The Late Night Phone Call Release Party, with live sound/image/text atmospherics, will be celebrating Kattt Sammon Atchley’s LNPC project and the recent album release on Edgetone Records — available below and at the party!

What: Late Night Phone Call release party and live sound/image/text melange. Take in the sights and sounds. Roam the library’s stacks. Have a snack. Mingle with friends and strangers. And raise a pop to Kattt!
When: Saturday night November 16. Doors will open at 8 PM and go until the last sound sounds (or 10’ish).
Where: Prelinger Library, 301 8th Street (SE corner of Folsom St.) in San Francisco.
Press Library’s icon/button on the security phone and we’ll let you in.
Fee: zip!
Tips: Dress in layers. It may be a bit cool inside the space. We’ll have a few snacks and sodas but it’s BYOB.

Here are lots more details about the party and the project.…
———————-
Release party for Late Night Phone Call! 

The double CD, released on Edgetone Records, will be for sale at this event!

LATE NIGHT PHONE CALL:  a community gathered around a melody. The original Late Night Phone Call came from one of my musical practice sessions. I decided to record it because a particular melody kept taking over one of my practice sessions. At the time, it didn’t feel like anything special – just another session. But when I listened back, I felt really giddy, but doubt soon crept in. Encouraged by feedback and initial remixes by greensatan and Phil Perkins, I decided to turn it into a project and invite others. This led to the ‘Late Night Phone Call’ compilation which traces the melody through various artist’s reinterpretations, with each piece incorporating tracks (vocals, keyboard, and/or MIDI) from the original recording  – Kattt Atchley, November 2024

This event will be a freeform jam session featuring a group of musicians and visual artists from the Late Night Phone Call compilation and project:

Rae Diamond: Voix
Kattt Atchley: Voix, Bell Chimes
Dan Carbone: Voix
greensatan: Laptop electronics
Thom Blum: Laptop electronics/instrullation
Rent Romus: Reeds, Things 
Dan Plonsey: Reeds, Klangy things 
Visuals: a slide show from the Treasures of Tutankhamun with maybe something else thrown in.

For more information about the project, people, music, art: https://www.latenightphonecall.com

Social media: https://www.instagram.com/latenightphonecallproject/

From the brainchild of Kattt Atchley, Edgetone Records and others have erected a 15-track collection of original musical pairings, each one using Kattt’s brief, haunting humming-melody, “Late Night Phone Call (Original)“.

The set of pieces covers a rich and wide range of reactions to the melody, each one unique and composed with loving attention, specifically to the melodic subject. Each of the tracks is composed by a different person, most of us based in the Bay Area, including track #14 It’s Only Hummin by yours truly. The opportunity was an unexpected gift for me (and I bet some of my composer compatriots on the collection would agree).

Mikee Labash provided the graphic design for the release and it also includes some beautiful, whimsical artwork by Kattt, Alice Wu, and Dan Plonsey. Hats off to Myles Boison who wrangled the pieces and mastered the release. Nice job, thank you!

The release is available in both streaming and hardcopy (CD) formats. For all the info and access to the results, please check out Late Night Phone Call.

Devon Turnbull has designed a stereo setup for SF MOMA’s current exhibit titled The Art of Noise. I’ve been invited to take control of the “HiFi Listening Room” for the entire day on August 2, 2024. I will use the day to play some of the progressive rock, acousmatic, musique concrète, and electronic music that I have loved and been influenced by in my music-making lifetime. I hope to see you at the Museum on Friday, August 2nd!

The HiFi Listening Room (see photo) is only one of many aspects of this multidimensional, multimedia exhibit that runs from May 4 through August 18, 2024 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There is also a room-sized exhibit of album and poster artwork from days gone by, another room filled with over 100 historic objects for the playback of recorded and live music, and the unique designs of the company, “teenage engineering”, that infuses the exhibit and the accompanying furnishings.

Different sound artists, musicians, and others were invited to choose and play recordings that they, and hopefully those who are present, will enjoy hearing over the high-fidelity stereo playback system, which is equipped with two turntables, a Revox A88 reel-to-reel tape recorder, a CD player, and a wireless connection enabling streamed audio to reach to the digital-to-analog converters on the system.

For details and tickets to exhibit, including the HiFi Listening Room and the daily schedule of people DJ’ing there, check out The Art of Noise.

My sonic environments at the Prelinger Library are now running into their second year. On Sundays at the Library, my “instrullation” — part installation part musical instrument — continues to infuse books and other texts with a sonic sensibility, giving visitors a unique library experience.

Every Sunday I host at the Library from 1:30 to 4 PM. During those hours I improvise with and on a 12-channel, spatially distributed, “musique concrète” instrument that I set up for Library in January 2022. It consists of around 600, mostly fleeting, sound recordings that are specifically tuned to this Library’s stacks, its contents, and its meaning as a symbol of a house of knowledge.

I am pleased to be a continuing Artist In Residence at the Library, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary at its present location in San Francisco, opening in 2004.

Prelinger Library
301 8th Street (at Folsom St.)
Suite 215
San Francisco, CA 94103

My latest release House Music was put up on Bandcamp in early March 2024. It contains some recent short soundworks I mixed in late 2023 and early 2024. Several of the pieces take advantage of recordings of, what I think of as, signature sounds in and around my 110+ year-old home. Some of these tracks use sounds in the raw, others are definitely processed. All but one of the pieces is well under 5 minutes. 

One of the featured sounds is my steam-heat radiator that eventually creates an impressive noise-drone; one that consists of loud but very fine-grained inner details that constantly change.

Come for the radiator, stay for the floors.

Review of House Music by Stephen Smoliar

Matt Ingalls’s weekly sfSound concert series will present a Microfestival of Surround Sound Diffusion on June 9, 2024, featuring the members of the San Francisco Tape Music Collective. We will be controlling the spatial diffusion of pieces — works by members of the Collective as well as other composers — over 16 Meyer Sound speakers that will surround the audience.

The concert is June 9 at 7:00 PM
Dresher Ensemble Studio
2201 Poplar Street
Oakland, CA 94607