Participants will meet at Indexical to engage with their surroundings through field recording, listening, and site specific exercises. We will first cover a brief history of field recording and its applications, then split up into smaller groups to explore and record acoustic ecologies near the Tannery. We will also play with sonic ideas and exercises facilitated outside in the “field”. A limited amount of audio recorders and specialized microphones will be provided for shared use, but bringing your own personal recording devices, including phones and handheld recorders, is recommended. 

No prior recording, musical experience, or equipment is required.

Participants will meet at Indexical to share and manipulate their previously recorded material, as well as demo any material they may have produced over the week. Using computers, DAWs, and open source softwares, we will work with different methods for manipulating field recordings to interpolate and access found sound as means for improvisation, composition, and sound design.

No prior recording, musical experience, or equipment is required.

**This event is designed as an immersive two session program related to phonography and music composition. Single session guests are invited to attend as well! Learn more about the first workshop on field recording and acoustic ecologies here.

Santa Cruz-based artists Yayah and Thomas Sage Pedersen premiere a new interdisciplinary work,  'Shapes & Sounds of Freedom,' featuring film, musical performance, and dance by choreographer and dancer Micha Scott. These performances will be the culmination of a month-long residency (August 2024) in Indexical’s space at the Tannery Arts Center.

Valerio Tricoli is a Palermo born and Munich resident composer and performer of electro-acoustic music.

His main instrument for live presentations is the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue / ergonomic device for live sampling and real-time transformation / editing / mixing of pre-recorded (field or studio recordings) and made-on-the-spot sound sources, the latter usually being vocalizations (including speech and singing), small acoustic and electronic instruments, objects, the amplified sound of the room itself in which the concert takes place and - in the case of group sets - whatever is produced by the fellow musicians.

On a formal level his concerts focus on the impromptu creation of a narrative which takes into account the multiple relations intervening between reality, virtuality and memory during the acoustic event: sounds are always hovering between the "here and now" of the concert situation and the shady domain of memory - distant but at the same time present like in a deja-vu experience. Privileging fracture over continuity and by the use of a dynamic range that could often jump suddenly from near-silence to extreme blasts of sounds, an almost tactile feeling of brooding tension is often attained.

His electro-acoustic studio compositions are aligned to the tradition of Musique Concrète and explore themes of the internal - represented both by the psychological and the physical - and of the occult, which together with the large use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within.

Olivia Block (1970) is a media artist and composer. Her discography, spanning many years, is published on Another Timbre, Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music, where at any given concert she might be playing electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects. Block also creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. 

Her latest release, The Mountains Pass, is on Black Truffle records.

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, and leads the contemporary hybrid percussion / gamelan group ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH. His music has been released on labels such as Black Truffle, Editions Mego, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, Gaffer Records, Hasana Editions, 23five, iDEAL and his own label Antboy Music.

Guthrie first made a name for himself within the Australian jazz scene, establishing himself at a young age as a major presence by winning the Wangaratta National Jazz Awards for drums in 1997 and going on to perform with many of Australia’s most celebrated jazz musicians such as Mark Simmonds, Julien Wilson and Ren Walters. In the new millennium, his work took a long detour away from the drum kit through junk electronics, extreme amplification and electro-acoustic techniques, documented on a series of solo and collaborative recordings from these years.

Alongside continuing his electro-acoustic work, in the last decade, Guthrie has returned to the drums with a vengeance, developing a series of solo works marked by a radical single-mindedness, from relentless rhythmic workouts to earth-quaking explorations of the bass frequencies of gongs and other metal percussion instruments. In the crowded world of free jazz/improv percussion, Guthrie’s work is distinguished from the delicately pointillist approach of much European improvisation by its rhythmic sophistication, unashamed virtuosity and undeniable physicality, touching on aspects of world musics from Javanese gamelan to South Indian Carnatic music.