Music for Hard Times
ARTIST AS CURATOR
Curated by The Living Earth Show
The Living Earth Show’s Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson – “outstanding” (San Francisco Chronicle), “transcendent” (Charleston City Paper) and “performers to watch” (The Washington Post) – give the world premiere of the live version of their experimental 2020-21 album in this collaboration with composer Danny Clay and visual artist Jon Fischer. A sonic resource for comfort and calming recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, Music for Hard Times was created to answer a fundamental question: “Is it possible for us to use the tools of classical art music to make people feel better?” Featuring Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School Choir conducted by Valérie Sainte-Agathe.
Elemental View at EMPAC
Elemental View (October 24) is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The immense instrument installation, with its precisely tuned and configured 136 strings, takes full advantage of EMPAC’s Concert Hall acoustics, filling the space with its glistening atmosphere and giving the audience the experience of bathing in the sound of the instrument’s immersive and expansive resonance. This performance continues The Living Earth Show’s multi-season residency at EMPAC.
Elemental View @ rewire
For over four decades, American composer Ellen Fullman has maintained a singular focus on her project, The Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of tuned strings dozens metres or more in length which have resonated architectural spaces in festivals across the world. Through her research in just intonation tuning theory, string harmonics and musical instrument design, Fullman has developed a compositional and performative approach that expands harmonic motion through a focus on upper partial tones. Collaborating with experimental chamber music ensemble The Living Earth Show, Ellen Fullman presents the European premiere of a site-specific performance of Elemental View at Rewire 2023, inhabiting The Hague’s Nieuwe Kerk with a custom-built instrument of 136 20-metre-long strings.
A Kind of Ache @ EMPAC
Sarah Hennies, Terry Berlier, & The Living Earth Show
“What would it feel like to be the majority?”
A Kind of Ache is a multimedia installation and concert from composer Sarah Hennies, sculptor and conceptual artist Terry Berlier, and electroacoustic duo The Living Earth Show that reimagines a world designed from and for a queer identity.
The drums-and-guitar duo will play on Berlier’s sculptures alongside Hennies, using objects, music, and their imaginations to wonder “What would it feel like to be the majority?”
The Living Earth Show–guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson–is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists, seeking to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded. This performance marks the beginning of a multi-season residency for The Living Earth Show at EMPAC, offering engaging and exciting large-scale work from artists with whom they work closely.
Commando at Outfest LA
COMMANDO was created as an act of revisionist history: how would the world have been different if that specific cultural moment in the late 1990s that birthed nü metal and its then-ubiquitous musical toolbox had been used to dismantle homophobia, misogyny, racism/white supremacy and heteropatriarchy rather than reinforce them? The self-titled debut album – released March 4 on Kill Rock Stars -- uses tools from the last three decades of rock, metal, punk, hardcore, hip hop, and popular music, delivered in five suites with each quarterbacked by a different vocalist.
With an arsenal of blistering guitars, driving percussion and a crucial perspective, COMMANDO use their ferocious energy and lyricism to unite crowds in the struggle to smash racism, queerphobia, transphobia, fascism and all things that close society's minds, eyes and hearts.
Commando at The Independent
COMMANDO was created as an act of revisionist history: how would the world have been different if that specific cultural moment in the late 1990s that birthed nü metal and its then-ubiquitous musical toolbox had been used to dismantle homophobia, misogyny, racism/white supremacy and heteropatriarchy rather than reinforce them? The self-titled debut album – due out March 4 on Kill Rock Stars -- uses tools from the last three decades of rock, metal, punk, hardcore, hip hop, and popular music, delivered in five suites with each quarterbacked by a different vocalist.
With an arsenal of blistering guitars, driving percussion and a crucial perspective, COMMANDO use their ferocious energy and lyricism to unite crowds in the struggle to smash racism, queerphobia, transphobia, fascism and all things that close society's minds, eyes and hearts.
Commando
COMMANDO was created as an act of revisionist history: how would the world have been different if that specific cultural moment in the late 1990s that birthed nü metal and its then-ubiquitous musical toolbox had been used to dismantle homophobia, misogyny, racism/white supremacy and heteropatriarchy rather than reinforce them? The self-titled debut album – due out March 4 on Kill Rock Stars -- uses tools from the last three decades of rock, metal, punk, hardcore, hip hop, and popular music, delivered in five suites with each quarterbacked by a different vocalist.
With an arsenal of blistering guitars, driving percussion and a crucial perspective, COMMANDO use their ferocious energy and lyricism to unite crowds in the struggle to smash racism, queerphobia, transphobia, fascism and all things that close society's minds, eyes and hearts.
Commando
COMMANDO was created as an act of revisionist history: how would the world have been different if that specific cultural moment in the late 1990s that birthed nü metal and its then-ubiquitous musical toolbox had been used to dismantle homophobia, misogyny, racism/white supremacy and heteropatriarchy rather than reinforce them? The self-titled debut album – due out March 4 on Kill Rock Stars -- uses tools from the last three decades of rock, metal, punk, hardcore, hip hop, and popular music, delivered in five suites with each quarterbacked by a different vocalist.
With an arsenal of blistering guitars, driving percussion and a crucial perspective, COMMANDO use their ferocious energy and lyricism to unite crowds in the struggle to smash racism, queerphobia, transphobia, fascism and all things that close society's minds, eyes and hearts.
Commando at SXSW
COMMANDO was created as an act of revisionist history: how would the world have been different if that specific cultural moment in the late 1990s that birthed nü metal and its then-ubiquitous musical toolbox had been used to dismantle homophobia, misogyny, racism/white supremacy and heteropatriarchy rather than reinforce them? The self-titled debut album – due out March 4 on Kill Rock Stars -- uses tools from the last three decades of rock, metal, punk, hardcore, hip hop, and popular music, delivered in five suites with each quarterbacked by a different vocalist.
With an arsenal of blistering guitars, driving percussion and a crucial perspective, COMMANDO use their ferocious energy and lyricism to unite crowds in the struggle to smash racism, queerphobia, transphobia, fascism and all things that close society's minds, eyes and hearts.
Raven Chacon: Tremble Staves
A challenging site-specific work, Raven Chacon’s Tremble Staves connects narratives of the San Francisco Bay Area’s complicated relationship with water – usage, access, rights — to overlapping Navajo creation stories in which water figures prominently. Both a concert performance and an installation, Tremble Staves is performed from memory by The Living Earth Show outdoors, on public land, using water as a dynamic percussion instrument. It is also important that Tremble Staves include the participation of students and teachers; in two of the movements (Delta and Distributary), the act of teaching and relaying information in real time is an audible and visual element of the composition. The first iteration of the work was presented in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Art in the Parks Program in the ruins of Sutro Baths.
This performance is made possible by the UC Davis Department of Music.
Music For Hard Times with UC Davis Improv Ensemble
Music for Hard Times
Built with the aim of offering a sonic resource for comfort and calming, composer Danny Clay and The Living Earth Show created Music for Hard Times: an eight movement work crafted using a series of composed "calming exercises," recorded independently in their homes using instruments, voices, field recordings, and found objects. The work is built to be listened to on a continuous loop if desired--that is, the eighth movement segues back into the first so that the listener has agency over the length of their own listening experience. Music for Hard Times is a work of experimental music in the truest sense, in that it was created to answer a fundamental research question: “is it possible for us to use the tools of classical art music to make people feel better?”
A Kind of Ache
What would it feel like to be the majority?
A Kind of Ache, commissioned by The Clarice Center at the University of Maryland and supported by the Creative Work Fund, is an installation and concert length work created by composer Sarah Hennies, visual artist Terry Berlier, and TLES that deconstructs, reconstructs, and queers everyday objects in the service of creating and investigating the concept and possibility of creating “queer space.” Connected by a fascination with what they term queer objects—small thrift store hand bells and mis-matched pan lids—Hennies and Berlier collaborate in bringing these percussive objects together in a new installation imagining creating and demarcating a “queer-only” space, as this environment is nearly unattainable in every day life. What, ask the collaborating artists, would it feel like to be the majority?
Lyra at SF Performances Pivot Festival
The Living Earth Show and Post:ballet perform Lyra, a new collaborative production featuring the music of composer Samuel Adams, the movement of choreographer Vanessa Thiessen, and the cinematography of Benjamin Tarquin. Rooted in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Lyra delves into today's most urgent questions regarding empathy, technology, and our relationship to the natural world. Created both in quarantine and in person, Lyra weaves together the digital and the physical through a seamless, highly collaborative synthesis of dance, live music, projected film, and Meyer Sound’s new spatial sound technology Spacemap Go.
Lyra at SF Performances Pivot Festival
The Living Earth Show and Post:ballet perform Lyra, a new collaborative production featuring the music of composer Samuel Adams, the movement of choreographer Vanessa Thiessen, and the cinematography of Benjamin Tarquin. Rooted in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Lyra delves into today's most urgent questions regarding empathy, technology, and our relationship to the natural world. Created both in quarantine and in person, Lyra weaves together the digital and the physical through a seamless, highly collaborative synthesis of dance, live music, projected film, and Meyer Sound’s new spatial sound technology Spacemap Go.
Shapeshifters Cinema and Kala Art Institute present: Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles
Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles features Guillermo Galindo’s “genome scores” which consist of graphic representations of his musical compositions and artwork merging textures of plants, animals, and microbes. These pieces illustrate, in Galindo’s unique symbolic language, how research and data have historically expressed and sustained systems of power, particularly relating to colonialism. As a follow up to Galindo’s exhibition Dissonant Matter at Kala Art Institute which closed early this year, Shapeshifters Cinema and Kala will co-present a new iteration of Sonic Biogenesis, a performance by Guillermo Galindo with The Living Earth Show—the new-music chamber ensemble consisting of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. Andrews and Meyerson will play experimental sonic devices designed by Galindo. Animation by Christoph Steger bringing Galindo’s “mutants” to life will weave through the video. The online exhibition catalog Dissonant Matter is available for download on Kala's website.
The intention of this performance is to demonstrate how science, while often considered to be neutral and objective, played – and continues to play – a role in colonization and conquest. For instance, naturalists were often motivated by the desire for new remedies to treat European ailments (economic or medical) to continue their exploitation of the “New World.” Similarly, biotech corporations today push the boundaries of ethics and possibility as they seek to modify the environment and creatures to best suit the needs of humans.
The first iteration of Sonic Biogenesis, Sonic Botany was a commission for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time biennale. It was a response to the exhibit “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” which contained a collection of European codices that visually cataloged the flora and fauna of the Americas. Galindo calls this body of work an ethno-futurist “window to mutant environments” as he sees a direct link to his artwork and the human-made environmental modifications that are ushering societies around the world towards dystopian futures (events such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, the patterns of Global Warming evident worldwide, as well as the use of the gene-editing tool CRISPR).
Watch HERE
Music for Hard Times Premiere with SFCM + SFGC
Throughout the spring of 2021, The Living Earth Show and composer Danny Clay have been working with students from the SF Girls Chorus and SF Conservatory of Music to create a new Music for Hard Times collaborative work. Join us for the premiere and a discussion about the process on May 27th at 7:00pm PDT!
Preview: A Kind of Ache
Throughout the Spring 2021 semester, visiting artists Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews of The Living Earth Show, composer Sarah Hennies and sculptor Terry Berlier have been working with University of Maryland students to create sound and sculptural elements to be integrated into The Clarice’s commission for 2021-22 A Kind of Ache. Preview this open-source artmaking collaboration and learn more about their special creative process that weaves music, sculpture and LGBTQ+ topics into one artistic experience.
Listening & Discussion: Renvoi/Shards by Brian Ferneyhough
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