Artworks and Compositions / Shape Note Music / Writings / News / Jesse
I’ve recently added descriptions, photographs, and recordings of several projects of mine from the past few years to this site. Visit the Artworks and Compositions section of the site to learn about these recent works. Added projects include:
I’m happy to announce the publication of the 2nd edition of the Subliminal History of New York State: Route of Progress tunebook. Published by the Society of Subliminal State, this book features 53 original shape note compositions, with music written by me and lyrics by Carrie Dashow. I designed the book, and Carrie Dashow wrote the book’s words and contributed the illustrations.
For this new edition, roughly 20 songs have been improved or corrected, and the introductions and rudiments of music sections have been updated.
You can order copies of the book for $20 through the Society for a Subliminal State store. Read more about the tunebook in the artworks and compositions section of this site.
The Society for a Subliminal State, the organization I co-founded with Carrie Dashow has published a hardcover tunebook featuring all 53 shape note songs written during our summer tour of the Erie Canal with the Subliminal History of New York State.
Each song is accompanied by texts written by Carrie contextualizing the words and music, as well as occasional illustrations of how the poems were performed as participatory readings during the tour.
Order copies from the Society’s store
This summer I’m on tour with the Subliminal History of New York State, a tour with Carrie Dashow along the Erie Canal excavating subliminal histories and writing them into shape note songs, then presenting these songs with a video installation at final presentations in each location.
I’ll be too busy to post updates here along the way, but will have created a blog for the tour: Route of Progress which Carrie and I will be updating regularly.
Also on the web site for the tour is a complete schedule, podcasts, our press room, and lots of information about the project. Come see us this June and July in Troy, Schenectady, Rome, Palmyra, Lockport, or Lily Dale!
I’m proud to announce the release of a new CD, Under Island, in partnership with Gigantic ArtSpace. The CD, a collaboration with Carrie Dashow, features eleven original shape note songs telling the subliminal history of Roosevelt Island.
The limited edition CD comes packaged in a paperboard case with a screenprinted cover, and includes an editioned, hand-printed tunebook containing scores to the songs so you can sing along.
You can listen to the Under Island CD at Gigantic ArtSpace at 59 Franklin Street in Manhattan, where the disc is for sale through January. On December 9, you can buy the CD at La Superette at Eyebeam in Chelsea.
I’m five days into my weeklong AIRtime Residency at free103point9’s Wave Farm in Acra, NY. I’ve been making a lot of progress toward realizing an interactive installation of the Azariah songs in a forest setting.
I’ve also been captivated by the abundance of mushrooms along the paths through Wave Farm’s forest. There must be tens of thousands of mushrooms here, and dozens of varieties. I’ve been photographing the mushrooms as I work in the forest, and I’ve been posting the pictures to Flickr along with text mostly about the mushrooms, but intermittently detailing the work I’ve been doing.
See the Mushrooms:
Knock-Knock, an interactive installation I created in collaboration with Bettina Bloc, Olivia Robinson, and Amy Scarfone, will open this Friday in the Boston Cyberarts Festival at Kendall Square. Knock-Knock evokes contemporary communications networks using cardboard and copper wire. This collaborative project is a network of suspended cardboard boxes, linked by contact microphones and drivers, transmitting sound across the box network through the cardboard filters. The contact microphones are precisely tuned so that tapped messages can travel short distances along the network or cycle around the ring, depending on the strength of the tap.
There will be a reception this Friday, April 22 6-9 p.m. Knock-Knock is in the Vertex Building at Kendall Square, just off of Third St. near the Kendall T stop.
More information about Knock-Knock is on the Knock-Knock web site.