Action in the Stacks

Klooj w/ Si-si D

Saturday, June 15, 2019
7:30 p.m.


Prelinger Library
301 8th St, Suite 215
San Francisco, CA


​Electronic duo Klooj and Si-si Dance & Performance Art Project (Si-si D) 

Another episode in their allegorical composition series, Action in the Stacks—collisions of sound, action, spoken word, and location... in places with books. The composition explores the tension between storytelling and improvisation through choreographed performance and sonic events that vary depending on location. Drawing Out the Muse: Cecilia is Wondering is inspired by the mysterious, open-ended pursuit of creative knowledge as manifested by the Prelinger Library.


Klooj 
​Thom Blum has been composing electroacoustic music since 1972. His early teachers were James Tenney, Ingram Marshall, and Curtis Roads. Recent performances and installations include tabula rasa (reset) (2018) performed at the 2018 San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Sound Portraits (aural renderings of 18th C. Indian paintings), for the San Francisco Asian Art Museum (2015), the 2015 ISMIR Conference (concert) in Málaga, Spain, the Hörlursfestival, in Solleftea, Sweden (2015), and the 2016 San Francisco Tape Music Festival. He is co-founder of the International Computer Music Association and a member of the six-person San Francisco Tape Music Collective.

Charles Kremenak is a media artist who’s been experimenting with sound and storytelling since the 1980’s. His subject matter has included memory, synesthesia, surveillance, acoustic ecology, and the body as listening instrument. He first met Janet Silk in the early 90’s through their socio-political performance art-work with Ian Pollock. Collaboration with Thom Blum began in 2007, with the live performance cinema ensemble Epic[abridged]. Their work together over the years has involved use of noise, acousmatic sound, ambient drone, free-jazz, and post-digital elements. Their current sound project Klooj explores deeper relationships within site specific location and history.

Si-si D
Janet Silk is the founder, Artistic Director, and Choreographer for Si-si Dance & Performance Art Project (Si-si D) which was launched in 2014. Si-si D is Silk's conceptual framework for exploring the intersections between dance, performance, and experimental art. Si-si D's performances have been inspired by somatic movement practices, Situationist theories of dérive and psychogeography, street art, goth/industrial/black metal music and culture, and butoh dance, especially the work of Kazuo Ohno. In 2018, she began a collaboration with the electronic band Klooj on Action in the Stacks, an allegorical composition to be performed in settings with books.​

---

Drawing Out the Muse:
Cecilia is Wondering

Program notes
​The work consists of five sections.
Musings
A burst of euphoric possibilities that slowly unravels over time. The Shiny Pink Shaman emerges with their fluttering sweeper baton, dusting the space and clearing the air. 
Crossroads
On the edge of a rural soundscape, Robert Johnson sings about his Faustian pact as the Swamp Witch slithers and sways in the grass. 
Room Tones
We find ourselves in the library— a quietly buzzing chamber of research, writing, thinking, and creativity. Here, the books randomly speak, the shelves percussively express themselves and lead us to a more psychological dimension. 
Patient #18
The voice is a mix from a video interview produced in 1961 for the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Los Angeles. Schizoanalytic paper antics overwhelm interior space. The Conjurer arrives.
A Baroque Dish Recipe
​The recitation mirrors some of Gilles Deleuze’s vision as expressed in his book The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque. Deleuze suggests that the world is interpreted as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space and the contemporary subject is nomadic, always in the process of becoming.

---