Drawing Sound
Fred Frith Trio with Heike Liss & Susana Santos Silvia
“…a five-way, free-improvisation pull that [is] both wonderful to behold and impossible to absorb.” -Washington Post
In their ongoing collaboration Drawing Sound, Fred Frith generates soundscapes while visual artist Heike Liss draws her images directly on windows. Liss works in a variety of media, including video, photography, drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation, and public intervention. She has collaborated with choreographers, musicians, multi-media artists, painters, and poets, and her award-winning work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and at film festivals. Frith (electric guitar) and Liss (visuals), along with Jason Hoopes (electric bass), Jordan Glenn (drums), and Susana Santos Silva (trumpet), confront the difficulties specific to improvising in both visual and audio fields in a world where the visual is generally perceived as primary. How to avoid the music being taken as a soundtrack? Should the listeners/viewers be able to understand it from the same point of view as the creators? What is the equivalent of silence in images? How does a visual “gesture” correspond to a sonic one, or indeed should it? In the end, what kinds of interaction are possible or desirable?
