Sharing sounds during the lockdown
The COVID lockdown did not shut down the desire to share sound with the world. While the pandemic closed concert and exhibition venues worldwide, undoubtedly damaging many artists financial prospects, it has not kept them from sharing their work. Numerous venues have created platforms for sharing adventurous sound – some of them free, some of them requiring a donation to help the performing artists.
Here are a few noteworthy examples:
Quarantine Concerts
Experimental Sound Studio
https://ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts
$10 suggested donation, but concerts are also archived on youtube
The Quarantine Concerts are a collaborative endeavor meant to provide artists a space to share their work and continue to earn a living during this time when most live performance opportunities have been cancelled due to COVID-19. We believe in the necessity of art during difficult moments like these, and feel fortunate to live in a time when loss of mobility does not have to mean loss of community. Thank you for being here.
Suggested donation of $10/evening
Think of it like paying cover to a concert! 100% of the donations contributed during each performance go to the artists who played that night
Isolated Field Recordings
Issue Project Room
https://issueprojectroom.org/program/isolated-field-recordings-series
Free – all episodes archived on IPR’s website
In response to COVID-19’s impact on public assembly, ISSUE Project Room is commissioning artists to produce field recordings to be streamed over the course of this challenging and isolated time. This series will support artists directly in an unprecedented moment of uncertainty, struggle, and financial risk and emphasize the solidarity of artists working in a situation where everyday life is confined and separated. Focusing on recordings from artists’ current conditions, the series will broadly approach the field recording as an expanded form and open invitation to experiment with home audio recording during this period of social distancing.
The series focuses on both emerging artists and many from across the organization’s history: ISSUE Artists-In-Residence and artists who call New York City home, composers, sound artists, choreographers, filmmakers, and interdisciplinary artists in the experimental arts community.
SO⅃OS – a space of limit as possibility
Fridman Gallery
https://issueprojectroom.org/program/isolated-field-recordings-series
Tickets: $5 each concert (live viewing and unlimited playback);
$35 series pass (live viewing and unlimited playback of all 12 concerts).
For inquiries, including free access for those in need, please contact info@fridmangallery.com
Fridman Gallery and CT::SWaM presented SO⅃OS from May to July in 2020, a program of weekly performances inside the empty gallery. Operating within NYC’s shelter-in-place guidelines, only one person – the performer – is present. Equipped with multiple microphones and cameras (mixed remotely), the space itself becomes a generative agent for the performer.
As the world moves online, our bodies remain situated within physical boundaries, resulting in a new kind of dissonance. SO⅃OS turns this phenomenon inside out, the shuttered confines of the gallery creating a new immediacy.
