These pieces are composed of ambient and directed sound. I made tapes of the sounds I heard daily in Prague, Czech Republic and Portland, Oregon and sounds made on the strings and soundboard of a piano, and blended them with text.
I began to work with layers of sound and text in 1986 when I created “Kirtan 10/17/86” and later “Kirtan 2/28/87”. For these collages, I used Sanskrit text from the “Bhagavadgita” and conducted musical and percussive motifs around it. I further developed this work in 1994 in Prague for a staged reading of a play. There were four actors, and the director gave each their own cassette player with instruction to raise and lower the volume as they felt appropriate.
I titled this piece “Music for four tape players” and sent it to a dancer, Gregg Bieleimeier, in Portland, Oregon, who performed it at the Portland art museum in February of 1995, where it was well received.
In 1996 I moved to Portland, Oregon and obtained the rights from the copyright holder to use the texts of Bruno Schultz’s stories “The Gale” (performed as part of Literatur Schallmauer – Literature Sound Barrier 30 May 2002 in Vienna, Austria), “The Street of Crocodiles”, “August”, and “Cinnamon Shops”. In 1996 and 1997, I made two more four tape assemblages that included the text of two stories by Bruno Schulz: “The Gale” and “The Street of Crocodiles.” In 2000 I mixed these pieces onto tape at the Emmons Studio in Los Angeles. (August 25, 2004 Update: Because the nice folks at the Central European & Slavic Literature in Translation recently linked to me, I’ve uploaded “The Street of Crocodiles.”)
It is my intention in these pieces to create an aural collage.