[NewMusic] Call for Participants - Pmocatat Ensemble on March 12th

[Matt Davignon]

Luggage Store Gallery, March 12, 2009
8pm: TBA
9pm: The Pmocatat (prerecorded music onto cds and tapes and things) Ensemble

Call for Participants
The Pmocatat (prerecorded music onto cds and tapes and things) Ensemble

The rules:

Instead of bringing your instrument, bring recordings of yourself
playing one or more "real" acoustic instruments. The recordings can be
on record, tape, cd, or a portable device like Ipod (no laptops). We
will then improvise the best we can, using only the recordings of our
instruments.

The recordings should be mostly simple musical gestures, recorded with
the intention of being mixed with the sounds of other instruments at
the live show. You should be the performer of the instruments heard,
but it doesn't have to be an instrument you're known for playing.
You're also welcome to bring recordings of more than one instrument,
but within each "song" at the set, you'll be sticking to one
instrument.

At the performance, you're encouraged to play your recorded media with
the level of attention that you'd pay to a "real" instrument. You'll
be using the play and pause buttons, fiddling with the volume,
skipping ahead to certain sections of tracks, scratching the records,
etc. We're NOT going to simply let the recordings play by themselves
or on shuffle play. Regarding effects, they should be minimal - no
samplers, loopers or laptops. I'd say just volume pedal, reverb and
pitch bender allowed, and most frequently going "au natural". There
may be one song where we use distortion.

Once I know who's participating and what instruments you're bringing
recordings of, I'll probably split the show up between different
instrument combinations, such as all acoustic guitars for one song,
woodwinds for another, and sax/bass/drums for another.

Advice: CD and tape will probably be the easiest and most fun
instruments. The better cd players have cue and reverse buttons that
are separate from the "previous/next track" buttons. Multi-speed
cassette recorders can be found at radio shack, best buy and a number
of stores. Ipod sounds easy, but will probably be the least flexible
instrument. (That is, unless iphones have some snazzy track
manipulation software I don't know about.) CD-DJ players and such are
ok.

Before you ask: No, you can't bring recordings on your laptop and play
your laptop. You also can't use the "ipiano" or other fake instruments
on the iphone, unless they're modifying your instrumental source
material. An LP must have your own solo instrumental material. Yes, I
know that probably means nobody will be bringing LP.

To Participate

To sign up, send an email to mattdavignon at gmail.com that states

   * which form your media will be in (cd's, tapes, ipod, lp)
   * which instruments will be featured on your media (acoustic
guitar, piano, drums, etc...)

and bookmark this space to view the running tally of who's
participating and what they're doing.

Current participants: See www.bayimproviser.com/luggagestore#pmocatat