Welcome listeners to the 15th installment in the Anechoic Chamber audio documentary series. Our guest for this edition is San Francisco-based artist and acoustic researcher Michael Gendreau. Gendreau has been active as a solo artist or musical collaborator since the early 1980s, gradually diverging from the realm of conventional recorded music by recording the sounds of built structures and amplifying them in performance scenarios. This use of buildings themselves as a kind of “loudspeaker” is one dramatic and unequivocally physical aspect of his work, but certainly not the only one. With his several decades long research into the concept of parataxis - that is, the juxtaposition of multiple pieces of verbal information that have no immediately clear relation to one another - Gendreau has immersed himself in the worlds of linguistics and logic, while also alighting on the ideal conceptual apparatus with which to animate works of experimental music. Among his other sonic adventures, Gendreau has also made his own unique contribution to the world of so-called “turntablism,” using the volatile medium of lathe-cut records as a performance tool. From his early work with ‘zine production to his publication of the densely packed yet accessible Commonplace Book of Parataxis, Gendreau’s creative life has been held together by several common golden threads of elementalism, openness to collaboration, and - in his own words - a belief that ““Creativity arises with effective interaction between two modes of thinking.” music used in this episode: Michael Gendreau: “Drowning” 12” and selections from “Concerted Structures” CD Crawling with Tarts: “Cameo and “Candy Tooth Ceylon” Collision Stories: untitled 2 and 3 from “Those Missing Will Complete Us” Artist links: http://www.michaelgendreau.net http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=140 https://soundcloud.com/michael-lee-gendreau http://www.collisionstories.com/ http://rajar.bandcamp.com/releases Anechoic Chamber links: donate via Paypal - tbwb@protonmail.com general host info: www.thomasbeywilliambailey.net
Anechoic Chamber Episode 15: Michael Gendreau