Flooded at Intersection for the Arts

Powerful sonic performances by Daniel Blomquist, Voicehandler, and Chuck Johnson with a string ensemble

Flooded showcases the overpowering nature of water and our natural environment out-of-our-control and by our own design. San Francisco artist Daniel Blomquist investigates floods and flood victims in connection to our sonic memories with a special performance using sounds, memories and music from flooded audio and videotapes exposed to water. These partially lost recordings are composed to let water find a new nostalgia within the sound.  Voicehandler takes us on a virtual sonic tour of the Sutro Baths, which once physically and spiritually sustained the people of San Francisco. Located at Land’s End, where the continent literally ends and gives way to the Pacific, the baths represent an attempt to harness and tame the ocean. The process is currently reversing itself — water washing away the work of mankind, as in the universal flood myth. Using found and original images and sounds, Voicehandler will evoke the history of the baths and reflect on their lingering ruins. Musician and composer Chuck Johnson creates a meditative performance with a string ensemble featuring Chuck on pedal steel guitar, Marielle Jakobsons and Christina Stanley on violin, Jason Hoopes on electric bass and Ben Bracken on electronics and analog instruments. He explores our attempts to mediate and harness water by constructing large dams on rivers, and the significant ecological and social implications, such as flooding, destruction of watersheds, species extinction, and displaced populations.

 

Daniel Blomquist grew up in the mountains of Northern California lives and works in San Francisco. He received his MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. As an interdisciplinary artist Daniel’s work has moved and shifted forms, tending to work through ideas and experience rather than one particular medium. He has been touring and recording with the experimental sound trio 15 Degrees Below Zero since 2001. Daniel is currently working with tape manipulation: eroding away the production of music, field recordings and distant whispers and rendering them into a landscape of analog dust. The listener is taken into this sonic tableau and thoughtfully guided through its textures.

Chuck Johnson is an Oakland-based composer and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on American Primitive fingerstyle guitar, experimental electronics, and minimalist composition. Recordings of his work have been published by Strange Attractors Audio House, Communion, Amish, Merge, Umbrella, Phaserprone,Squealer and Three Lobed. Johnson has performed with Eugene Chadbourne, Frank Gratkowsi, Peter Kowald, Miya Masaoka, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. He has performed at the Hopscotch Music Festival (Raleigh, NC), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Siren Fest (New York), BENT (New York), the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento), Music for People and Thingamajigs (San Francisco), and the San Francisco International Film Festival. Johnson’s credits as a film composer include scores for several feature-length films, including as Brett Ingram’s award-winning Monster Road and Cynthia Hill’s Guestworker. In 2009 he received an MFA in Electronic Music and Intermedia Art from Mills College. Johnson views his current work – both electronic and acoustic – as folk minimalism.

Voicehandler, the duo of Jacob Felix Heule and Danishta Rivero, is an electroacoustic ensemble combining improvisation with original compositions. They perform with voice, percussion, electronics, and the Hydrophonium (an electroacoustic percussion instrument created by Rivero).

Their most recent work, song cycle, comprises different nontraditional approaches to the song form. It explores ideas of our origins and what it means to be human, as presented in mythology and literature. Each song is based on an individual text including the Yekuana creation story, and works by Borges, Burroughs, and Hamsun. The music is written as open scores, leaving much room for Heule and Rivero to draw on their extensive experience as improvisers.

Voicehandler has performed at Soundwave (5) Humanities in San Francisco, and the Roost Creative Soundscape Festival in Albuquerque, in addition to tours in the US and Europe.