaborative pieces.

The festival kicked off last Sunday, July 17th, with its always popular Touch the Gear tm night, a free hands-on expo where attendees can experience new and exotic instruments and electronic gear and make some of their own unique sounds. Over the past nine years, The Outsound New Music Summit, presented by Outsound Presents, the Bay Area organization of independent and experimental music and sound artists, has showcased over 300 artists and groups from the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia, many of them performing in the Bay Area for the first time.

Past performances have included the legendary Richard Waters, inventor of the water phone, the instrument you’ve heard in movies, TV, and music CDs but probably can’t name; a 2005 collaboration with the Illuminated Corridor collective, which brings music and film into pubic spaces; and Tom Nunn, musician, composer and designer and builder of over 200 new instruments, who returns this year as part of the second edition of Outsound’s “Sonic Foundry” program.

There is more art and sensation to be discovered in music than is contained in hit charts, sound alike trends, or snappy tunes. Or so say a diverse and intrepid band of musicians and sonic artists who improvise performances, make their own instruments, freely cross genres (jazz with classical, say) and media (sound with film or poetry or both), push electronic soundscapes to the edge, and regularly break out in head-banging noise fests. John Cage would approve.

10th Anniversary Outsound New Music Summit
July 17-18 & July 20 – July 23, 2011
Free events start at 7pm; Q&A w/the artists start at 7:30 pm, performances at 8:15 pm
San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street (bet. 20th & 21st Streets), S.F. Price: All Ages | Wheelchair Accessible
July 20-23: $12 General ($10 advance) / $10 Student; Festival Pass $45 ($38 advance)
Advance general tickets at Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/174366

Tonight, Friday July 22: ~The Art of Composition~ A night of performances infused with new and exciting compositions with Gino Robair’s Aguascalientes Ensemble performing a musical suite based on scenes captured by Jose Guadalupe Posada in his politically charged engravings of late19th -and early 20th-century life in Mexico, Andrew Raffo Dewer’s Interactions Quartet performing “Strata (2011)”, dedicated to Eduardo Serón, graphic scores by Kanoko Nishi featuring bassist Tony Dryer and Krys Bobrowski’s “Lift, Loft and Lull” a series of short pieces exploring the sonic properties of metal pipes and plates and the use of balloons as resonators, with percussion and objects by Gino Robair.

Saturday July 23: ~Sonic Foundry Too!~ Outsound has teamed up with Thingamajigs to produce the sequel to the first Sonic Foundry held in 2006. To celebrate ten years of innovative programming Outsound Presents 10 Inventors in 5 collaborations! Featuring Tom Nunn, Steven Baker, Bob Marsh, Dan Ake, Sung Kim, Brenda Hutchinson, Sasha Leitman, Bart Hopkins, Terry Berlier, Walter Funk. In these masters of the innovative just the visual alone of metal, wood, strings, plastic, rubber, and paper is bound to inspire. Each duo set will enhance these specialized inventions and the inventors that perform on them.

Joan Jeanrenaud and PC Muñoz's "Pop-Pop"

Recently, I came across the album "Pop-Pop", a collaboration of cellist extraordinaire Joan Jeanrenaud, (formerly of the Kronos Quartet) and one of my favorite percussionists, art-funk percussionist/beatmaker PC Muñoz. Described as "an exhilarating mash-up of contemporary classical/new music sensibilities and future-funk/hip-hop sonic aesthetics, Jeanrenaud's polyrhythmic compositions, rendered on both acoustic and electric celli, are paired with skittering electro-funk beats, eruptive drumkit, cajon drums, Hua Pan Gu (traditional Chinese drum), and other percussive elements, making for a refreshing, culturally diverse 21st century sound."

Derk Richardson, Senior Editor of Afar magazine, wrote that "Pop-Pop contains Jeanrenaud’s most playful music to date. There’s a big, implicit grin behind the dance that takes place between the cellist’s percussive bow strikes, pizzicato playing, and swirling arco phrases and the drumming, bleeps, burps, scratches, clicks, mixes, and washes brought in by Muñoz and Lieberman. But this highly re ned music also evokes both contemporary classical and cinematic legacies (Glass? Reich? Riley? Ligeti? Hermann?)."

"And for all the lively tempos, Devo-esque electronic pulses, and edgy avant-rock drumming, a certain darkness pervades many of the tracks. Dramatically ascending and descending glissandos, overlapping mournful phrases from two to six overdubbed celli, a feeling of unrelenting compression and extension, and eddies of dense, shadowy textures all contribute to the inexorable emotional gravity. What pops out from this canny interplay of mechanical and human elements is a complex musical personality as singular and fresh as it is steeped in history and experience."

Working with co-producer Justin Lieberman, the duo tracked the album at San Francisco's Studio Trilogy in a highly collaborative and improvisational fashion. "I had a great time working with PC on beats for a couple of tracks on my last record (the Grammy®-nominated ‘Strange Toys’)," Jeanrenaud notes. "So we thought we'd just dive in completely this time, and also have some fun working with pop-song structures, as well."

"I had a lot of material when I went in to record Strange Toys," says Jeanrenaud during a recent interview with NPR radio host Liane Hansen, "... And I sort of picked what I thought was the best material I had composed over the last several years. This time, I didn't have any material! So PC suggested, 'Well, why don't you just come in the studio, and we'll play around, and we'll just create some music by doing that process, just the two of us collaborating.'"

"Sometimes we'd start with a beat idea....and other times we'd start with a cello line, or an arrangement of a piece Joan had already finished," Muñoz says. "We'd mess around with ideas, and Joan would improvise melodies and themes...then she'd take home the demos, spend some time composing, and return with a piece that we would then start recording for real. It was a lot of fun, and very loose."

"The interesting thing is that when they hear the record, a lot of people might assume that the avant-garde stuff on the album is all from Joan and the funk/hip-hop stuff is all from PC," observes co-producer Lieberman. "But that isn't the case---some of the coolest, hip-hop-like ideas came from Joan, and some of the really out-there ideas came from PC. It was a very high level of collaboration and genre cross-pollination; very exciting to see."

With "Pop-Pop", Jeanrenaud and Munoz have met the challenge of devising new music for cello in the studio, and have come up with some of the most unique and creative music I've heard in some time. "That's why we ended up calling it Pop-Pop," Jeanrenaud says, "because it was the pop record that wasn't actually pop."

Brian Eno’s "Drums Between the Bells"

Brian Eno first came across the work of poet Rick Holland in the late 90’s during the "Map-Making Project"; a series of collaborative works between students of the Royal College, the Guildhall School of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music, the National Youth Orchestra and the English National Ballet, among others. In 2003, Eno and Holland made their first music together, although the resulting work does not appear on this album. In the intervening time since that initial session, they have met infrequently to work on new compositions.In early 2011, following the release of ‘Small Craft on a Milk Sea’ (Eno’s debut album for Warp Records), the pair resolved to finish the project. ‘Drums Between the Bells’ is the result.

Michael Calore recently wrote about Eno's latest album on Wired magazine's website, "Eno has always found great inspiration working with other big thinkers: His long, influential career as an artist, musician and record producer has seen him team up with the top names in rock and pop, including David Byrne, U2, Daniel Lanois, David Bowie and Robert Fripp. (Eno’s last album, 2010’s acclaimed Small Craft on a Milk Sea, was a collaboration with musicians Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams.)

Working with a poet has yielded some interesting results, (which you can hear when you stream the album from the Warp Records/Wired website). Holland’s words grace every track on Drums Between the Bells, but there’s very little actual singing on the recording. It’s almost exclusively a spoken-word affair."

"The vocalists are also mostly unknowns — people in Eno’s life like his accountant, a woman from his gym and a graphic designer friend, among others. Some of them are non-native speakers of English, so their performances are colored by foreign accents both subtle and thick. On top of that, the voices are digitally manipulated, the words sometimes stretched or pitch-shifted.

Under all the talking lies a tapestry of pillowy synths, minor-key melodies, chiming guitars, skittering drums and the other sonic touches that define all of Eno’s recent work. The man has a sound — you can spot an Eno track, or at least a very good imitation, with a simple taste of the ingredients. His is a well-defined palette, and one that works.

Drums Between the Bells was made available worldwide this week as a regular CD, a digital download, a double-vinyl album and the 2-CD version, which comes with a hardback book featuring artwork by Eno and designer Nick Robinson."

Inspiration for the album's artwork also played a role in Eno's music making. "Recently," Eno explained, "I was in Sao Paulo, the most city-ish city in the Western world. I took lots of pictures of the forest, and then, back in London, started playing with the images in photoshop. As I was playing I was listening to this album ( – in shuffle mode, highly recommended ) and I realised I was crafting the images and the colours to match up with what I was hearing. So that’s how the cover images came about…”

Calore says that "The spoken bits aren’t for everyone. They take an excellent, moody ambient album and add a different textural spin, either elevating it or sinking it depending on your tastes. (Just in case the vocals don’t suit you, the second disc of a special 2-CD version of Drums Between the Bells will contain instrumental mixes of all the tracks.)"

For me, "Drums Between the Bells" is a worthy successor to "Small Craft on a Milk Sea", "77 Million Paintings" and "Another Day on Planet Earth", making it once again, a joy to experience Eno's brilliant talent for creating sound-scapes with music, electronics, photographs and words.