I’m releasing a series of albums on Bandcamp’s sfSoundLabel. Each album is a collection of thematically like-minded musical works hand-picked from those I’ve produced over recent and past many years.

Abstractions 1
artwork: “baooooanh” © 2016 Tuyen Q. Nguyen | www.odyssey7.zone

Abstractions 2
artwork: “feverish dream 320” © 2020 Tuyen Q. Nguyen | www.odyssey7.zone

This is the first comprehensive gathering of my compositions into thematic and chronological releases. Once complete the series will include the following albums:

Passages: audio postcards, journals,
and travelogues (1995 – 2015)

Abstractions 1 (1996 – 2008)
Abstractions 2 (2012 – 2018)
Abstractions 3 (2018 – 2020)

Fantasias & Improvisations (2016 – 2020)

I’ll be releasing another album in the Collections about once a month. And please be on the lookout for other new releases on sfSoundLabel. My hunch is that there are more new releases percolating there.

I hope you enjoy this music and that it takes you to new places.

sfSound is pleased to announce our new release

San Francisco Tape Music Collective

A selection of fixed media works presented by the collective in recent San Francisco Tape Music Festivals.

Works by Maggi Payne, Kent Jolly, Cliff Caruthers, Matt Ingalls, Thom Blum, Kristin Miltner, and Joseph Anderson.

Freely available for streaming and download from http://sfsound.bandcamp.com.

Donations are welcome.
All proceeds go to the San Francisco Tape Music Festival.
(post COVID-19)

The San Francisco Tape Music Collective is dedicated to presenting performances of audio art. For over 20 years they have presented The San Francisco Tape Music Festival, diffusing works from composers throughout the world in addition to their own works through a pristine immersive 24-speaker surround-sound environment, in complete darkness.

SFTMC and SFTMF are projects of sfSound.

http://sfSound.org/tape
http://sfsound.bandcamp.com/album/san-francisco-tape-music-collective

Cenk Ergün had a great idea, inspired by the 2020 Pandemic and shelter-in-place: enlist a group of his musical friends, yours truly among them, to contribute sound recordings that Cenk would then assemble into a composition.

He executed the idea beautifully as can be heard in the new release on Bandcamp Amore Vieni for Isolated Ensemble. Check out the music and the story about how the piece came to be.

All proceeds from sales will go to the New Music Solidarity Fund.

Another side to my music-making over the last 3 or 4 years has been playing in a duet with drummer extraordinaire and widely recognized Jazz disk jockey, Ron Pelletier. We’ve called our duet Due Pesci (“Two Fishes”) because we’re both pisces (the fish), astrologically, and in fact we share the same birthday, different years. Ron is Italian and came up with the name. It seemed apt.

I have a difficult time classifying this music. It’s not like other styles I’ve composed, like tape music or musique concrete, acousmatic, or place music. I think it’s closer to Jazz inhabited with the vaporous spirits of Jimi Hendrix.

The music results from live electronic processing, feedback, and synthesis that is sometimes loosely interleaved other times tightly commingled with trap drums and other percussion. The combination is elastic but often takes the form of a unified or fused voice that is an amalgamation of electronics and acoustics, circling in an embrace that sometimes completely blurs their boundary. Perhaps it is heading towards an electroacoustic Jazz.

Hear and get it all at Bandcamp

The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2020
Friday, January 10, 8:30pm
Saturday, January 11, 7:00pm
Saturday, January 11, 9:30pm
Sunday, January 12, 7:00pm
Victoria Theatre
2961 16th Street
San Francisco
$20 general ($10 Sat 9:30 concert)
$10 balcony/underemployed
$50 fest pass (general seating all concerts)
advance ticket purchase
or at the door (cash only) the day of show
(box office opens one hour before showtime)

Thinking about what I might play at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival next month I rediscovered a “tape” piece of mine along the way — a musical setting that I wrote 23 years ago for a poem by the Beat author Bob Kaufman. The poem’s title is, “To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room.”

I hadn’t listened to this composition (or read the poem for that matter) for at least a decade, but my inspiration to hear it again came a couple of months ago and from the same source that originally inspired its creation, Bob Kaufman.

I had just heard about the newly published collection from City Lights Books of all the surviving as well as some never-before published poems by this late great poet of North Beach fame who died in 1986. He had so inspired me with his words, which I only happened to hear on KPFA one morning during my drive to work. But that’s another story…. (Thank you Vic Bedoian!)

So I got quickly reacquainted with my own composition which like the poem reemerged from the shadows like an old friend from the past. I realized pretty much immediately that I wanted to share them both with you — Bob Kaufman’s poem and my setting of it.

And so in homage to Bob Kaufman and his words, recited perfectly by Roscoe Lee Brown, that moved me in 1995 first to tears and then directly into my studio, I’ll be playing the piece on the Saturday night, 7:00 PM program.

I hope you’ll be there to hear it. It will be in very fine company as you’ll see from the full lineup available at SFTMF.

Here are two radio interviews that SF Tape Music Collective has given prior to past Festivals.
 

I’ll be giving a late afternoon recital of solo prepared and improvised electro-acoustic
pieces at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco on Sunday, Oct. 27.

The first work Nature or nurture is a suite of four pieces for prerecorded and live-processed sound. The structures are prepared and the details are improvised. The second piece Conjuring waves/Soniferous climates is sonic alchemy, conjuring and coaxing the sound through live processing of the Library’s space.

Charles Kremenak, my cohort in the Klooj ensemble, will also present a piece on the program.

Prelinger Library
301 8th Street
Suite 215
San Francisco, CA 94103
Sunday, October 27, 2019
4:30-6:00 PM
Free or with donation to the Prelinger Library

Thom Blum (solo, electro-acoustics)
Nature or nurture
Conjuring waves/Soniferous climates

Charles Kremenak (media performance)
MEMORetc.: lost communications & memory detritus in mail-art

This performance is one of the 2019 series by Klooj and Si-si D for their Prelinger Library Residency.