Author: B

JANUARY 2012 Shows

| B


JANUARY 13, 2012
DC POETS, RUTHLESS GRIP READING SERIES
7pm
Black Fox Lounge, 723 Connecticut Avenue (near Dupont Circle)

DC Poetry Website
Bonnie Jones / Ric Royer / Sara Wintz

———————————————————————————————————————————

JANUARY 20, 2012
14 KARAT CABARET
9:00pm
14 Karat Cabaret
218 West Saratoga St., Baltimore, MD

First time collaboration between filmmaker Stephanie Barber and Bonnie Jones

———————————————————————————————————————————

JANUARY 21, 2012
THE RED ROOM
8:30pm
Red Room, Baltimore, MD

Collaboration with: 
John Berndt
Khristian Weeks
Andy Hayleck
Tyler Wilcox
Paul Neidhardt

———————————————————————————————————————————

January 26, 2012
Rhythms of Time Sharing (RoTS) in collaboration with Vox Populi, Philadelphia
7:30pm
Aux/Vox Populi, Philadelphia PA
Kiosk Collective

On Thursday 26 January, 7:30pm, AUX presents the second Art Writing event, following November’s kick-off. Curated by London-based collective KIOSK, who will remain “present” throughout the night via a Skype screening, the evening features art writing and performance from artists in the UK and the USA by Nightwatch, The Collect, The Original Copy, Bonnie Jones, and Helen Kaplinsky.

———————————————————————————————————————————

JANUARY 28, 2012
PHILADEPHIA SOUND FORUM & AUX
8:00pm
Vox Populi, Philadelphia PA
View press release

This event will feature two pieces in composer/improviser Eric Laska’s Vigilance Improvisations framework:

“Mutability” performed by Bryan Eubanks and Eric Laska
“Recursion” performed by Bonnie Jones and Reed Evan Rosenberg

Vigilance Improvisations is a series of structured frameworks for improvising electronic musicians. The archetypical design consists of two musicians, one working with computer and the other with non-computer electronics,  improvising together while following unique visual scores. Each score corresponds to material changes related to the opposing musician’s instrumental sound source. The musicians are instructed to watch a designated meter vigilantly over the course of an improvisation all the while remaining conscious of the possible visual correlations that may or may not be provoked by a chance correspondence between a reading of the meter and the score. The scores are hosted in a folder online and the visual content therein is entirely sourced from the Internet. No recommendations are made concerning sound.

DECEMBER 2011 Shows

| B

———————————————————————————————————————————

December 7th, 2011, The Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, PA
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/1211.php#7 

MATERIAL CONSTRUCTION: AN INVESTIGATION IN TEXT AND MOVEMENT AS ARTISTIC MATERIALS

A participatory event with Meg Foley of Moving Parts, Bonnie Jones, Laura Neuman, Megan Bridge and Peter Price of Fidget Space

In artistic practice and production, TEXT and MOVEMENT are materials with distinct texture, history, function, possibility, charge. This evening’s program includes (five) artists, working in choreography, performance, sound and the written word. Through a variety of multimedia performance, “reading” and participatory workshop, each of these artists will lead audience members through an embodied and communal investigation of TEXT and MOVEMENT: what they are, what they do, the overlap and interstice, the way instances of each construct space, bodies, and community, the possibility of a map, the relationships we find and make.

———————————————————————————————————————————

December 2nd, 2011, Red Room, Baltimore, MD
Baltimore Video and Performance Artists

PROJECTIONS

Window Projections, Eric Franklin and Bob Wagner
the hunch that caused the winning streak and fought the doldrums mightily, Stephanie Barber
Untitled, Andy Hayleck
Rui, Jorge Martins
if the atomic bomb should go off, sitting on top of the world, Heather Romney
ARP Face, M.C. Schmidt

PERFORMANCES
Eric Franklin, banjo
Bonnie Jones

http://www.redroom.org/

OCTOBER 2011 Shows

| B

October 18th, 2011, Philadelphia, PA
Moles Not Molar Reading Series
7pm, @ Vox Populi Gallery – 319 N 11th St., 3rd Floor

AN EVENING OF POEMS & MUSICS featuring:

JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI (Brooklyn)

BONNIE JONES (Baltimore)

CAROLINA MAUGERI (Philadelphia)
w/ TRISTAN DAHN (Philadelphia)

voxpopuligallery.org

Louis Armstrong – (What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue – New York, 22.07. 1929

| B

I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue” – all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the while mound watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aides me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette some jokers gave me reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.

Invisible Man, “Prologue”, Ralph Ellison, 1952

Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong’s “Black and Blue” 1929 playing simultaneously (with reverb)

I first read  Invisible Man in my senior year of high school AP English class. It completely wrecked my mind – in part because there was a urgency that communicated through this novel that I could just barely grasp and understand – it was as heavy as it was breathless – insistent in it’s poetics. I didn’t understand about 90% of it! 

I read the novel again in college in two different courses – a Black Literature and Comparative Literature Intro class. Each time, deepening my understanding and drawing out more of a relationship to it’s protagonist and the questions of visibility/invisibility and the refusal of white culture to recognize non-white subjectivity. The tension that exists in, as Sylvia Wynter cited by Weheliye notes

‘‘the possibility of their/our recognition of this imposed ‘invisibility,’ which leads to a new demand for another concept of freedom, another possibility of a livable being that culminates in [the protagonist’s] recognition of  his alterity.’’ (20)

As Weheliye notes, by situating the protagonist’s “non-subjectivity” in the ocular domain, the visual space – there is then inherent possibility within the sonic space – a place for the formation of the black subject. 

As a young asian adoptee in a white family within a predominantly small white town – the idea of double-consciousness introduced by Invisible Man, the conflicted subject formed by the hypervisibility or invisibility formed by those around me was particularly resonant to my own personal experience. 

As a 45 year old musician today, the link between my sound practice over the years and this particular desire to understand one’s body and subject outside of it’s visual appearance – to find one’s own subject that resists the legibility of those who define me by their gaze is deeply embedded in my work. 

Rather than suggest that this dimension (subjectivity) can be converted into or represented in sound, I would like to retain its ‘‘scandalous’’ qualities, since the sonic realm grants aural ‘‘opacities’’ qua subjectivity: pathways to moments of subjectivity set off against subjectivity per se; a sonic subjectivity that does not lose sight of the black subject’s visual interpellation but noisily ‘‘rings’’ and ‘‘clangs’’ beyond, above, below, and beside the optic nonetheless. (Weheliye 114)

I’ve made a few versions of this experiment with five recordings, the first was just having the five different embedded videos of the record playing as soon as you load the page – This created a short delay based on the few milliseconds it took for the videos to load sequentially. For this time around, I duplicated the recordings in a DAW and tweaked some reverb settings to hear the the “flesh” of these recordings in space – the bodies of sound. Below is my interpretation of the Ellison passage and the video of the original 1929 recording on Odeon. 

Wanting to embody and be embodied by sound, the protagonist imagines his flesh as an eardrum, transforming his corporeal schema into a channel for his sonic subjectivity, which, in turn, emerges only in relation to his scopic interpellation. Thus, the sonic and the scopic, far from being diametrically opposed, provide occasion for one another; visual subjection begets sonic subjectivation. (Weheliye 10)

Weheliye, Alexander G. “‘I Am I Be’: The Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity.” Boundary 2 30, no. 2 (May 1, 2003): 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-2-97.

SEPTEMBER 2011 Shows

| B

September 1-15, 2011
The Stone, NYC, the corner of avenue C and 2nd street
$10 per set, separate admissions
http://thestonenyc.com/

I’ll be performing two concerts as part of the Erstwhile Records Amplify 2011 Festival at the Stone NYC.

9/2, 8:00 PM: Maria Chavez/Bonnie Jones
9/7, 10:00 PM: Toshi Nakamura/English (Joe Foster/Bonnie Jones)

Full festival schedule at the Erstwhile website.
http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/

———————————————————————————————————————————

September 11th, 2011, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
Details TBA
http://www.timara.oberlin.edu/concerts.html

Toshi Nakamura/English (Joe Foster/Bonnie Jones)

AUGUST 2011 Shows

| B

August 20 & 27th, 2011, 3pm – 9pm
HxWxDxTx2
Collaboration with Marley Freeman & Trisha Baga
Hunter College, Hunter Leubsdorf Gallery Windows, New York, NY.
Curated by ACE Curatorial Collective – More Info

Trisha, Marley & I will transform the gallery windows at the Leubsdorf Gallery of Hunter College for 2 consecutive Saturdays in August 2011. The project, title “Johnnycake” is a multimedia performance installation.

 


MAY 2011 Shows

| B

BONNIE JONES & SUZANNE THORPE IN HOUSTON TEXAS

April 30, Labotonica, Houston, TX
7pm | $5

Bonnie Jones
Suzanne Thorpe

Hear/Her/Ear #5: a series devoted to women in experimental music.

WORKSHOP: 12-2pm Workshop- Electronic Music: Powered by Girls (Workshop co-presented by Nameless Sound & Girls Rock Camp Houston)

http://labotanica.org/

May 1, Nameless Sound, Houston TX
http://www.namelesssound.org/

May 2nd and 3rd – Workshops sponsored by Nameless Sound

———————————————————————————————————————————

May 6, Lab Experiments Festival, Baltimore, MD
9.30pm | $6

I’ll be performing on Friday night of this two day festival and highly recommend both nights – some amazing artists on the bill.

http://labexperiments.org/

MARCH / APRIL 2011 Shows

| B

March 29, New Music Collective: Fixed Media III, Charleston, SC
8pm | pay-what-you-can

I have a short text video in the program featuring works by Robert Ashley, Henri Chopin, Language Removal Services and others.

John Rivers Communications Museum
College of Charleston
58 George Street, Charleston, South Carolina

http://www.newmusiccollective.org/wpnewsite/?page_id=16

———————————————————————————————————————————

Friday April 1st, Show & Tell at Minas Gallery, Baltimore, MD
8:00pm,  donations

Bonnie Jones/ Smelling Salts Amusements / Christine Ferrera

Boîte (rhymes with kumquat) is a series of intimate performances coinciding with Hampden’s monthly first Friday celebration. This month it’s the latest edition of Show& Tell with host Lauren Bender. The evening culminates in an open mic of sorts, where audience members are welcome to present their own objects or ideas for show & tell. Come sip a glass of wine and be amazed!
http://showandtellseries.blogspot.com/

———————————————————————————————————————————

Friday April 8th, The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, NYC
10pm

Bonnie Jones / Samita Sinha

http://poetryproject.org