Suzanne Thorpe and Philip White created "Balancing Act", a psychoacoustic composition which related the list of the ship to the location of the listener on the cabin deck
Richard Garet's "Inner-Outer" harmonized a video projection of the abstract, crystalline effect of light reflections bouncing on the water's surface with a sound collage of recordings made underwater
with "Underfoot", Melissa Clarke, Ben Owen and Shimpei Takeda recreated the Hudson River bed within the ship's bowels, using projections, sound, reflective materials composed of geographical data, and light
Bart Bridge Woodstrup's "Gathering Lore", set up on the ship's bridge, was a weather station which translated current meteorological conditions into sound
Jessica Feldman's evocative piece, "Sirens", heard throughout the ship, and beyond, reflected the ship's original function, warning sailors, simultaneously playing with the natural seductive quality of sound
It's not often that I get a chance to post my own images from my experience of a musical performance. Even if it might be better described as a musical "installation", my ears and my camera both delighted in "Sound in the Frying Pan", a remarkable project put together this past weekend by the Electronic Music Foundation in and on the "Frying Pan", a historic decommissioned lightship moored in the Hudson River at the end of 26th Street. What you see above are a just a few bits from my collection of visual takes on the five separate site-specific compositions created by the artists or artist-collaboratives who worked on this quite literally "phenomenal" sound project, curated by Suzanne Thorpe.
This post, because of the images, may seem to be as much about the "Frying Pan" as is about the music, but I've been to the ship before* and yesterday it wasn't only the squeaking of its old metal plates that I heard as it rolled gently alongside the dock, although that sound accompanied the ensemble introduced both above and below its decks; yesterday the old barnacle-encrusted veteran actually sang.
*
beginning in September 2000, in the halcyon days before Bush 2, with the appearance of Miss Kittin in the program, "BATOFAR: NEW FRENCH ELECTRONICA"
[the images are mine, but the captions are partly borrowed from the press release]