October 17 & 18: Dan Siegler's Concrète Jungle
A conversation between New York past and New York present, about New York’s future
"The recorded music, by Dan Siegler...used varied sounds—rushing water, staticky buzzes—to complement the piano, strings, and brass, and was frequently haunting." - Andrew Boynton, The New Yorker
On October 17 & 18, Bessie-award winning composer of experimental music, Dan Siegler and guest artists perform the world premiere of Concrète Jungle at The Invisible Dog (51 Bergen St.) in Brooklyn. Admission is free ($15 suggested donation) and reservations are available at this link.
Siegler's new electro-acoustic work features hundreds of intricately edited New York voices and highlights borough-specific accents, linguistic filler and word repetitions to form assembled sentences and musical grooves. Layered under the dialogue, Siegler transforms harsh urban street noise by filtering it through digital delay, reverb and echo effects, rendering it meditative and ambient.
The world premiere performance features guest instrumentalists, vocalists and dancers including Pam Tanowitz (dance), Netta Yerushalmy (dance), Christina Campanella (voice), Pauline Kim Harris (violin), Tomoko Omura (violin), and Greg Chudzik (double bass). The collaborative artists perform, individually, improvised solos that compliment and contrast with the ambient noise created by Siegler.
Concrète Jungle is inspired by and takes its title from musique concrète, an electronic genre pioneered in the 1940’s in which readymade sounds are employed in place of instrumentation.
Dan Siegler began recording the source material, clips of conversations and other utterances by New Yorkers, in 2013, shortly after his father was diagnosed with dementia. “I didn't realize it at the time,” said Siegler, “but by creating this piece, I was attempting to make order out of the chaos of my dialogues with him, which contained some of the most comical and emotional exchanges we'd ever had." After Siegler's father died, Dan discovered some of his black and white street photographs, including images of a Times Square flea circus, Chinatown parades, and East Village tenements. Projections of this artwork are incorporated into the performance.
“The New York City I remember is long gone,” says Siegler. “But when I'm live-mixing these dialogues and sounds, I'm establishing some measure of control, if only for one night, and placing sounds, voices, attitudes, expressions that may be considered antique, into a contemporary context.”
CALENDAR LISTING
October 17 and 18, 2019 at 7:30 pm
Concrète Jungle
by Dan Siegler
with guest performers Pam Tanowitz, dance, Christina Campanella, voice, Pauline Kim Harris, violin Tomoko Omura, violin, Greg Chudzik, bass and more
51 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY
Free admission
($15 suggested donation) RSVP at this link
Dan Siegler is a Bessie Award-winning composer and sound artist. His music has been described as "luxuriously mercurial" by Artforum, and “eerie, churchly and jazzy…” by The Village Voice. Strongly influenced by musique concrète, his work incorporates references to jazz, blues and folk via a mix of analog synthesizers, orchestration for strings, horns and woodwinds, glitch sound material and field recordings.
Siegler has worked extensively with choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Their collaborations have been performed at venues including Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center Out of Doors and The Joyce Theater. He has composed music for choreographer Yanira Castro and the violin duo, String Noise, among others. DanSieglerMusic.com