WORKSHOPS + WORK
Birdrock, CA Sound Mark Walk
This walk was created in fall of 2020 by Lexi Pulido, a multi-media artist based in San Diego CA as part of her 8-week Sound Art Group Workshop series at Kalabash School of Music and the Arts. Pulido was inspired by the Elastic City walks of New York. Through the lens of its sound, participants are invited to combine imagination and self reflection with the living, sounding world around Birdrock, CA.
Pocketing Water Workshop
Following discussions on groove, pocket, micro timing, and phrasing, participants experimented with these musical concepts while discovering the ranges of sounds possible by their instrument for this workshop, a bucket of water on a table and various objects. Using rhythm-counting basics from the konnikol oral tradition, participants practiced “slap, plunge, plow” hand-water playing techniques used by water musicians from the northern islands of Vanuatu. With the tools of looping a groove and speech-based rhythms, participants practiced repetition, speed, accents, phrasing, and improvisation over a groove. The workshop was sealed off by a cleansing “sound bath” meditational improv.
Curating Sound Space with Dissonance, Consonance, and Parameters
In exploration of intentionality and analysis of context, quality, musical tools, and parameters, participants discussed and put to practice various methods of curating and intaking sound space using miscellaneous household items as their tools of instrumentation to perform solo and group improvised pieces. Throughout this process, participants discuss and draw connections between sound performance curation (with its qualities of dissonance and consonance) and its relationship to familiarity, context, the pleasant, and the unacceptable.
Graphic Scores and Multi-Media Play
In this workshop, participants engage with graphic scores as they serve to exemplify structural tools for composition, performance, and improv as well as transitive associations between the 5 senses. Participants discuss and create graphic scores with styles of composer communication from “x-y axis”- based to ambiguous guides with or without parameters. Following these discussions and compositional play, participants then work together to create a transformative, multi-media performance piece engaging with 4 out of the 5 senses on a journey beginning with smells to trigger memories and continuing on through haiku to audio, audio to movement, movement to audio, audio to audio, and audio to visual.