Re: Good week for looping in Santa Cruz

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 2:27 PM -0800 2/6/05, William Walker wrote:

>at a few points in the show the rain pouring on the roof created an 
>amazing ambience. One point in particular when Michael Manring was 
>playing a beautiful long toned textural piece, it was if the 
>environmental sounds were being cued from the mixing board.

I had a similar experience a while back in Rome. The venue was a 
circus-style tent called Spaziozero, and the occasion was a festival 
of contemporary voice (I was there with Diamanda Galas). Pauline 
Oliveros was also on the festival, and she asked me to mix for her, 
in quad. It had been unseasonably cold during the preceding few 
weeks. Rome was covered in ice and as you can imagine the tent was 
horribly cold. Fortunately a day or so before Pauline's gig there was 
a thaw, then continuous rain. As PO described it, the sound of the 
rain was like "a thousand spirit drummers" and she went with it. 
Whenever the a gust of wind would sweep the raindrops across the 
tent, she would make a phrase on her accordion and I would pan her 
sound across the quad system.

A less propitious windy performance happened in Santa Cruz during one 
of the "years of the tent" when the Cabrillo Music Festival was held 
on the UCSC campus. The typical weather pattern was for the wind to 
come up off Monterey Bay in the late afternoon but to died down befor 
the evening concert, but one particular night it was delayed by about 
an hour. During the first part of the concert the tent flapped 
mightily against the wooden uprights around the periphery. I did my 
best to ride the sound system gain so the rear of the audience could 
hear the music (though this made me unpopular with the front rows) 
and the ushers positioned themselves between the wooden uprights and 
the canvas tent walls, trying vainly to keep the two apart.
-- 

______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://salamandersongs.com
http://ill-wind.com