The Squid's Ear Magazine


Parkins, Andrea: Two Rooms From The Memory Palace (Infrequent Seams Records)

Using piano, synthesizer, electronic feedback, field recordings and amplified objects, sound artist Andrea Parkins' long-cycle installation composition explores time and space in an 8-channel, multi-room work designed so that adjacent acoustical spaces respond to each other, creating shifting and unexpected sonic juxtapositions; CD package include a link to "The Third Room".
 

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Personnel:



Andrea Parkins-composer, performer


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UPC: 650076547222

Label: Infrequent Seams Records
Catalog ID: CD-IS-1037
Squidco Product Code: 31234

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2021
Country: USA
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded by Andrea Parkins.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Two Rooms from the Memory Palace re-imagines and captures the live, visceral impact of Andrea Parkins' eponymously-titled immersive eight-channel fixed-media composition. The work highlights Parkins' ongoing exploration of poetic interrelationships between site and time, and gestural trace and acoustical space, "Two Rooms" was initially developed as a spatial audio work, designed for diffusion through adjacent acoustical spaces that sonically respond in real-time interaction, thus enabling shifting and sometimes startling sonic juxtapositions to take place.

Two Rooms from the Memory Palace premiered in 2015 at the New York Electronic Art Festival on NYC's Governor's Island and was later site-adapted for Akousma Festival in Montreal as a performance/installation for 40 loudspeakers in a single listening space. It has additionally been presented at festivals in Oslo, Bolzano and Berlin.

Later iterations of Two Rooms from the Memory Palace - with its multi-pitched and slowly churning layers of electronic feedback - have included "The Third Room", an additional audio installation that acts as a sonic "disturbance" in relation to the lush and immersive sonic world of "Two Rooms." "The Third Room" is a random playlist of fragmentary sonic snippets from the massive archive of audio recordings Parkins has been creating and collecting for the past several decades, focusing on the interplay of objects and idiosyncratic acoustic spaces. "The Third Room" is accessible to listeners via a weblink included in the CD package."-Infrequent Seams


Artist Biographies

"Andrea Parkins is an American composer, sound artist, performer and improvisational musician based in New York. She is known for her inventive explorations on the electric accordion, generative sound processing, and arrangements of objects and sound. Parkins received a BFA from Tufts University and MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

Andrea Parkins's work is influenced by the compositional strategies of John Cage and Fluxus and pays homage to musique concrète and 1970s analog synth. Parkins often incorporates electronically processed accordion, customized sound processing, live tape manipulation, analog effects boxes, laptop electronics, acoustic piano, sampling, and amplified objects. Her method and sound were characterized by LA Weekly as: "The big, varied, confidently conceived abstractions Parkins yanks from her squeezebox, laptop, effects devices and maybe piano - cloudy and cranky one minute, surgically sharp the next." With an unconventional approach to instruments, Parkins "fragments the instrument's traditional vocabulary and expands its capabilities with electronics and extended techniques."

Recently Andrea Parkins has been developing a series of interactive sound and image works inspired by the structures of Rube Goldberg's circuitous machines. Describing this organizational approach Stephen Bezan remarked: "the individual sounds manipulated by Parkins seem to interact and influence the outcome of the other, crafting a goal-oriented structure based on timbre, not harmony or rhythm. This approach transcends the inherent cacophony of the material and reveals a genuinely organic, even playful quality to her work." Parkins has described her Rube Goldberg approach as a means for examining slippages between object and meaning. She observed: "An important conceptual thread running through these pieces is the discovery and expression of metaphors for the slippage and tension between object and meaning that occurs through the passage of time." Describing her intentions, Parkins noted: "As both a sonic and visual artist, I try to build and layer idiosyncratic systems and structures that point to these shifts in meaning."

Andrea Parkins has toured and exhibited internationally and has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, and Diapason Gallery for Sound and Intermedia. She has collaborated with musicians such as Nels Cline, Jim Black, Ellery Eskelin, David Watson, David Fenech, Fred Frith, Thomas Lehn, Günter Müller, and Otomo Yoshihide and choreographers Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad from the BodyCartography Project. Parkins has been the recipient of various grants, awards, and residencies including Meet the Composer, New York State Council for the Arts, Harvestworks Media Art Center, in New York City, Frei und Hanseastadt Hamburg Kulturbehoerde, in Germany, and CESTA in the Czech Republic."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Parkins)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Two Rooms From the Memory Palace 53:48

Related Categories of Interest:


Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
Installation Sound Work
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Solo Artist Recordings
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New in Experimental & Electronic Music

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Infrequent Seams Records.


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