2023 September Catskill Listening Club Offerings

Club meetings returned after an entire summer away. We gathered in Leeds on Friday evening, September 15. Present were Jared Mezzocchi, Nicole Cohen, Meredith Kooi, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Lisa Schonberg, David Garland, Kenji Garland, Zach Layton, Rebecca Bray, and Jimmy Garver. Below is a brief description of what went down.

Garlands. David shared a piece from the current Garlands album. He began creating this mode of music four years ago, soothing his ailing wife, Anne. This music is made with his son (and club member) Kenji, also present at the September meeting. We all talked about the progression of the Garlands music, and how the music seems to have changed with the passing of Anne. Listen to the new work here. 

Jimmy Garver. I shared a remix of some music I’m working on for an art installation called [siccer]. The original music was created by Holland Andrews and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and it’s part of the [siccer] show currently running at Portland Institute for Contemporarty Art in Portland, Oregon. Will Rawls is the lead artist and choreographer. I learned a lot, just listening to this in the presence of the group. Thank you for that! Since this meeting, I installed the piece on 15-channel system at PICA, and it was very rewarding. I'm really proud of this large body of work and if you're out West, go see the show!

Lisa Schonberg. Lisa was in the middle of a wave farm residency at the time of the club's September meeting. (And she lives in Troy! So, now she's a club member.) Her ongoing research contemplates cryptic insect sound. At Wave Farm, she was considering the effects cellular phone wavelengths might have on ants, whose small body size makes them more susceptible to impacts of absorption of these high frequencies. She shared with us a composition which uses field recordings and the stridulations of bugs as a palette. Read more about LIsa’s work on the Wave Farm website here.

Zach Layton. In March of this year, Zach premiered a new piece of his music at Roulette in Brooklyn called Concerto for Nepenthae and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn. He’s in the middle of mixing it now and is planning a public release in the coming months. He shared a section of it with us, and from what we had time to listen to, it’s pretty freaking great! The entire concert was archived and you can listen to it here.