hi there! continuing a series of letters about sounds i’ve been part of making / absorbing.
i’m fortunate enough to have power, many people in Pittsburgh don’t after the storm earlier this week. a lot of trees have fallen. i’ve never heard my name so frequently.
sheltered enough to still be thinking about sound, playing often, building things. i don’t have words for what’s going down but feels important at least to acknowledge this. online statements ring hollow anyways, the real work happens off screens.
my last letter was looking forward to a week; here’s some photos of what happened:
one project in april was creating a first draft of sound design for a short film by Starr Jiang (based in NYC). at the top of this letter i placed a 1.5-minute medley of ideas improvised with field recordings & alto flute through pedals. i like it a lot. currently it’s best listened through headphones.
a second project was reviving / re-assembling my classical-flute-chops for rehearsals of “The Onion” with original music by Joshua Malavé for Confluence Ballet at Attack Theatre. shows this weekend have sold out, which i am disappointed since none of my friends are able to go & listen.
(a necessary interlude! friends have been attending many shows i’ve played in past months. the whole gamut from noisy-experimental-underground things to polished-ambient-gallery-vibes. when i think of it it makes me want to cry. sort of like having family around a kind of play who are removed enough from the scene to have no stakes in attending. i have no expectation for this to continue! only much gratitude.)
reassembling classical-flute chops has entailed hours of practicing / confusedly orienting myself within the relationship with flute i used have — more scientific/precise, extractive in a way, production-obsessed as opposed to process-oriented… i’ve had mixed success infusing the expansiveness i found in years of solely improvising with the perfectionist ethos that nearly destroyed my belief i could play music.
overall i’m happy with how i sound playing this music, independently of how this weekend’s shows will go. more to say, maybe elsewhere.
i am still unemployed & have had little time to job-search. beside the projects above, plus keeping this music calendar updated (for over a year now!), others came up:
i facilitated two shows the first weekend of april — one at Telephone featuring Your Elephant’s Cousin (Hellcat Sneer and Taker / Darren Moore), THAT LIKE THIS (Corey Hackathorn with David Bernabo), Johnny Arlett — mostly noise / electronic sound-worlds. great conversations amid all the sets. lots of strangers stopping to listen from the art walk. lively night.
then a second show i curated at Abolition Coffee featuring Ivana, Drew Collins, and 7D with Dade Lemanski — songs about endings, bass improvisation with spoken word, poetry with live soundscaping. the shop was packed! grateful to the brilliant & generous performers, Tyler Phan for hosting us / letting me hold a third show here, the crowd for being so loving and energizing.
in the day between those shows, i played a short solo interlude at Glitterbox Theater for their 10-minute playfest — super minimal & ambient with field recordings & unprocessed piccolo in the spirit of deep listening. interesting to find this wasn’t the crowd for this sort of set! i had to sit with feelings afterwards about having a set not land, realizing i’m not for everyone — even most, maybe 90-95% of audiences in the world — and it’s ok.
the following week i picked up my C flute — which i don’t play so much these years, usually alto flute or piccolo — to play a 4-hour set of free jazz at Remedy with Dylan Zeh, Ross Antonich, and Derek Bendel, all of whom i started playing with in 2023 to celebrate music of Sam Rivers. this time included tunes of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane.
jazz is a language i don’t speak, having never had the time, resources, energy to immerse myself in its history & idioms — but Dylan is open-minded enough to invite me into the project anyways & welcome whatever i do spout out. thanks Dylan! i tend to prepare for these sets with weeks of anxious procrastination, attempts to cram jazz theory, binge-listening to records, sputters of practicing; it all tends to lead to performances where i leave most of that behind & have fun shredding ideas to pieces on this instrument i used to police myself on through over a decade of classical training.
below are recordings of two of the solos i took. re: my playing, i don’t think this is what most People In JazZ would call “real FreE JaZz” but i’m grateful to be in spaces where this playing is welcomed for what it is. for me it is intensely liberating, dizzyingly technical, exuberant & reckless — illiterate though i am in the genre, i’d like to think this could be a definition.
photo & recording by Derek Bendel. me on flute, Dylan Zeh on bass, Ross Antonich on drums, Derek Bendel on tenor saxophone. 4/11 at Remedy, an ideal spot for this sort of playing.
the last weekend of april i played two shows — one opening for touring singer/songwriters Alexia Avina & Sam Cope (NYC) at the house venue Pierogi Palace. for this set i collaborated with iriseoyoung, who wrote a poem with me that we read live-processed by Iris through modular synthesizer / VCV rack. i mixed in field recordings from Iris’s recent time in Korea & both of us played found objects. i love the soundscape we found ourselves in — drone inflected with bells, temple sounds, voices, chanting. unfortunately i lost my recording of the set. we’ll have to do it again. to close the show i played a duo with bella figlia (f.k.a “Fig”) in one of my favorite modes to improvise with alto flute.
the next day i played a solo set at Seafoam for an ambient/noise show organized by Carrie Sours featuring Celestyn Celestyn on tour. i also lost my recording of this set, but thanks to Iris and Geoffrey of Arcane City i pieced together the video below. had some tech issues disrupt flow, plus a lack of familiarity with the crowd — both these factors slowed the pace drastically, made it more of a noise/drone soundscape. the noise element was mostly created with contact mic against a paper where i wrote lines from a poem by my friend.
i noticed i didn’t feel good about the set at all. granted, it was my first time with this particular combination of gear (borrowing a couple pedals). it’s interesting how improvising can either seem to spiral upwards (super cathartic, a high, unlooked-for) or plod muddily, indefinitely through some vague inarticulate spaces, a sorta mediocre fog. i think i had this latter kind of set. my friends told me it was good anyways. it’s nice to have friends.
i’m learning to have a bad set or simply feel like i don’t know how a crowd received me. over the past couple years i’ve been spoiled & used to playing for crowds i either know well & trust, or who unequivocally express warmth for what i shared. i’m also learning about the limits for what sounds are possible in a space, how these are defined cooperatively, how these definitions are sustained.
i’m grateful to play in a mix of familiar / unfamiliar spaces as summer draws near:
May 3 & 4 at Attack Theatre with Confluence Ballet in a chamber ensemble conducted by Alejando Pinzón (who generously offered to fix my huarache shoes :’)
May 11th, 7pm at Bantha Tea Bar: with an improvising orchestra performing a text score / opera written by Román Antopolsky. playing with friends Caleb Gamble (bass), Jay Rauch (clarinet), Trever/Dittocrush (tapes/electronics), Carl Fuermann (electronics), Mai Khôi (voice), Nick Sirio (voice, percussion).
May 17th, 9pm at Kelly Strayhorn Theater with BusCrates!!! groovey / electroacoustic / flutes & synthesizers.
June 6th - back at Remedy with Dylan Zeh, Ross Antonich, Derek Bendel, playing some new tunes.
June 16th, 7pm at Poetry Lounge - joining improvising ensemble THAT LIKE THIS for their album release show! also feat. Your Elephant’s Cousin.
now that i’ve gone at length & lost most of this other kind of audience (invisible & existing outside of time), i want to follow up on my past letter about being unemployed. what boggles my mind is i am some of the busiest i have been and yet making a shadow of what i did when i was somehow also working in food service (the compromise was never feeding myself properly, sleeping little).
last month i received some community love in the form of mutual aid that helped me pay my rent last month. it put me in a better place this month & i’m starting to get back on the job hunt. unsure how that’ll go. if you find yourself with a paycheck / some disposable income & wanna help a sista out, my venmo’s @ tree-vsa.
lastly here are some car sounds under the 279 highway (along the river trail, by downtown) during a 2-hour solo bike ride from Brighton Heights to Wilkinsburg i impulsively went on. the full moon watched til i got home safe.
~ trē <3
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