Porch Swing Orchestra is an art project that pairs music recorded outside with images made on-site. Performed and recorded at home and away, solo and with others. Our orchestra is comprised of birds, guitars, artists, poets, and passing cars that spontaneously create ephemeral symphonic chance-inspired compositions. The original site and hub for all things PSO can be found at porchswingorchestra.org
This episode is the first of a mini-series of pods highlighting artists who are presenting in VAST IS THE SEA, a series of live events exploring the interconnections between images and sound curated by PSO and hosted by Co-lab Projects in Austin Texas.
The series will take place over 4 Saturdays and feature 2 presentations per evening on Jan 20, 27, and Feb 17 and 24. All presentations are maximally 45 minutes long
There will be a 15-20-minute intermission between presentations
Each presentation is ticketed separately except for the opening night which is one combined ticket. You can purchase tickets on a sliding scale starting at $5 at co-labprojects.org. This is a great way to support PSO.
The opening event features San Antonio Artists, Anthony Francis and Xavier Gilmore beginning at 8 and that will followed by yours truly who will be joined by Paul Stautinger to reprise the suite of music we performed in the Turrell Sky space but accompanied by a new video.
Co-lab is a legendary art space whose current configuration is a 40 x 10 x 10-foot concrete culvert sitting on an open plot of land just east of the city. The culvert will be awash in projections and stereo sounds on either end of the ceiling. The floor covered in a sea of moving blankets.
Viewers/listeners are invited to lay next to the performers occupying the center to become a raft in an ocean of sounds gazing at a visionary sky.
(video documentation of Gilmore’s architectural sculpture, Between the Lines)
In this pod, we will first hear my conversation with Anthony Francis where we cover everything from the poetry of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Fred Moten, bell hooks, Frank Wilderson, family, community, stillness, and so much more. Our conversation will be followed by an excerpted audio from his piece, All Is which he will present on Saturday. Following that we hear a piece by Gilmore which was originally Shown as part of a sculpture show called Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations in a pop-up in Adkins, Texas. The Piece is a sound element that accompanies an architectural sculpture called Between the Lines which for Gilmore speaks to gathering, community, and privileged space.
LINKS and REFERENCES
Porch Swing Orchestra
https://porchswingorchestra.org/
Tickets to VAST IS THE SEA
https://withfriends.co/event/17182339/vast_is_the_sea
Anthony Francis:
https://www.afrancisart.com/
Xavier Gilmore:
https://www.xaviergilmore.net/
Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, bell hooks, Frank Wilderson, Édouard Glissant, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin,
VAST IS THE SEA: A CONVERSATION with ANTHONY FRANCIS