Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1207070150300.27550@panix2.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Why you should hear our performances live, at least once by the boy
who cried wolf but couldn't even get eaten
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2012 01:51:37 -0400 (EDT)
Why you should hear our performances live, at least once I shouldn't need to write this, but every time we play (maybe 15 times this year or so in NY or Bklyn), our friends never come; we feed off the gratitude of others, transitive friendships and appreciations that keep us going. I've gone to other people's work in the past, but it's made no difference. I've watched other people's tapes, read other people's books, and we perform more or less isolated. I borrow from dancers, Europeans, jazz audiences, new music audiences - but my acquaintances, almost never. I can think of twice that friends have shown up. Perhaps there's a surfeit of rehearsal tapes, experimental works, that I put up at ESP or my own website. But as tonight's recording shows, everything is missing: we play off echo, off architecture, off pacing, positioning, movement - what comes through is a pale and illicit shadow, unless we've gone through a recording studio (and it's others who buy our records for that matter). I wouldn't mention this, but it's constantly disenheartening: we had an audience tonight, but in terms of my New York friends, it was really the other performers who brought the people. I can only conclude, I'm not really that good, that as I've said before, I play out of tune, too furiously, too stupidly, for others to pay attention to the noise. WFMU's played us but obviously that can count as error; more to the point is my father's last comment on my music - that I have no sense of rhythm but just go foomf foomf foomf all the time. Anyway I put up a relatively poor recording tonight; I did my best, but the echoes at Churner and Churner - which sounded beautiful in situ - made a mess on the recording, which only dealt with point sources. And apologies for this; I'm tired of feeling unsupported, and sometimes it's only through occasions like this that I find out I have few friends in the city, thank god good friends elsewhere in the country and abroad, but nothing that might be called neighborly, or boro-wide. I'll just end by saying you missed something terrific, but with all the culture on- going in New York, it really doesn't matter all that much. This ends my little neurotic piece, while despair and pills will follow me to sleep. ---