Art’s Birthday Weathered Piano Exchange

With the Decomposing piano at New Adventures in Sound Art having been outdoors through four complete seasons (1 year) as of December 2023, and having been enjoyed by the community and improvised on by many artists from the region, various options were discussed regarding an exchange of sorts related to the “decomposing” piano at NAISA and another piano from somewhere else.  NAISA Artistic Director Darren Copeland suggested approaching Jesse Budel who lives in Australia.

Darren Copeland related to Jesse that the Belgian visual and media artist Ward Weiss had suggested as a possible theme for Art’s Birthday 2024, an acknowledgement of the 50th anniversary of John Cage’s Etude Australis. With NAISA being in the northern hemisphere it was useful to note that Cage did have a companion piece to Etude Australes which is Etude Boreales for cello and/or piano which of course references the northern star patterns. These Cage pieces together form the notion of opposite ends working independently to achieve something larger as a result of their simultaneity. So if anything these pieces can serve as a point of inspiration for re-imagining another musical form that results from our collaboration from opposite sides of the world. Check out the Art’s Birthday web-page for more information about this annual international event.

From this initial idea came the first meeting between Nadene, Darren and Jesse, the outcome of which was to create a series of exchanges, each set of which responded to the previous set.  It was agreed that Nadene would perform four pieces on the piano outside in South River (recorded by Darren) and send these to Jesse, who would respond with another four performances (recorded by Jesse) and send them back to Nadene.   Nadene then responded with another four performances to Jesse’s set and the final set was performed by Jesse in response to that.  This created 16 separate tracks – 4 each of 4 performances each a response to the set before all created between mid-December 2023 and mid-January 2024.

From the 16 tracks, Jesse created a binaural mix of the four pieces which was then presented by NAISA as part of its Art’s Birthday celebration.  This binaural mix was then broadcast on CITR in Vancouver as part of its 24 Hours of Radio Art and on James Bailey’s show on CIUT called Electric Sense on January 17, 2024.

A Bandcamp page was created to release the solos and duos as well as a binaural mix of all four recordings of each of the four tracks. You can listen to the releases on this web-site here or follow us on our bandcamp page here.

Towards the end of the project, Nadene, Darren and Jesse discussed their thoughts on the outcomes of project and their shared interest in ‘weathered’ or ‘ruined’ pianos. You can access this on the interviews page, which can be found here.