Field Trip

Media Arts Manila
Field Trip
"Field recordings and soundscapes of corporeal and imagined environments"
Green Papaya
February 25, 2009

Photos: Eddie Boy Escudero















Blums Borres















The space






















Dark side of autoceremony






















Crowding the space






















Lighting the Green






















Tad's right side






















Korg's DS 10






















soundscraping






















A tad of light






















sound tripping

Media Arts Manila
in cooperation with Green Papaya Art Projects presents

FIELD TRIP
field recordings and soundscapes of corporeal and imagined environments

February 25 (Wed) 9 p.m.
Green Papaya Art Projects
41 T.Gener St cor Kamuning Road (near Brahma Kumaris)
FREE ADMISSION

http://mediaartsmanila.blogspot.com/
http://www.greenpapayaartprojects.org/

The M.A.M. tour bus stops over at the Green Papaya Art Projects and ushers us through an acoustic safari of feral atmospheric fauna. Featured artists present their original phonography, creating immersive environments through the manipulation and playback of captured ambient sounds. autoceremony, Blend:er, Christian Conception, Mark Laccay, Mannet Villariba serves us their own brand of improvised acoustic ecology. Improvised video by Edsel Abesames and Tad Ermitaño. This show is supported by Globe.

Edsel Abesames

is a video editor / motion graphics person / director / racketeer / guitarist / poser / anime fan /overweight 32 year old / discontent drunkard.

autoceremony a.k.a. Jing Garcia

sound artist and award winning music producer. He established the Children of Cathode Ray backed in 1989, one of the early experimental and sound art groups in the country. Produced several music albums for different alternative music artists in the 90s. He is currently the tech editor for The Manila Times and Speed Magazine. He also hosts a tech segment on the late evening news on TV5

BLEND:ER a.k.a. Cris Garcimo

is an electronic music creator and a noise enthusiast who lives in Cavite, Philippines. He started experimenting with audio acrobatics and technoid sonic landscapes in 1999. Being included in various album anthologies like Mood Swing Theater Volume 1 (2004) released by Kittenwhip Compilation and S.A.B.A.W. Anthology of Noise, Electronic, and Experimental Music (2004), Blend:er has often collaborated with E.X.I.S.T., SABAW and Electronica Manila artists.

Tad Ermitaño

is a media artist, writer and filmmaker. As far as the media art goes, he is interested in algorithmic/procedural editing and composition, new uses for the moving image and have been lately drifting into elementary robotics. His work "Quartet" was exhibited in the recently concluded International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Singapore.

Grnd Ctrl a.k.a Christian Martelino Concepcion

a manila based art director, experimental musician, DJ and event organizer. His breed of work roots from his propensity in the field of music and design. It is his passion for avant-garde films, art, fashion, experimental music and bizarre imagery that led him to create audible pieces as well as to do graphic design work. It wasn't until implementing his studies of traditional fine arts and his enthusiasm with avant-garde music that began his realization of his ideas, philosophies and visions by combining dissected sound textures with rhythm, to create soundscapes that pierce images inside our minds. His currently an active band member for the ambient/experimental/industrial band "The Slave Drum", busy with his own electro industrial act "Decay Transit" and does solo performances as "Grnd Ctrl". Uses both traditional and non-traditional sound sources with using samplers, synthesizers, transducers, effects and anything he can get his hands on. Has participated in several events from various production outfits and his group called "Circa1849".

Mark Laccay

is an award winning Audio Engineer who is the CEO of Sonic Logo Multimedia Inc. and a managing partner of Sweetspot Studios. He has worked as a Sound Designer for various films and is the main audio consultant for the "Dr. Jose Maceda Collection Digitization" Project. As an educator he taught audio classes at DLSU-CSB. He recently returned from the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he acquired a certificate of Audio Tape Restoration and Digital Audio Archiving.

Mannet Villariba

is a performance artist, painter, sound artist, visual programmer and designer. He has been active in diverse fields of art and design - including research and development. Yielding the outputs of sounds, images, and light through analyzing and transforming the numerical values gained from various sensors and input devices, he is a visual artist pursuing sensual peculiarity and interaction.

EXPERIMENTAL AUDIO RESEARCH

I've been a great follower of E.A.R. (along with Spacemen 3 and Spectrum) since i accidentally found a CD copy of 'Beyond the Pale' at CD Warehouse in Greenhills back in the 90s. Since then, it has very much influenced the sound i create for (lately) autoceremony and (my previous incarnation) the dominguez-shimata colony.

So, as a simple tribute to this enigmatic and obscure soundart project group, I'm posting their band message taken from the Sonic Boom website (http://www.sonic-boom.info/ear.php), which also very much sums up what autoceremony do (as posted on this page's title head).

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Experimental Audio Research was formed in 1990 by Sonic Boom as a solo and collaborative ensemble in order to pursue the more experimental work he had contributed to Spacemen 3 since the 1980s.

The project revolves around two separate yet overlapping areas - studio recording and live performance, both environments being treated as complimentary but different sides of the same coin.

EAR's main ethos, embodied in their acronymous name, is one of necessary experimentation. They create a space where any sound or texture, technique or emotion is treated as a possible contribution to the piece(s) in hand. The same applies to the interaction of the performers improvisation and integration are left open, until what feels like the right moment, all the while keeping an eye on the whole, and avoiding a forum where concept overtakes content.

EAR's members and musical philosophies run the gamut from purely Electronically generated sounds -produced instantaneously- to beautifully crafted, acoustic techniques - the product of a lifetime's experience. This is a rare terrain where individual extremes merge in the collective sound - each member exploring the possibilities of the integration of opposites. By definition each of the group's performances are quite different -to replicate performances is of no interest. Surprise and variety are far more important - yet all within and around their intended framework and disciplines. In this way the group creates a special kind of sound-scape and mood space aiming forwards whilst heeding yesterdays experiments and advances. To ignore the work of Cage, Varese, Stockhausen or Cardew would be foolhardy. To dismiss the expeirments of LaBradford, Joe Meek, Eno or Kraftwerk would equally be a mistake. EAR exists in the furrow between the low brow and the high brow, between traditional and contemporary, independent of categorisations, where AMM can meet Spacemen 3, where classical music can meet My Bloody Valentine. Where Preconceptions and prejudice can be left outside and sounds can exist for their intrinsic values. Where sounds can show their true selves.

To assume that this approach must lack discipline is a common mistake. The discipline is mirrored by the freedom given the performers, keeping its aims pure and free from excess, aiming to be progressive, but not just for progressiveness' sake.

The Instruments used in their recordings and performances do not revolve around the chromatic scale, and no amount of divisions per octave is defined before hand - indeed many of the instruments from the Theremin and Modular synthesisers to the Insect and Human voice generators "lack" any fretted or keyed sequential controllers to even suggest a particular mode or scale. In this way, the most stimulating range of sounds is come by, because it is the most stimulating and not for any predetermined reasons. Likewise, the sounds selected come from various random or heuristic programming functions and improvisational playing techniques rather than from a preset bank of sounds - none of these instruments have a 'memory' or "preset" facility -giving unique sounds every time the instrument is used. In this way the performer becomes the selector from the near infinite possible range of textures.