Morton Subotnick to Visit Gray Area Tomorrow

Electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick (from the Gray Area Web page for this event)

It is unclear why this item was overlooked in the BayImproviser Calendar (and, therefore, did not show up on this week’s Bleeding Edge article); but Morton Subotnick will be in San Francisco tomorrow. Those that prefer to bury history in order to ignore it may not know that Subotnick is one of the leading pioneers in interactive electronics and multimedia. He was one of the three co-founders of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (the other two being Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender). I came to know him as one of the first composers to work with the modular voltage-controlled synthesizer created by Donald Buchla. (I visited Subotnick’s studio in Greenwich Village when I was a graduate student.)

Tomorrow night Subotnick will give a special live performance of As I Live and Breathe. Subotnick himself describes this project as follows:

“As I Live & Breathe” features live and sampled vocalizing along with some of my most advanced electronic performance techniques in a technological environment that I never expected, in my lifetime, to experience. It starts with my breath, moves through a vocalising cadenza of utterance gestures and ends with a sensitive and sequenced use of intricate oscillator rhythms and melodic fragments.

That performance will then be augmented with live visual animation provided by Lillevan.

This performance will be given a “preview teaser” with a screening of the 35-minute documentary Subotnick: Portrait of an Electronic Music Pioneer, produced by Waveshaper Media.

This performance will begin at 8 p.m. tomorrow, June 23. The venue will be Gray Area, and the doors will open at 7 p.m. The Gray Area Art And Technology Theater is located in the Mission at 2665 Mission Street. Tickets will be sold at the door for $30, but they can also be purchased online through the event page on the Gray Area Web site. This program is co-produced by Recombinant Media Labs, Waveshaper Media, and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco.