Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg

Along with Carrie Dashow, I’m very excited to announce the Society for a Subliminal State’s first annual members party, on no other day than March 4th. The party will include: a pot-luck, a trip to the Subliminal State, shape note singing, and performances by two Society member bands.

You must be a member of the Society for a Subliminal State to attend. Membership is $5 (annual dues). You will also get Subliminal Statements in the mail, and a patch bearing the Society’s insignia.

Join on the Society’s web site. You can also read more about March Fourth.

Come to Eyebeam Sept. 27, 6 PM for the opening of Interference. Eyebeam is located at 540 West 21st Street, NYC.

The show includes Subliminal History of New York State: Route of Progress (2007) an installation of community-shot video, original shape note songs and ephemera from this summer’s Route of Progress tour.

Jesse and Carrie will lead a shape note singing workshop (1-4 PM) and performance (5-6 PM) at Eyebeam on October 13

The exhibition will run through Nov. 10.

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!

Join me and Carrie Dashow on Thursday January 11, 2007, for a performance of Under Island and a shape note singing school at Gigantic ArtSpace in New York. The singing school will be held from 5-7 PM and the performance begins at 7:30 PM.

Singing school participants will learn the basics of shape note singing and will learn original shape note songs that will be featured in the performance later that evening. Carrie Dashow will join the singing school to give an introduction to the Under Island story and the practice of subliminal history.

During the performance of Carrie’s Under Island story, the singing school class will join Carrie, Jesse, and the audience in singing several shape note songs, from the workshop.

Documentation of the Subliminal History of New York State, Rosendale Edition, will be included this week in “LOOK@ROSENDALE,” a show at Rosendale’s No_Space Gallery. The show is a part of Listen with Your Eyes, a video festival held annually in Rosendale.

Our video is a three minute reprise of the event, featuring the song “Mortal Mortar Made of Death,” and edited by Carrie Dashow. The show at No_Space Gallery opens November 10, with a reception from 6-9 PM and will remain installed through November 17.

Visit the Festival web page for more information.

Gigantic Art Space is exhibiting Under Island, Carrie Dashow’s artist’s book featuring my typography and original shape note compositions. The show “Special_Reconnaissance” at GAS will also include new sound recordings of 11 songs from Under Island, recorded at the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, NY.

“Special_Reconnaissance” opens Thursday November 9 from 5-9 and stays open through January 19. On January 11, I will lead a shape note singing workshop at the gallery with Carrie, followed by a performance from The Subliminal History of New York State.

North Adams, a sound installation created in collaboration with Carrie Dashow, will be included in “Made in North Adams,” a show set to open this Friday November 3, at the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA.

North Adams is a sound installation featuring an original shape note song that I wrote in 2005 to a text written by Carrie Dashow. The song was a component of the sound for Pent-Up and Under Gone. The North Adams installation features a recording of the song sung by five shape note singers and is accompanied by a score, typeset for the show.

In 1992 a meteorite struck a parked car in Peekskill, NY. No one saw it hit, until now.

Carrie Dashow and I will present Eat Meat Meteorite, a new chapter in our Subliminal History of New York State, this month for the opening weekend of Peekskill Project, an annual arts festival organized by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.

We’ll be at the city waterfront, relating the story of the Peekskill Fireball — a meteorite that struck a parked car in Peekskill on October 9, 1992 — running a hamburger stand and science fair display. Our stand will illuminate the experience of the peekskill fireball, inviting visitors to ingest a meteorite and reenact the famous collision.

We will be presenting Eat Meat Meteorite during the weekend of September 16-17. On Saturday, we will be at the waterfront in Peekskill, right by the Metro North train station. On Sunday we will be at the Charles Point ferry landing.

For this year’s Conflux (a psychogeography festival co-produced by Glowlab and iKatun) I’ve organized The Tune our Lips to Sing Quartet, a quartet of street-walking shape note singers. The Quartet will conduct a singing tour of Brooklyn, beginning and ending at the McCaig-Welles Gallery. We will sing songs from the Sacred Harp on pages corresponding with the numbers that members of the quartet recognize as they walk.

The Tune our Lips to Sing Quartet is Greg Mulkern, treble; Allison Schofield, alto; Aldo Ceresa, tenor; and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, bass.

The Quartet will conduct two tours, beginning at noon and 6 PM on September 14. Visit the Quartet’s web site for more information.

The Widow Jane Mine event last week was a great success. We had a very strong class of ten during the workshop and more than fifty people joined us for the performance/assembly in the mine. Feedback was good and we were able to document the performance in sound, video, and still image. I’ll be posting some of that documentation soon!

Meanwhile, this coming weekend, I’ll be singing with a large group of Sacred Harp singers at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. We’ll be singing at 11 AM on Sunday, August 6.

Read more about our appearance on the Newport Folk Festival web site. And come check us out if you’re in the area.

What: Shape note singing school of Subliminal History
Where: Widow Jane Mine, Century House Historical Society, Rosendale, NY, 668 Route 213.
When: July 30, 2-5 PM (Workshop), 6 PM (Performance/Assembly).

This July 30, come attend our Singing School Workshop inside the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, NY. Learn how to sing shape note music and discover for yourself the Rosendale edition of the Subliminal History of New York State, a narrative about living land and history being developed by Carrie Dashow and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg.

From 2-5 PM, the singing workshop will mix instruction on how to sing shape note music, an early American singing style still in practice today, with stories communicated from the living land about Rosendale’s cement industry and the vast inland sea that covered much of the region in Cretaceous times. At 6 PM the class will perform with Carrie and Jesse.

Both events are open to the public. Registration required for the workshop. $10 donation. No musical experience necessary. Please bring a snack to eat between 5 and 6, and invite your family and friends to come to the assembly. To register call 845-658-9900 or email mail@centuryhouse.org.

Brought to you by the Society for a Subliminal State and the Century House Historical Society.

For more information, visit Subliminal State and you can email Carrie and Jesse.

Something slumbers sunk, mid the tunnel mud,
Utterance arouse, lumps begin to show.
Tintinnabulate! Sight the air aware,
Forge a fort of tude, planetary ship.
–Carrie Dashow

Tintinnabulate is an ensemble of improvising artists founded by Pauline Oliveros at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005. The members include Pauline Oliveros, Alex Chechile, Yael Kanarek, Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, and Bart Woodstrup.

When: 8 PM, Saturday March 18
Where: the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology, 250 Jordan Road, Troy, NY (in the Rensselaer Technology Park)

My MFA Thesis Show, Azariah: Whom Jehovah Helps is this Saturday.

The show will be a participatory shape note singing, and begins at 2 PM on March fourth (please be on time) at the Old Songs Community Art Center at 37 South Main Street in Voorheesville, NY (directions).

The singing follows the story of a young man from the Burnt-over district in nineteenth century Western New York who begins to experience visions of singing prophets in the wake of the Great Disappointment.

After the singing, there will be a pot-luck supper (please bring dishes that can be served cold), and from 7:30-10:00 PM is the monthly, Albany-area Sacred Harp singing.

Visit my blog for more information on Azariah.

This Thursday, Tintinnabulate will be playing with Pauline Oliveros and Brown/RISD’s MEME Improvisation Group at Eyebeam in Chelsea, presented by the Upgrade! New York. The performance will be followed by a discussion, and marks the first physical meeting of two ensembles who have previously performed only over the Internet.

Read more about Tintinnabulate, Pauline, and MIG on Eyebeam’s web site, the networked_performance blog, or in this report on Rhizome.

Addendum

The show was a success, with over 100 people in attendance. I performed with two wireless microphones, free to roam about the building, running one through Pauline’s Extended Instrument System and the other straight to two of our sixteen speakers.

Pictures from the show are online, and will be followed by sound and video documentation soon.

This Sunday, I’m showing a selection of new tunebooks in progress, performing with Tintinnabulate, and leading a brief singing school from the Under Island songs during my department’s year end open studios.

In my studio at RPI’s West Hall, I’ll be showing drafts of Parsons Cove, a tunebook I’m developing into a score for book and soprano for Anne Rhodes. The performance piece will be premiered by Anne at Wesleyan University on February 18, 2006. Alongside Parsons Cove is a bound draft copy of the Under Island tunebook I’m creating with Carrie. A four-channel sound installation with two shape note score transparencies mounted on photographs rounds out the open studio.

During the auditorium program, I’ll be performing with Marshall Trammell, Pauline Oliveros, Thom Kubli, Alex Chechile, and Yael Kanarek as Tintinnabulate. At the conclusion of the auditorium show, I’ll be leading three songs from the Under Island tunebook: “Climate,” “Awaken,” and “End.”

This Thursday December 1, 2005 at 4PM in RPI’s West Hall 118 Tintinnabulate (me, Alex Chechile, Yael Kanarek, and Bart Woodstrup) with guest artist Thom Kubli from EMPAC will perform a network concert from RPI in Troy, NY with the AMP Ensemble and guest artist Pauline Oliveros in Tempe, AZ.

Tintinnabulate will also be performing on Sunday December 11 with Pauline Oliveros in the West Hall Auditorium during “Obsess Profess Process: Open Studios with Electronic Artists,” my department’s end-of-semester graduate open studios event. I will also be presenting my own work during “OPP.” I’ll announce that later.

This Thursday, I’ll be performing in a realtime, multi-local concert with RPI’s Tintinnabulate and Brown’s Meme Improvisation Group (MIG). The show will feature improvised sound, music, dance, and video.

The performance will be held at RPI in West Hall 118 on Thursday, November 17, at 8 PM. MIG will be transmitting from Brown University’s Grant Recital Hall.

I will be performing as a vocalist in the concert, and Alex Chechile will be processing my voice. In addition to singing, I’ll be performing with a set of sand dollars that I collected on Parsons’ Cove beach in Kennebunkport, Maine, during the summer of 2004.

Tintinnabulate is:

• Alex Chechile
• Yael Kanarek
• Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg
• Charles Veasey
• Bart Woodstrup

MIG is:

• Damon Baker
• Brian Knoth
• Kevin Patton
• Butch Rovan
• Carmen Montoya
• Shawn Greenlee
• Polly Hall
• Mathew Warne

Carrie and I are presenting 11 of the songs we’ve written as the first chapter of our Subliminal History of New York State as a first reading of just-finished music by unrehearsed non-singers (you) on November 10 at the CAC in North Adams.

Please join us for a reception at 6 and a participatory singing at 7. Come sing the story and rise the beast! Singing experience not necessary. Watchers welcome. Tunebooks will be provided. Wear warm clothes.

After carrying out psychical and physical research for months, Carrie uncovered Roosevelt Island as a living breathing monster that after gaining its sight, desires to leave Manhattan’s East River. In its expression here, the Under Island story is told through original shape note song poems, written by Carrie and Jesse. Under Island is the first chapter of The Subliminal History of New York State, a singing school tour of New York State by Carrie and Jesse planned for the summer of 2006.

Air Raid, my 2003 sound installation mixing recordings of the shock and awe bombing campaign in Baghdad, Iraq, and air raid sirens in Kuwait City, Kuwait, will be presented publicly for the third time later this month. Air Raid will be included in the Zeppelin 2005 Festival de Proyectos Sonoros: “Acústicas del Control,” show at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, in Barcelona, Spain. The festival will take place from October 19-22, 2005, and is jointly organized by the CCCB, Orqestra del Caos, and Sonoscop.

Along with other accepted sound works, Air Raid will be broadcast to radio receivers spread around the CCCB, in the Joan Coromines Plaza, on the passways and at the hall of the Centre.

I’m running sound design for a multi-location improvisation tonight featuring Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster. The official concert will take place at Mills College in Oakland California, where Pauline and Stuart will meet projected on a large onstage screen. A pair of dancers, choreographed by June Watanabe, will dance on stage in front beneath the screen. In their respective studios at Rensselaer in Troy, New York, and DXArts in Seattle, Washington, Pauline and Stuart will perform as they receive live video and audio feeds from the other locations.

I’ll be running the Troy location’s mixing board during the performance, after designing the sound set up last week. Also helping out in Troy are Alex Chechile, Joe Fiegl, Charles Veasey, and Bart Woodstsrup.

The concert is at 7:30 PST and at 10:30 in Troy in Pauline’s West Hall studio on the first floor.

The Tang Museum has decided to extend my installation, Rapture/Rupture past its September 11 closing date. The exhibition will now be on display for an additional few weeks. I’ll post the new closing date as soon as it is finalized.

Addendum

Rapture/Rupture will close October 26.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be creating a sound installation for the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY this summer as the fifth iteration of the Museum’s “Elevator Music” series.

My installation, Rapture/Rupture, will open June 25 along with a new show featuring Michael Oatman, and “Weapons of Mass Dissemination,” a show of WWI and WWII propaganda posters. The work will incorporate “Russia,” a shape note music tune written in 1786 by Daniel Read, and the first song I led at a Sacred Harp singing convention.

Recordings of two shape note music compositions of mine, “North Adams” and “Undergone” will feature in a sound installation I’m creating to accompany The Informants, a work by Carrie Dashow in her collaborative solo show with Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua at Jessica Murray Projects in New York City, Pent-Up and Under Gone.

Working with Albany-area shape note singers, I’m creating recordings of the two tunes for five speakers, with each speaker playing back the voice of one singer. Each speaker is paired with an “informant” a character of sorts in the form of a video sculpture, created by Carrie. The work is juxtaposed with a giant lighthouse sculpture built by Matt and Jesse, and a video depicting the “eye” of the lighthouse by Carrie. Carrie also wrote the texts to “Undergone” and “North Adams.”

Pent-Up and Under Gone opens on May 27.

Two new works of mine, Shade and Lawrence are featured this afternoon in MaFiA Show at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Lawrence mixes diary, tunebook, and recorded spoken word, creating a new home for journal entries removed from Jesse’s personal website.

Shade is a five-channel sound installation expressing Jesse’s relationship to a shape note music song written 200 years ago — “Evening Shade” by Stephen Jenks.

My mobile audioblogging project Metaradio will be featured in this year’s Psy-Geo Provflux, a “weekend-long event … part festival and part conference” that will “take place throughout Providence to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city.” Metaradio > Providence will be a featured Tech Mapping project.

For more about Metaradio, visit the Metaradio > Troy prototype web site, or read my introduction to the Metaradio > Providence project.

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.

I will be participating in the Boston Cyberarts Festival this Spring, collaborating with Bettina Bloc, Olivia Robinson, and Amy Scarfone, creating an installation reconstructing a communication network out of low-tech materials.

Our work will be installed, along with work by Bill Seaman, and some Brown University graduate students, at 675 West Kendall Street. The Cyberarts Festival (and our show) runs from April 22 through May 8, 2005.

My new piece Victory/Concession will be featured in this weekend’s Graduate Exhibition, SNOWNO SHOW, at Rensselaer. Work by all of the graduate students enrolled in my program will be included.

Victory/Concession depicts the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns at the moments of their closure. Victory/Concession retraces the myths of evangelical Christianity, moral values, urban and rural, and red and blue, and exposes devious campaign strategies and a complicated country.

The show will run from 5-9 PM on Sunday, December 12 with a reception at 4 PM and a screening and performances at 6 PM. The show is all around West Hall on the Rensselaer campus in Troy, NY. Feel free to email me for directions.

I’ll be participating in an exhibition at the Firlefanz Gallery, in Albany, NY during the first 11 days of September. The show is called “Shock and Awe: Some American Art,” and is billed as “an invitational art exhibition reflecting on the 9/11 tragedy, the war in Iraq, the current political climate, etc.” My piece is Air Raid, a sound installation that premiered on April, 23 2003, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

Air Raid superimposes sounds of the “shock and awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad and the air raid warnings in Kuwait City from March, 2003 upon the physical space of the gallery, making the experience of the threat of war and its aural experience palpable and immediate.

“Shock and Awe” at Firlefanz encompasses a performance series, and works by over 90 artists, all shown in a very small space. The show will culminate in a closing reception on September 11, from 5-9 PM.

Listen to Air Raid in the works section of this site. Check out the Firlefanz Gallery online and read more about “Shock and Awe.”