PARTICIPATION
Performance:
A sound sculpture performance, played very vigorously as a kind of mad sport, or a spoof of sport, called Creature/Craft. The original idea was a deliberately silly idea, my Quidditch, so to speak, but it turned out to be doable, and should be very crazy-lively, fun and spontaneous to watch, full of surprises.
It develops out of a very simple musical instrument/sound toy I’ve made for many years, the simplest I can devise. It looks like such a simple hunk o’ junk and sounds so wacky-funky that people aren’t intimidated by it, as they are by proper instruments -I mean, try to hand a violin to people and they’ll often decline, intimidated by its delicacy and and preciousness, but my item, which calls itself a Ktwang, is so tough you can toss it down the stairs unscathed if you’re curious what that sounds like.
People aren’t afraid of it, it’s very welcoming.
From Burbank, craft Hollywood, The Artist Monte Thrasher does the physical labor of movie making, building costumes, painting sets, running cables. He collects skills instead of possessions, sketching, sculpting and building, though he’s developing into a storyteller. He wrote for the now-legendary 90s sound sculpture zine Experimental Musical Instrument (Tom Waits’ favorite magazine) about his pioneering experiments with Chester Oswalt exploring the emotions stirred by timbers and frequencies in the powerful but only obliquely sensed ‘silent octave’ of infrasound, sound waves below audibility. They used a unique ‘speaker’ originally built to play back infrasonic elephant vocalizations in the field, nicknamed the Godbox.
Artist Location: Burbank, CA