Gather with festival artists, talk about the future. It’s a zoom for real. It’s friends in a room talking about hope. It’s sad because we’re apart. But, it’ll be great to do something together.

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You are in the middle of the desert. There is a campfire in front of you. You can stay here for days or leave anytime. One evening, a familiar object is passed to you. You ask a question about your place in time. Your question will be answered and its effect will manifest before you.

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richard valitutto performs an all-day virtual house concert, a livestream lasting from LA’s sunrise to sunset. He marks the passing hours in pianistic solitude — playing music of long durations and gentle contemplation, full of silences, simplicity, and quietude. Featuring works by Ann Southam (Simple Lines of Enquiry), Federico Mompou (Música callada), Valentin Silvestrov (Silent Songs), Alvin Curran (Inner Cities), and many others.

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Titled after a line in Bruce Springsteen's seminal 1980 double-album, The River, Two hearts are better than one is a work for two windchimes spread throughout the city of Los Angeles. Each set of windchimes will be lent to festival goers for weeklong listening sessions. The work will run throughout the four-week festival, departing Kallmyer's workshop January 18 and circling one another in conversation across the city. The chimes will not meet again until the end of the festival when they are returned to the artist.

If you are interested in hosting the piece in your home, please write us here. Share where you live in LA, and list all of the sounds you hear in your outdoor spaces. To do so, please go outside, find a place to sit down, sit down, and listen. Then send us a list of the sounds you hear — maybe a list of the sounds you didn't hear. Snap a pic of where you'd hang the chimes and we’ll select 8 listeners to welcome the piece into their bubble during the festival.

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There You Are is a series of micro-performances that take place over the phone. The performances were developed so each chosen participant can feel comfortable and intimately connected to a sound experience that was curated for that single individual as the "audience" at that moment.

Andrews, a vocalist and composer, has created a new work which will be emailed to each participant to be played in an available speaker or sound system in their home while Andrews then calls them to sing and speak to them. The piece begins with a text message from the artist as an affirmation and invitation for each participant to set an intention for the performance catered to them individually. In this time where most of our available forms of intimacy happen through screens, Andrews was confronted with an opportunity to find other methods of deliberate connection through performance. How do we find limitless compassion within so much restraint and fear? How can we explore new pathways of vulnerability in performance? What are you prepared to release to find new openings?

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A moonbeam is just a filtered sunbeam is the world premiere of a new piece by composer Andrew McIntosh. In his words:

After twenty or so years, I’ve finally found a creative outlet in A moonbeam is just a filtered sunbeam for the younger me who improvised for hours at a time on a detuned violin. At the time I didn't share that music with anyone, since it felt vaguely forbidden and like a cherished secret place. Moonbeam was created in 2020 out of improvisations on violin, viola, and piano that have been layered, edited, and electronically processed, with field recordings of the wind passing through Bristlecone pines, and a few sounds mixed in from my sample libraries of bowed cymbals, bowed wine glasses, and stones on slate.

These six “performances” of this forthcoming record will take place as previews of the near-final version of the album that are only available at sunrise and sunset over three days.

Improvising still feels unknowable and somewhat private to me, but here is what I can say about moonbeam. It is curious. It is defiant. It is not in a hurry. It does not apologize for itself. It doesn’t care that 58-minute pieces are impractical for the age of social media and internet clips. It is a celebration of noise. It is a celebration of wind. It is a celebration of spontaneous harmony. It is a celebration of stillness. It is a celebration of that which is wild and natural, and it is untamed. It is a rejection of the false dichotomy in music of perfection vs. imperfection.

I am not sure what genre or style of music this is, but I know that it is heavily influenced by the last eight years of performing and recording with Wadada Leo Smith in the Red Koral Quartet, and it shares some common ground with the work of violinist Tony Conrad.

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In 2020, we created a proof-of-concept film to examine how our developing work Rest, an in-person music-theatre performance, might have an expression in a digital medium, i.e. as a screen-based or headphone-based experience for participants at home.

This proof-of-concept was created collaboratively with concept and direction by Annie Saunders, composition by Emma O'Halloran, visual concept creation, direction of photography and editing by Andrew Schneider, music direction by Christopher Rountree, dramaturgy by Adah Parris, Rita Williams, and Rachel Joy Victor, and creative consultation from Jackie Zhou, Mike Merchant, James Okumura and Brian Hashimoto, as well as over twenty thinkers and experts who were interviewed about sensory experience and the nature of consciousness. The music is played by members of Wild Up: Jiji, Jodie Landau, Allen Fogle, and Archie Carey, with mixing by Lewis Pesacov.

The work was inspired by research on the concept of rest, which revealed the profundity and magic of what we notice when we are able to pause: the play of light behind our eyelids, a patch of daylight moving across a wall, or colored lights of the city reflected in window panes. As a part of our dramaturgical research about what rest means in the modern world, we also conducted a series of interviews. Many conversations veered into discussions of managing relationships with screen technologies. We wondered if there was a way to make a meaningful experience informed by our research, perhaps interactive, perhaps not, perhaps including visuals, perhaps not, for audience members at home, on a device, either with a screen or audio-only.

The result is an audio-led experience with intermittent visuals. These visuals are light sculptures: made solely of real light and real shadow in a real room, without any computer-generated imagery, and filmed in real time. We may develop this work into an interactive film for two participants at a time on separate devices, or a solo experience for one audience member at home. In a different time, this might be called a work-in-progress showing or an open studio; an opportunity to share material with the public as we continue to explore the work and how it wants to be in the world. We hope that this experience might give you a glimpse of where our process is now.

It's the only piece on the festival that is open to members of the public for free. Take a look!

Watch the Rest Concept Film Now

Artists

Annie Saunders
Christopher Rountree
Emma O'Halloran
Andrew Schneider
Adah Parris
Rita Williams
Rachel Joy Victor
Jackie Zhou
Mike Merchant
James Okumura
Brian Hashimoto
Lewis Pesacov
Jodie Landau
Allen Fogle
Archie Carey
Jiji

Thanks

Rest by Annie Saunders and Wild Up was commissioned by EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY with support from the Jaffe Fund.

A private 5 minute solo vocal performance for a household, at a safe distance outside their home.

Sound is touch. Even with the reality of no bodily contact these days, we have been touching each other endlessly with our voices, and probably listening more deeply than ever. Connection is a matter of perception, we all now know that too well. These 5 minutes will remind us that there is a physical body at the other end of human communication, a body that is experiencing this moment in history with you, that feels you, that hears you, that sees you.

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A 40 minute interactive sound experience led by an audio track through different stations on a vast slice of land in Joshua Tree. Listeners will be guided to tune into the silence of the desert landscape, engage with installations on the site, and sink into deep audio, composed for the location. Creating an experience that combines introspective meditation, a journey through the Mojave, and a safe distanced outdoor art experience in a time when our favorite institutions are unavailable.

Andrew Tholl: Selected readings on listening, work, dreams, noise, time travel, self-care, and the American way

Intended as both inspiration and distraction for those making the journey from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree for Archie Carey's Desert Sound Visit, this collection of 13 recordings features written pieces by artists such as Ian F. Svenonious, Milton Babbitt, Lester Bangs, Pauline Oliveros, Andy Warhol, and John Cage, read out loud and soundtracked by new works and performances from Tholl. These recordings can be enjoyed in a variety of ways: by car, bike, or foot; while cooking, cleaning, or sleeping; with intense focus, as background noise, or to simply keep you company in these times of solitude. There is no wrong way; the choice is yours.

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A big part of what we miss about concerts revolves around having to go out into the world, to a special place, and find art in that place. For these Quick Response (QR) Shows, the audience is invited to find music out in nature. Alone, and maybe near some other people listening to the same music. Like a treasure hunt, these artists have picked spots for their music to appear, spots they envision the audience taking in the work while sitting in or moving around nature.

Eliza Bagg / Lisel: “Heat Signature”

In a quest for structure and routine during the endless quarantine — really a way to delineate the days, understand that time is passing — I have clung to two things especially: walking, and producing music in my home studio. Walking for several hours a day around my neighborhood to feel I'm connected to the world. Producing music to make something out of nothing, an antidote to the gentle, searing, numb waiting that seems to fill our days. Much of my music-making during this time has been without agenda or specific purpose. As the year progressed, I did notice some distinct ideas start to arise over and over again, and out of these persistent themes I have constructed a piece for Darkness Sounding: Heat Signature. It is to be consumed while walking, out in the world but alone, connected but solitary.

Every body has a heat signature. I liked that idea, I liked the idea that we can be detected, and how that plays into the traces we leave behind us, the marks we make, the impact we have on the earth. Something that keeps coming up for me as I make music during this time is the sensation that we’re falling in an uncanny and gentle way into a catastrophic world. We wake up every day and accept more and more things that once seemed absurd, and then we order takeout and try to maintain a coherent schedule. It is uncanny. We're simultaneously dealing with a sense of monotony and tedium alongside the sobering light of hovering doom, and the anxiety of our own culpability. I keep feeling as if we live in a time of combined despair and ecstasy, we want to run away and forget the reality of the crumbling world, and we want to revel in our own excesses. I find myself wanting to make music that is even more beautiful, lush, wondrous even as it becomes more distraught — an anxious euphoria.

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