Mesh – 2018

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Mesh (2018) was an experiment in psychogeography, collaboration, and sound led by Clay Chaplin. During the month of June 2018, a group of sound artists from Los Angeles, Chicago, and Reykjavik took residence in a large, isolated house in the southern part of Iceland. Through experimentation, improvisation, and collaboration we created a series of recordings. Each collaborator was a unique musician, sound artist, and improvisor and brought their own ideas and influences to the creative process. The instrumentation was diverse and included laptops, electronics, violas, voice, found objects, hurdy-gurdy, and viola da gamba. We did not have a set structure going into our work together but topical starting points included: droning, repetition, field recording, medieval folk traditions, chant, alternate tunings, acoustics, and a general blending of purely electronic, recorded, and acoustic sounds.

Mesh performed at Mengi in Reykjavik on Thursday, June 28 2018 at 8:30pm

Album Notes

Clouds – one of our group favorites
Trampoline – inspired by the trampoline in the cabin yard
Endless Sunset – Iceland in the peak of summer
Mengi – our live performance in Reykjavik

All tracks were recorded live in Iceland in June of 2018 by Clay Chaplin
Mixed and mastered by Clay Chaplin at Casa Berenice Recordings in Los Angeles
Album artwork and design by David Paha
Special thanks to MENGI in Reykjavik
@2019, CBR001, Casa Berenice Recordings

Ensemble Members

Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir

Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir equally performs as a violist, composer/sound artist and improviser. She has in recent years been based in Reykjavík, Iceland and in the Los Angeles area, where she performs as a soloist and with ensembles, groups and songwriters. She has premiered pieces especially written for her at festivals such as Tectonics and Dark Music Days. Her electro-acoustic improvisations, explore the subtle and the extreme through the rich sonorities of the viola mixed with field recordings, synthesized sounds and voice. In composition she likes to experiment with sound, space, bodies, objects humor, lights and movement. Kristín has written for Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Nordic Affect and Trio XelmYa among others.

Heather Lockie

Heather Lockie is a performer-composer, teaching artist and visual artist based in Los Angeles. She plays viola and piano, writes songs, plays in some bands, writes and arranges music for herself and for other people, teaches music, gardens, and paints. Her latest musical project is called Marshweed, which recently released a cd called “Marshweed in the Garden”. Outside of playing with and arranging for Marshweed, recent projects include writing string arrangements, recording, and performing for OCS (Thee Oh Sees) and Cory Hanson (Wand).

Heather has played and toured as a backing musician with international artists such as Syd Straw, Fun., Spiritualized, Arthur Lee/LOVE, Eels, as well as with various independent bands. She has performed at diverse venues, from LACMA, The Museum of Jurassic Technology and The Hammer Museum to world-renowned venues such as the Royal Albert Hall in London, Letterman, Leno, and various DIY spaces throughout America (treehouses, attics, RVs). She has a master’s degree from California Institute of the Arts (Performer/Composer focus) and a BA from Occidental College (Comp Lit: French/English). She is most interested at the moment in these things: how things grow; the notion of seeds as simple machines that unpack themselves genetically; worms and the effect of their poo on an ailing fruit tree; color symbolism in musical notation; circular knitting; how to teach complex abstract musical stuff to kids via simple activities that verge on ephemera; how to represent temporal and pitch information in a picture; earliest existing keyboard music.

David Paha

David James Paha is a Chicago composer whose work explores the synesthetic and psychoacoustic experience of static textures. Through the use of heavy DSP, the sound overwhelms the listener with the hope of inducing states of subtle psychedelia or hallucinatory reactions.

He holds an MFA in experimental sound practices from the California Institute of the Arts and a BM in music composition from Columbia College Chicago.

In addition to his solo work under ‘Fiction Wisdom’, David is a member of the network computer ensemble ‘Bitpanic’ (Los Angeles), performs in the Chicago noise band ‘Only’ and pop band ‘Family of Geniuses’.

He is also an active audio engineer, visual artist and co-founder of Chicago label Scripts Records.

Laura Steenberge

Laura Steenberge is a performer and composer in Los Angeles who researches language, the voice, mythology and acoustics. Influenced by folk music, psycholinguistics, acoustics and medieval Byzantine chant, collectively her work is a study of nonsense and the boundaries of knowledge. A multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and public speaker, Steenberge uses voice, contrabass, viola da gamba, objects, images to create works in traditional and site-specific locations throughout California, including SF MOMA, the Sutro Baths, the Hammer Museum, REDCAT and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She holds BAs in music and linguistics from the University of Southern California, an MFA in composer/performer and integrated media from CalArts, and a DMA in music composition from Stanford University. She teaches experimental sound practices at CalArts.

Mustafa Walker

Driven by interests in instrument building technology from the Age of Exploration, Renaissance ceremonial magic, Greek tuning theory, mensural notation, and calligraphy, K. C. M. Walker aims to produce work exploring ritual in musical performance, the mysteries of sound, and the magic in objects and actions. He practices medieval and renaissance repertoire for the hurdy gurdy, bass viol, lute, brass and woodwinds, but also seeks to discover their forgotten and hidden voices through altered tuning practices, extended techniques, and long form improvisation. He holds a bachelors of music theory and composition from the College of Charleston and a masters in experimental music from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. K. C. M. Walker is from Charleston, South Carolina, but is currently based in Los Angeles and pursuing a DMA in music composition with David Dunn and Larry Polansky at The University of California, Santa Cruz

Clay Chaplin

Clay Chaplin is a sound artist, improviser, and audio engineer from Los Angeles who explores the realms of audio-visual improvisation, sound synthesis, field recording, electronics, and computer processing for creative sonic expression. He has worked on many projects involving experimental music, video, audio recording, and interactive computer systems. Clay’s works have been performed internationally including performances at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, the Bent Festival, the S.L.Á.T.U.R. festival, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Elektroakustiche Musik (DEGEM) studios, the Ear Zoom Sonic Arts festival, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conferences, the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College (CCM), and many others. Clay has been composer in residence at STEIM and the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. He is currently the Director of the Computer Music and Experimental Media Studios and teaches experimental sound practices at CalArts in Los Angeles.

mesh

noun

1. Material made of a network of wire or thread.

“mesh for fishing nets”

2. An interlaced structure.

“cell fragments that agglutinate and form intricate meshes”

verb

1. (of the teeth of a gearwheel) lock together or be engaged with another gearwheel.

“one gear meshes with the other”

2. Represent (a geometric object) as a set of finite elements for computational analysis or modeling.

Special thanks to the The Provost’s Creative Leave Impact Award at CalArts.