sfSound presents

The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2019
January 4-6, 2019





The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2019

Friday January 4, 9pm
Saturday January 5, 8pm
Saturday January 5, 10:30pm
Sunday January 6, 8pm


16th Street Victoria Theater
2961 16th Street
San Francisco

$20 general
$10 balcony/underemployed
$50 fest pass (general seating all concerts)
(Saturday 10:30pm show is FREE TO ALL!)


advance ticket purchase
or at the door (cash only) the day of show after 7pm


America's only festival devoted to the performance of audio works projected in three-dimensional space, The San Francisco Tape Music Festival features four distinct concerts of classic audio art and new fixed media compositions by 40 local and international composers. Hear members of the SF Tape Music Collective, along with guest composers, shape the sound live over a pristine surround system (24 high-end loudspeakers) with the audience seated in complete darkness. It's a unique opportunity to experience music forming - literally - around you.

The 2019 Festival features contemporary “fixed media” compositions alongside classic works from 50 years ago. The FREE Saturday late show presents starting-time-appropriate works that are more on the ambient and long-form-exploration side of the spectrum.

---

The works from 1969 truly represent the spirit of the time. With releases in the late-60s by WENDY CARLOS, PAUL BEAVER / BERNARD KRAUSE, and MORTON SUBOTNICK, electronic music was being heard by mainstream audiences.

We represent MORTON SUBOTNICK'S music here with his 1969 surround-sound work, Touch. Also included is one of the most experimental works of "tape music" ever released on a popular record (Billboard's #1 album of January 1969, in fact): THE BEATLES' Revolution 9. We present "cross-over" tape pieces that incorporate sounds from both popular and electronic music: JON APPLETON'S Newark Airport Rock, FRANÇOIS BAYLE'S Solitude (from L’Expérience Acoustique, chapitre I) and BERNARD PARMEGIANI'S Du Pop À L'âne.

1969 was also a time of experimentalism, and we also present ELIANE RADIGUE'S early feedback composition Stress-Osaka alongside our own multi-channel realizations of ANTHONY GNAZZO'S text-sound work, Population Explosion, and JAMES TENNEY'S minimalistic, pychoacoustic classic For Ann, Rising.

We round out the festival with recent works by 31 international and bay area artists:
HORACIO VAGGIONE
GILLES GOBEIL
ANNETTE VANDE GORNE
ALISTAIR MACDONALD
THOM BLUM
CLIFF CARUTHERS
KRIS FORCE
BRENDAN GLASSON
ROB HAMILTON
HANES/ADAMS (STEVE ADAMS and JOHN HANES)
HEADLIGHTS (DEREK GEDALECIA and AURORA JOSEPHSON)
MAIJA HYNNINEN
MATT INGALLS
KENT JOLLY
FERNANDO LOPEZ-LEZCANO
KRISTIN MILTNER
MAGGI PAYNE
LARRY POLANSKY
RAUB ROY
BRIAN REINBOLT
JASON BOLTE
CHRISTOPHER CHANDLER
DARREN COPELAND
MIKE FRENGEL
ANTHONY DI FURIA
ZURIÑE F GERENABARRENA
AKI PASOULAS
ADAM STANOVIĆ
ELI STINE



PROGRAM DETAILS

(to be announced shortly)

Friday January 4, 2019 (9pm)
Saturday January 5, 2019 (8pm)
Saturday January 5, 2019 (10:30pm - FREE!)
Sunday January 6, 2019 (8pm)



equipment kindly provided by The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University and sfSound.

It is a bit paradoxical to use the word traditionally with a practice of the avant garde -- but, traditionally the words tape music have referred to the target media of a new kind of music. This new kind of music is not composed for arbitration by a pianist and the piano, so it must not be piano music. . . not for the string quartet, not for the orchestra, not even for the rock band.

The idea of a music composed for a fixed medium, while perhaps starting down a path, does not really lead us to a fundamentally new art. If the only criteria for differentiating tape music from all other musics is the fixed delivery medium -- magnetic tape, vinyl, CD, miniDisc -- then our thought has just led us to all industrialized forms of music, so called "popular" and "classical". When this is our only standard, we discover tape music is actually the foremost music of our time. The kids love it, the moms subdue their road-rage with it, the dads sing tunelessly with it, and so on.

The pieces we present transcend simplistic notions of music and its materials and its "instruments." The recording/playback media itself is treated not as a stand-in for an absent performer, a poor man's orchestra, but as a vital and unique territory for exploration/exploitation. They coexist in many worlds, blurring the line between composition, field recordings, sound design, "cinema for the ear," virtual [audio] reality, "radio" drama, and sound synthesis. This art form does not depend upon the posturing of performers. It does not worship the technology with which it was produced, nor does it fetishize the physical medium in which it is contained. There is nothing to see here! In the same way cinema is NOT theatre, tape music is NOT music.