Finding Folk: Workshop and Sonic Performance
as part of MERL: A Folk Late
at The MERL
Tuesday, 20 November 2018, 7 – 10 pm
Jeff Morton will lead a workshop in which participants explore, create, and present sounds collected in and from rural settings. Participants will engage in collective sound walks, listen to and make field recordings, and then use these materials to create sound and musical compositions in a kind of extended folk music, similar in some respects to ‘anti-folk’. Transcription is central to the workshop, and will be realized in a variety of ways, including (a) digital analysis, using microphones and recording technologies to explore sound and to visually represent actions over time; (b) narrative ‘topic’ mapping, where sounds are given identities and organized as in a story; and (c) live ‘headphone transcription’, where performers play objects/instruments in real time, following along and imitating pre-recorded sounds they (alone) are hearing.
‘Anti-folk’ is a contemporary form of participatory music that engages sound art, improvisation, composition, and a sense of naïve or amateur realization whereby a true folk aesthetic is discovered outside of the otherwise compartmentalized and commercial genre of folk music. Any and all people can participate, regardless of skill level, and the result is often playful and disarming. In this workshop participants will work together to create their own unique sound through a process of recording, listening, and transcription. The result will be a varied set of compositions and guided improvisations that participants present in live performance.
Jeff Morton is a composer, musician, and media artist whose projects are playful, experimental explorations of sound, sound-making, communication, and compositional processes using found and musical objects or materials. In performance, composition, and installation, his work has been presented by ensembles and in galleries and festivals across Canada and internationally. Jeff Morton lives in rural southeast Saskatchewan, Canada.
The event has been supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts