birds and walkers

Free improvised Music — Germany

2008-10-17T01:03:00.004+03:00

Without a clear and obvious reason, free-improvised music is the less supported music manifestation in Germany. To survive professionally, free improvisers have to find totally different ways to make music (or to opt for another way of living). This fact negatively affects the development of free improvised music, which has been demonstrating being one of the most fresh and innovative music tendencies, either in the sonic direction, the creation of new instruments and the new ways music can be created in general.

Whatever form of improvisational resource may now be conceived as a feasible creation tool even for the most reluctant contemporary composer. By the way... composers, as omniscient-historical personalities are disappearing... contemporary music is over, philosophically speaking, The end of hegemonic conservative ruling aesthetics, the development and urban democratization of technology and the urban global communication have a clear impact in today’s music.

Still, German music-supporting public institutions, agencies, foundations and sponsors systemically insist in supporting certain, specific musical "trends" because these trends pertain to marketing systems usually related with esthetical judgments and quantitative, commercial, demographic and consumer statistics.

The music-performance-contest is the most accentuated institutional tool of musical judgment: Winning contests is an important goal for music performers when they want to strength and consolidate their careers. It is a powerful, hegemonic system of musical judgment related also with plain marketing, stressed academic interests and homo cultural institutions and politicians.

Departing from this fact, we want (The Tilt) to establish a different, ironic, feasible and open way to confront free improvisers within a contest and send a message to the audience, the musicians and the institutions: If it will be judged, new music requires new judgment criteria...

— With a dynamic participation of audience through open, real-time-based selection tools.

— Through the use of a random selection process of individual musicians. By conform an ensemble right before a concert, at stage, they have resolve their improvisations skills instantly, with unknown musicians.

— Through the selection of well know music personalities who will informally interact with the audience after each session to asssit them to conclude what is “good” and “bad” in improvised music, and why.

We want to take advantage of this encounter to promote the free improvisation scene in Berlin (the Capital of free improvisation in the world) and to create an atmosphere of encounter and communication within musicians and audience. We want also to provide the audience with new cognoscitive and spiritual tools and music spectra to be better acquainted to the newest musical expressions in Berlin.

Free improvised music is the most "anti-contest" music manifestations, for several reasons:

— "Music quality" is hardly definable and exceptionally desired as a ruling concept. New-cynical and anti hegemonic musicians don't like to be labeled within a relative "quality" qualification.
— Musical precision in terms of voice synchronicity and tuning is generally avoided. Any aesthetic approach related to academic or "classical" criteria is not welcome or not interesting to much of the free improvisers.
— “Composition quality” is a strange term for free improvisers, since free improvised music is not derived from rational, constructive linear processes, but moods and very subtle ways of sonic and mystical communication.
— Charisma and stage-presence is the last goal free improvisers are looking for (with some exceptions!).

The contest will be organized in the following stages: (if we get the money to do it!)

— Call for entries via electronic media through our network.

— Pre-selection stage using a pool of on-line-available sound files to be mixed to a solo performance recording, to be sent to the organizers

— An onstage-real-time-open-random-selection of participants to compose a spontaneous ensemble of maximum 2 musicians.
— After this random selection, an immediate 15 minutes concert. No musicians meetings and brainstorming will be allowed before the concert. The musicians have to resolve their performances in real time.

— After each session, the expert’s pool will comment and discuss the performance with the audience (meanwhile, the technicians set up the next session).

— Before the next session, audience will vote for the past ensemble via an electronic device.

— Votes will be averaged per audience proportion, not by quantity of persons.

— An animator actor/actress will comment and moderate the discussion between experts and audience, if any.

— Musicians will have the right to play two times that only day, with a new randomly selected musician or musicians, at different schedule.

— At the end of the day a winner will be announced and the prize will be paid in cash in that moment.

— The festival consists of two days. There will be two winners, 1000 Euro prize each duo, 500 each musician.

— A CD with the winner may be released. All the sessions will be audio and video recorded.

This contest will be realized within the context of the Festival Interaktion 2, in Berlin. Haus der Sinne.

Interview in two parts, In Spanish

2008-07-26T18:07:00.001+03:00

PARTE 1
— La dura vida de un compositor independiente (!)
— Instrumentos nuevos y computadoras
— Ciencia y música
— Nuevas maneras de ver la naturaleza
— Las herramientas de creación como animales

PART 2

— Trabajo con árboles
— Ecolgía sin naturaleza: instalaciones sonoras con árboles
— Arte en espacios públicos

Sexual energy and... empty pockets!

2008-07-26T16:14:00.004+03:00

If you read my posts on Sexual energy and music, you will like this: Yesterday, 4AM, I came back from a friend's party. Yes... a bit drunk, so to speak. I was with another friend who took her train back home and leave me alone at the station. Suddenly a bunch of guys, much likely Romania's Roma, ask me to take a photo with them. I said "OK" and they came to me and started to jump and jump saying "cheeesss!". Suddenly the taller guy started some kind of fucking mimics in one of my legs, meanwhile the guy with the camera came to me to show me the photos. Between my high levels of alcohol and this astonishing surprise I could not react. Most likely for good. Then, they said "thanks" and vanished. This happened in less that 15 seconds, no kidding. In the next 8 seconds I realized that my wallet wasn't in my pocket anymore, my mobil had a new owner and my backpack was open. This was a beautiful, PhD-level lesson about sexual energy!

Saint Obama in Berlin

2008-07-25T16:35:00.003+03:00

I watched "Obama 2.0" in youtube last night. This was one of the most demagogic, opportunistic and empty discourses I have never heard. I wonder why so much people came to see this. I feel sad for the Americans in Berlin, but its understandable: WHATEVER shit will come is better than Bush (actually for all of us). But for the Germans... 200,000 people came to this shit, amazing! I know that the relationship Germany-USA is historically different than the relation Mexico-USA, for instance, OK, but Germans sometimes are Soooo naive!!!! What the fuck is doing Obama in Europe? He is using Europe to get votes in USA, nothing will change! Since many years politicians do not have the power any more. If Obama is intending to DO something, I dont think he will stay alive much time. But no... is not the case: his words were words of war and confrontation. His discourse about 911, terrorism, mass fear and global warming sounds exactly the same as Bush's. Please Obama, stay in your country and finish washing the poor brains of the American people. We don't need you in Berlin. We have enough with Merkel.

SNC Fellowship 2008-2011

2008-07-25T16:30:00.002+03:00

Well, it looks it happend... I got it! The only worry about it is that I HAVE to compose. But at the same time I will be more relaxed in terms of money and related stresses.

People and pianos

2008-07-19T03:43:00.007+03:00

Running portrait project involving people and pianos. Mainly my piano tuning clients. Further photos coming soon, I hope.

Birds and walkers

2008-07-19T02:42:00.010+03:00

Waether is shit these days in Berlin: rainy and a bit cold. But the people walk and ride bikes as usual, no problem. Berlin is now full of young, baby-birds learning how to still food from the people in the street restaurants and asking their mothers to feed them as if they were in their nest. They are so fat and arrogant! We have also millions of pigeons in Berlin. You see them everywhere, flying over your head, asking for food, fighting and flirting. The males dance around the females making a kind of bird poetry, trying to convince the females that hey are the best option ever. (The females always fly away, bored with the same dances and sang poems). Sometimes you find ran-over pigeons in the middle of the street, converted into a kind of hard pasta, fully integrated to the pavement. Baby storks are making also their first attempts to fly over the houses around Berlin like lost, white satellites with three antennas. We have also parrots, different kind of ducks with collars and other strange and beautiful birds swimming in the water-channels all over the city.

With a bit Sun, people go to read and chill-out in the parks and gardens. They also eat and dance and try to make poetry with their own individualistic existence. Males do not dance around females, nor the opposite. This is why females never fly away but still are bored. From time to time you hear ambulances running and screaming like pregnant hyenas. Sometimes they collect people from the streets, converted into a hard pasta, fully integrated to the pavement. Nice city! I took these photos two blocks away from my house after a gentle rain.

Birds and walkers video (+18)

2008-07-19T02:27:00.001+03:00

Video prersented as a part of the piece "mextoys" for percussion, video, Mexican toys and dance. Premiered in Hamburg, Germany, November 2004. Contains moderate-explicit sexual images. This video inspired the name of this blog.

Sexual energy and music 2

2008-07-16T14:32:00.004+03:00

Western contemporary music is the ONLY music expression in this world that avoids any kind of direct interaction with its audience. And if it does, is a kind of intellectual (may be poetic if you want), rational one. This is one of the main reasons why contemporary music has so few fans.
Is NOT about music, is not about aesthetics, acoustics or philosophy. Is not because "they don't understand". Its because:
— The huge arrogance of composers and performers. ("You didn't get it? ah! You are idiots, we are geniuses". Just applaud and thats it...)
— Performers and composers are so score oriented. A score acts as a barrier between audience and musicians. A score is the MAIN REASON, THE RULE, THE CODE, THE LAW.
— Lack of body expression. ("the important is what you ear, not what you see. Everything is in the tips of our fingers, we are not people like you, audience, we are gods, you shut up and listen"
— Lack of real-time performer's reaction-capacity on the actual audience's mood during a performance. No shared sensitivity between audience and performer. The score and the fixed- programe idea is guilty for this, among other factors.

Good morning!

Sexual energy and music 1

2008-07-15T11:20:00.011+03:00

Lets stop discussing about what kind of energy could be the best to COOL this planet. This is not our problem, we are not scientists (still we can spend some energy, I know). Lets better talk about what kind of energy could HEAT our art. When I talk about sexual energy and art I don't mean that people have to make love before (or after, or both) whatever piece of art he/she is doing, Gauguin or Bukowsky style (still, is a nice possibility!). I think its just a matter of a connection and acceptance of this energy when we make music. Specially when I work with a woman in a project, this energy flows more easily and natural. And as far as I don't repress it (indeed I express it) I have had some problems, sometimes. We are in general so sexually repressed! Sex is a taboo not just in our social life but also in our personal, private, artistic one. Just think in the most direct and impressive artists in history and make this connection: how they handle their sexual energy through their art? You will get the idea. I will further develop this post later.

La grande abbufata (+18)

2008-07-14T13:11:00.008+03:00

Some scenes from Marco Ferreri's Das Große Fressen, La Grande Bouffe, La gran comilona, La grande abbuffata. I was specially impressed with the personality of "Marcelo" (played by Mastroiani) and his relationship with sex, objects and machines. Dialectics of symbols are present in this film.

Video 1 : The first appearance of Marcelo as pilot. Before he leaves, he takes a last look inside the airplane. Once out, he looks again inside... but he is not looking for somebody, he is saying "see you later" to the machine.

Video 2: Marcelo touches the car in a sensual way.

Video 3: It was perhaps his penis —the tube in Video 2. Here is clearer. He does not give a shit about the girl. The Bugatti is much more important. He manifest his masculinity through the car. The fact that it is a Bugatti and no other car is not a coincidence.

Video 4: He fucks with the car, or with the help of the car as an extension of himself. The woman's blue socks and shoes are not a coincidence, but an extension of "Mrs. Bugatti", who is actually a part of himself in the Video 3.

Video 5: Totally frustrated, he does not follow the sensual, over-saturated, decadent, over-macho sex-and-food experience in the film. He can not express himself as a man without a "psycho-container". He is totally fucked and he knows it. He tries to fix the car to fix himself.

Video 6: Freudian Marco Ferreri takes the bird as a symbol of masculinity. The animal dies, the machine wakes up. In the second scene nothing is a coincidence, Ferreri overlaps the bird in the hand with the image of the car painted on the door. Marcelo becomes a happy kid, rejuvenated, in ecstasy. The sculpture on the right side of the door is also relevant: the complete set of symbols are together.

Video 7: The car, Marcelo and the woman are secondary elements in this take. Marcelo symbolically fucks with the woman throughout the back-and -forward repeated movements. The small way is a vagina, the car is the penis, the whole scene is a symbolic coitus. Marcelo is almost in shock when the car does not start up at the beginning.

Video 8: Marcelo can not have a direct sensual relationship with a woman. He connects the sensuality of objects with the sensuality of a woman. Sensuality express through him as a living, autonomous element.

Video 9: The apotheosis. Marcelo simply can't do it. Everything falls dawn.

Video 10: Marcelo dies with the machine.

Ideas for a poster needed

2008-07-13T15:10:00.008+03:00

Last week, talking with Elena Mendoza, she told me something funny it happens in the University of the Arts, where I was supposed to teach in the Summer semester. As far as I had just one student I asked the school to post some signs announcing my workshop. The answer was "No, we don't do these things. You must make your own posters and paste them around the school". I was a bit astonished... anyway, I made my posters (20) with the photo at the left (from my piece "The Body of Ligia") stating " SEMINAR — Multi-discipline and music making today..." plus some schedules and contents information. My intention was just to attract some students to my workshop. The posters were took away in less than 3 hours by the UDK. And this people asked Daniel Ott something like "What the hell is happening at the experimental music section of this school?" I could not believe it, and still: My posters were censored by an ART school in BERLIN!!! I am not proud of it, my intention was not to provoke but to promote . Next semester I will teach again in the UDK: "Improvisation and composition as complementary strategies". I am thinking on an Idea for my next poster. For example the photo below. Any suggestions?

Identity and trauma

2008-07-11T13:14:00.008+03:00

The Symposium about identity in Latin American music is over. It was a very interesting experience and triggered in me some thoughts about my identity I have never had, specially these last years living in Germany. I presented a paper called "Composition and colonialism today?" which was in general well received and will be published in Mexico (Pauta, Music Magazine) and in Germany (still not defined). My paper was about the differences between a "Mexican" and a "German" composers, whatever that means. My statement had two directions: differences related with a "sonic home" and differences related with the colonialism as a mass trauma. An extra issue was related with a sense of "literal symbol". Still I have further work on this last one . About the "sonic home" I wrote about two different kinds: sonic landscapes and academic and personal curiosity. About the colonialism as mass trauma I wrote about different aspects in connection with music, culture, politics and identity. Later on I will post the paper in my homepage.

Dance and music — MOLE project

2008-07-11T01:32:00.006+03:00

Today I stepped out from the MOLE project with Natascha Falter. We both wanted to found a dance company in which dancer and musician played the same roll and work in a truly cooperative way, joining both dance and music compositions into a single entity. It was a beautiful and full experience. I got, nevertheless, much emotionally and sexually involved and could not manage it. The issue is the separation of privacy and profession (a tabu within the artistic world) that I actually have enjoyed in past experiences. This was not the case and wasn't dual. Still I deeply believe in it. It is a pity, a disgrace, a shadow. We reached so beautiful communication and creation levels. I feel totally frustrated and sad.

Wind, trees and music

2008-07-11T01:19:00.001+03:00

Seated at the top of a hill I realized that the entire humankind share a single wind, a wind that travels worldwide, without borders... a ground element that we all need to live in this planet... a global breathing that touches our skin and lungs every second of our lives. Then I felt that this sophisticated, rich and beautiful global wind, this embedded living organism could feasibly teach me something… me composer… as a non-human source of inspiration. The wind affecting trees was actually the best and simpler example of this lively interaction because it triggers a contemplation disposition I have never had with any other art expression. Over these past seven years I have been dedicated to learn about it. Now I know that the Mother Nature manages time and perception in a far different way human's artistic inspiration and rational thinking do. Even if I learned that a tree has its own particular way to relate and react upon the wind, the most important for me was the mutual convergence of trees, the bouncing forest of this world. This is why now I project myself into a tree, among other trees, and I extrapolate the wind as our creative energy.