Thursday 24 September 2020, 8.30pm
Please note that this event will be livestreamed on the OTO website. There will be no audience in the Cafe itself.
A live online performance of American avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier’s groundbreaking early work Bird and Person Dyning presented as part of an online LUX exhibition Receiver, Jenny Brady which considers how we both speak and listen, and the question of who has the right and capacity to be heard. ‘Bird and Person Dyning stands as an essential work demonstrating the composer turning inward to the fundamental sparks of aural phenomena.
“Dyning” is Lucier’s abbreviated version of “heterodyning,” a term introduced in the early days of radio transmission to describe the phenomenon of two waves mixing in a non-linear medium to produce two extra signals (created with the sum and difference in frequency). Known as “difference tones” in music, the piece tasks the performer to create the tones with an electronic bird call (originally a Christmas ornament producing a chirping sound), and the feedback created by a binaural microphone and stereo system. The emergence of the difference tones, or “phantoms,” depend on the position of the performer in the space and is, uniquely, music where we actually “listen to a composer listening.”’ Issue Project Room
Presented in collaboration with Cafe Oto to accompany the LUX exhibition Receiver, Jenny Brady 10 September - 30 October
Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary / experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic unit The Rolling Calf (with Jason Yarde and Neil Charles). Her regular collaborators include: composers George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, and Tansy Davies; visual artists Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay and The Otolith Group; chamber ensembles Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, and Klangforum Wien; choreographer Dam van Huynh’s company; and experimental musicians such as Moor Mother, Loré Lixenberg, Saul Williams, Pat Thomas and David Toop. While developing her own projects, Elaine continues to work as a collaborative and interpretive singer.
