soon to be heard projects include:

• Stabat Mom (What is it like to be a Bat?’s “new” piece)
• Robotica (performance work — me with GuitarBot and percussion bots)
• Panda Half-Life (my vocal sextet with electronics on the Tower of Babel..)
• documentation of Fall performances

upcoming concerts– with Shelley Hirsch (3/31), and live sound processing festival in April (?) and beyond..

see/hear me at Vital Vox Festival November 5th !!

featured artist talk at Expo ’74 at NYU Poly October 16th

— Foundation of Contemporary Arts has awarded me funding to travel to Poland in November to perform at the long-running Audio Art Festival!!

“Panda Half-Life” (commissioned for Magic Names vocal sextet) — live sound processing complex vocal sextet writing and gestural controllers (Wii and iPhones).    We recorded at NYU Dolan Studios, amazing room and microphones, and great singers!

Also an as-yet-unreleased What is it Like to be a Bat ? piece — “StaBAT mom” –  juxtaposes wild math-rock, noise, Morse code with dark and beautiful songs about mothering and the redemption found in the Pergolesi Stabat Mater.

.. coming soon .. video from my March performance of Robotica with Eric Singer’s LEMUR robots

This fall, I will be speaking at Cycling ’74 Expo in Brooklyn, as well as teaching Electronic Music Performance at NYU, and a few new courses at Bloomfield College.   In November, I will perform at Vital Vox (solo), the Gershwin Hotel and EMPAC (for Neil Rolnick’s piece MONO with some great singers from Magic Names vocal sextet, Robert Osborne, Daisy Press, Nick Hallett)

In 2010 she was an artist-in-residence, and worked on her solo pieces “Mahashefa” and “Robotica” for LEMUR robots and voice.

Also is an alum — (BM ’92 Vocal Jazz, Masters in Music Technology ’96), she was Chief Systems Engineer ’96-’98.

Fall 2011 semester she teaches Electronic Music Performance, and New Student Seminar (Fall semesters), and in the Spring semester she teaches Advanced Max/MSP and Jitter.   In the past she also has taught Digital Audio Processing (first year graduate course normally taught by the program director), and MIDI II: Intro to Max, as well as numerous workshops at the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Stimmung is a formidable 70-minute work for six singers, and a subtle sine-wave drone B-flat 9^th chord.  The score calls for nearly constant singing of quickly fluctuating phonemes in polyrhythmic overlapping patterns, creating a Western-influenced overtone singing style.  Aleatoric sections of the piece pit one singer against another’s rhythmic disruptions and pitch deviations, creating beat frequencies, and other sound events that are reminiscent of the composer’s work for tape and electronics.   The atmosphere is interrupted intermittently by lusty singsong texts, and by “magic names” of ancient gods and goddesses.  Poetic levity is incorporated into otherworldly intonation.

Working With Stockhausen’s Stimmung (1968) Filmed by Iki Nakagawa from daria fain on Vimeo.

We are an eclectic group of New York City performing artists. We come together as composers, classical singers, pop singers, dancers, sound-artists, and film-makers. We are all avid improvisers – united by a shared passion for contemporary repertoire, and new experimentation.

Stimmung was only the starting point for Magic Names.  In recent seasons we have incorporated original works written by members of the group. Including “Fassbinder Songs”, written by Gisburg for the Vital Vox Festival 2010, and “Panda Half-Life” by Dafna Naphtali,  commissioned by American Composers Forum Jerome Commissioning Program.

As well, we have  a strong collaborative relationship with choreographer Daria Fain, an acclaimed New York choreographer  who who invited the group to participate with her in her piece “Working with Stockhausen’s Stimmung” commissioned and presented by Danspace Project in New York City as part of PLATFORM 2010, with other performances in the past few years as Judson Church and 92^nd street Y.

www.myspace.com/magicnames

Both women sing with startling multi-octave ranges, Brazelton having honed her edge in rock bands since 1969, and in the 90′s with her large ensemble DadaDah (Village Voice: “Wild-woman vocalist . . . with a wailing intensity in all her genres” ) , Naphtali vocalizing in improv bands as well as classical recitals and new music ensembles.

Both women play electric guitar: Naphtali has toted hers from coast-to-coast, purveying jazz, folk, disco, whatever the gig required , while Brazelton makes unheard-of sounds on a bass guitar, with punk pick, Soviet-made fuzz box, never having played a bass before (though she’s written concertos for the instrument).

Both women compose hard-core computer music : Naphtali (consultant-teacher at Artist in Residence programs at Harvestworks and Engine 27 and former Chief Engineer of NYU’s Music Technology program) conducts live interactive radical ambience processing using her custom Max/MSP programs, while Brazelton ( D.M.A. Columbia University, 1994; now composer/professor, Bennington College) created digital sound tracks and samples from natural sound sources and field recordings using old time software re-synthesis at Columbia’s Computer Music lab or written-from-scratch, CSound code at home on her desktop, unwilling to settle for current off-the-rack plug-in sound.

All this is woven, spliced, patched, threaded, then drummed together by BAT’s third member: Danny Tunick, percussionist extra-ordinaire, whose credits span alterna-rock and contemporary classical realms.   He’s a recorded contributor to bands Barbez, Guv’ner, Camp and Mad Scene as well as the Princeton Composer’s Ensemble, Common Sense Composer’s Ensemble and the Bang on a Can Festival’s Spit Orchestra.

While Naphtali, Brazelton and Tunick alchemize in plain view, for their 2003 CD, sound artist Paul Geluso finalized this strange brew from the mixing board.

Brazelton and Naphtali are currently mixing their newest work StaBAT Mom, which documents their lives as women in a punk digital montage true to what they have done with the Bat? trio since 1997.   This latest chapter is about what it’s like to be a working mom, and incorporates that famous statement on the all-enduring mom — Pergolesi’s 1736 Stabat Mater — singing his gorgeous soprano-alto duet with the achingly poignant major-2nd suspensions,  which they put through a computer as an isorhythmic/morse code cantus firmus, so they could play some math-rock over it. Into that they peppered Naphtali’s outrageous song fragments about losing one’s sense of reality with two active young daughters, weave in Brazelton’s 1992 lullaby written when her daughter was 3 mos. old with colic. In addition to computers and singing, Brazelton plays electric bass and keyboard and Naphtali plays electric guitar, sings, does live sound processing (and of course with Danny Tunick on drums, glockenspiel, custom music boxes, toys).

What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new…”—Jacques Attali “Please ask me if you like it.”—Gertrude Stein

www.myspace.com/whatisitliketobeabat

This past winter, I was busily preparing for recording planned for the Spring, and also for a special performance of a piece I am developed with help from Franklin Furnace Fund –

March 26, 2011 — Music with a View with Robotica!!
video of the first workshop performance is here:

April 29th, 2011 — recording of Panda Half-Life (American Composers’ Forum Commission) at NYU’s Dolan Studios.    With Magic Names vocal sextet (Robert Osborne, Nick Hallett, Peter Sciscioli, Gisburg, Daisy Press)

back in NY:
Nov. 13 Magic Names Ensemble (Vital Vox festival) premieres work by Gisburg

Nov. 16 annual “in-C” reading Darmstadt New Music at Poisson Rouge
http://lepoissonrouge.com/events/view/1498
Nov. 22 quartet with Ras Moshe, Shayna Dulberger, Andrew Drury Evolving Voice series Local 269