Sainkho Namtchylak returns to Taipei

Tuvan folksong / extended vocal techniques / throat singing-diva Sainkho performs once again in Taiwan. Sainkho was born in Soviet-era Tuva, in a Siberian outpost within eyesight of Mongolia. She developed more than average singing skills and during the late 1980s she took advantage of the political/cultural reformations (perestroika) to set out on an innovative career that soon put her in the international ranks of outstanding, progressive singers.

She moved to Austria in 1994, and was begged to come back to Tuva by president Sholban Kara-ool this month, while she visited Tuva.

She established her name with sweat and original interpretations of Tuvan songs in the early 1990s and experimental work. Nowadays much of Sainkho’s output is ecclectic, avant-garde, with an electrifying, ear-catching aura to it. She is an amazingly busy and energetic performer, who constantly travels the world to collaborate with ever new musicians, pouring out CD after CD, and re-inventing herself every year.

Exactly ten years ago, she gave a memorable concert in Zhongshan Hall, and a throat singing workshop in TNUA (reported in Chung Mingder’s book OM. Overtone singing as meditation). At that time she brought with her German Popov, an old friend of mine from Amsterdam (born in the Ukraine), and singer/guitarist Caspar David Sacker from Austria. I am happy to see that this time she works with a local musician (and again a friend of mine), the Taipei-based pianist Lee Shih-Yang. Also taking part will be Dickson Dee, a Hong Kong sound artist.

This concert is highly recommended for all people interested in Tuvan/Mongolian music, throat singing and new vocal techniques. When I spread this message through my Fusica newsletter there were still tickets left. Now there aren’t…  But I had reserved a bunch of tickets for the students of my R E S O N A N C E  course through Lee Shih-Yang. If you are interested respond quick (reply below) and I can see if he still has a ticket for the October 5 show for you . Tickets are 500 NT$ minus a little discount. Hope to see you there!

2014新點子樂展Innovation Series – 人聲風景「即興篇」
SoundScape-Improvisation Across the Horizon

Videolink Youku
Taipei,

Experimental Theatre

October 4 19:00

October 5, 14:30

Breath-performance @ Red Room Aside

 

Tonight I am going to do a short ‘breath performance’ at a special edition of Red Room, the monthly event in the Aveda kitchen hosted by Chu Ping and Roma and Manav Mehta. The breath is a central focus of my performances, sometimes in the foreground, always in the background. And I thought the news of the passing away, on August 20 2014, of Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja (or simply ‘B.K.S.’) Iyengar would be a fitting occasion to start and end the performance using special breathing techniques.

 

Iyengar was instrumental in bringing yoga to the west in the 1950s and began to adapt it to the different lifestyles of American practitioners. Though he received criticism for changing the one-to-one transmission to a group practice and using physical tools such as woodblocks and straps, there can be no doubt that his methods have been a great success and have benefited hundreds of thousands of people in the West. And one can certainly not say that he himself was not fully part of the tradition, as an early video of him with is his own guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya demonstrated. This is the full version of the 1938 film, but you can find several shorter sequences on Youtube.

It was Tirumalai Krishnamacharya who traveled India to promote hatha yoga and its associated practices and philosophies and thus began the revival which then crossed over to other parts of the world.

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya shortly before his death in 1988, aged 100

One may certainly include me in the league of teachers who misinterpret yoga or use its name for purposes other than its original intentions. But I do not agree with those criticasters who deplore what Iyengar has done. I think yoga is a fantastic practice and profound philosophy that can benefit people in many different ways. Indians should be proud to see so many people around the world doing some form of yoga or yoga-derived practices today.

I am very often in favor of traditional practices above modern forms myself, for example when it comes to indigenous music. But the modernisation and adaption process is irreversible and in the case of yoga, even those not-so-dedicated practitioners like myself learn things and solve problems that you can not learn otherwise (I struggled with lower-backache for many years; physiotherapies did not solve it but hatha yoga did).

So to thank and honour Mr. Iyengar I will begin tonight’s performance with a very extended, silent inhale and finish with a very extended, resounding exhale.

If you are curious, read more about Iyengar in the Washington Post and on The Atlantic.

Upcoming events

Weekly Voice Yoga Returns to Canjune Training Centre

March 15: Underground Trip (performance)

March 29: Lacking Sound Festival (performance)

Voice workshop for spring 2014: coming up soon

This week Voice Yoga returns to Canjune’s Training Centre. Everyone is welcome to try out Voice Yoga on Thursdays between 10 and twelve. No registration necessary, but please be on time. Next week (March 20) the class will shift to the afternoon, between 14 and 16. Read the details about Voice Yoga in this blogpost.

Saturday March 15 you are invited to the performance Underground Trip with Serge Onnen, Erika Sprey (visuals), Tung Chao-Ming and myself (sounds) at Taipei Artist Village. There are two shows, at 19:30 and 21:30, please find the details in my previous blogpost.

Saturday March 29 I am invited to perform at the Lacking Sound Festival, which is one of the more interesting on-going sound events in Taipei. Serge Onnen will join me to provide visuals, and we will explore the theme of mirrors. More details in this post.

Soon I will announce some workshops for this spring season. Come check back here or subscribe to this blog. If you prefer to receive emails write to < info  at  fusica   dot   nl> and you will receive updates every once in a while.

Lacking Sound Festival: March 29

I am excited about this invitation for the Lacking Sound Festival, a mostly-monthly event currently held in the Digital Arts Centre in Taipei, to be precise in the Noise Kitchen. This meeting point for sound-art-buffs is a wonderful space with various ingenious instruments that can be played – reminding me more of a Museum of Musical Machines in the Netherlands than a 21st century Digital Arts site. Anyway, I have invited Serge Onnen to join me in creating something analog that sounds and feels digital  (and quite different from the Cloacinae sound-shadow-video performance we do/did the 15th of March). Both of us favor the kind of old-fashioned manual-vocal-labour forms of artistic expression, but then, we do use computers, digital recorders and the occasional effects apparatus to manipulate our creations. So here is the press-blurb:

Mirroring

Mark van Tongeren (sound) and Serge Onnen (image) dissect our everyday perception, enlarging our ordinary vision and audition to include the unseen and unheard. Mirrors, opposites and negatives of our everyday sense world.
Mark van Tongeren is currently fascinated by the voice as an instrument producing numbers, namely, the strict numerical ratios of overtones. When this is made audible through the technique of overtone singing, the voice almost loses its human identity: its sounds seem like pure sine waves. Digits, that is, whole numbers or whole-number ratios could be considered the DNA of our voice. In this installment of his theme The Digital & The Vocal, Mark offers an electro-acoustic performance where the distinctions between the digital and the vocal are blurred. Environmental recordings, extended vocal techniques, Jew’s harps and a Kaosspad further link the physical, everyday world with the digital, and the archaic with the hypermodern.
Artist Serge Onnen, currently holding a solo exhibition at MOCA Taipei, simultaneously provides a live visual performance. He will mainly use mirrors: echo’s of images, stretching the reflection, face reality,  double the sight and confront the audience with their image.

Coming-up in Taipei: Shadow-Sound-Performance

Last Friday evening was the opening of a solo exhibition of visual artist Serge Onnen at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Studio Underground, Taipei.

 

Cloacinae opening at MOCA Taipei

CLOACINAE – Goddess of the Sewers offers a selection of works by Onnen from the last ten years, including animation videos, phenakistiscopes, wallpaper, and a large shadow/sound installation made for the MOCA exhibition.

On March 15 we will do a shadow/sound performance at Taipei Artist Village. For this we will use a video compiled by Serge from inspection videos of sewers around the world. Nowadays everywhere cameras are led through sewer systems and other inaccessible places to look for obstacles or solve problems. Some of these videos have a certain kind of beauty of their own, and Serge made a good selection of those. Add to that live shadow play by Onnen and Erika Sprey, and sounds by Chao-Ming Tung and myself… and you have an unexpected visual-auditory-hallucinatory tour in the underground, there where the metro does not go. (get a preview on Serge’s blog)

We do the show two times, starting at 19:30 and 21:30 (not 22:30 as stated before), duration is one hour.

Free entrance!

Please take note! The exhibition is taking place in the underground (Zhongshan Metro Mall, Near R9 exit), the performance is not. It is in Taipei Artist Village, No. 7, Beiping East Road, 10 minutes walk from Taipei Main Station.

March10-13: PhD defense and performances

On March 13 I shall, deo volente, succesfully defend my thesis

Grenzen van het hoorbare: over de meerstemmigheid van het lichaam (Thresholds of the Audible: about the Multiphony of the Body).

For those interested there are several opportunities to attend performances in the days prior to the defense. All events can be attended free of charge.

Superstringtrio: Rollin Rachele & Mark van Tongeren (Photography Jochem Hartz)

Sunday 10 and Tuesday 12 March

18:30, doors open 18:00

Incognito Ergo Sum, performance

Dokzaal, Plantage Doklaan 8-12, 1018 CM Amsterdam

With Superstringtrio (Rollin Rachele, Mark van Tongeren, voices), Horst Rickels (artistic advice), Daphne van Tongeren (light-performance) and Maksim Chapochnikov (speaker).

 +

0… / Zeropoints

Monday 11 March

13:30-16:30, ongoing

0…: an overtone singing marathon for two singers

Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Rapenburg 38, Leiden

 With Superstringtrio (Rollin Rachele, Mark van Tongeren, voices), Paul Oomen (live compositional direction).

Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, Rapenburg 38, Leiden.

 +

Thresholds of the audible

Wednesday 13 March

12:45 – 13:15 Introductory talk, Zaal 2

13:45 – 14:45 Defense, Senaatskamer

14:45 – 15:45 Reception, downstairs

Academiegebouw, Leiden University, Rapenburg 73, Leiden

On the Fusica website you can find more information on all the events:

And here you may announce your wish to attend one or more of the events.

Your attendance at one or more of the events will be much appreciated!

Rollin Rachele (Photography: Jochem Hartz)

Thanks for sharing, hope to see you.

Mark van Tongeren

Tuvans in Beijing!

Otkun Dostai Choduraa Tumat

Friends in Beijing, don’t miss this opportunity:

Otkun and Choduraa bring their authentic and yet innovative Tuvan music to China for the first time. Take your chance to learn throat singing from original Tuvan masters!

Jan 13 SUN 16:00   Zajia Music Workshop:

Tuvan Traditional Throat Singing
with Choduraa Tumat and Otkun Dostay

Admission: 60rmb (student:40rmb)

工作坊座位有限，请提前预定：zajialab@163.com
Seats for the workshop are limited, please book your seat at zajialab@163.com

图瓦传统呼麦工作坊/音乐会
特邀图瓦音乐家：Choduraa Tumat 和Otkun Dostay

Tuvan Traditional Throat Singing with Choduraa Tumat and Otkun Dostay

工作坊时间 ：1月13日（周日）下午4点
费用：60元（学生：40元）*英文讲授
workshop: Jan 13(SUN) 4:00pm  60rmb(student:40rmb) and the class is in English

The website of Zajialab / Beijing Project Space:

http://site.douban.com/124288/

email: zajialab@126.com

Zajialab is a wonderful alternative space for arts events, and also the one and only distributor in China of my book/cd Overtone Singing, my solo cd Paraphony and Parafonia’s cd Sphere.

Live performances @ Taiwan Computer Music Association

Here are two videos from a live concert at Hsinchu in May 2012. The first piece is mainly based on overtone singing the second one on making computer-like/digital sounds. (Click the links below the photo).

 

Voice and Shruti performed live @ TCMA 2012 Pt. II by Mark van Tongeren

Live recording from a piece I did in May 2012 in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at the invitation of the Taiwan Computer Music Association. It was an excellent program of works by various Taiwanese composers of music with computers (Jeff Huang. Chao Ming Tung, TZENG Shingkwei and orthers). I was invited to do a piece together with composer Tzeng Shing-kwei and, before that, to do some of my own work. After a piece for extended vocal techniques, also on VIMEO, I did this longer piece of overtone singing with drones from a shruti box.

 

Extended computer techniques for voice

 

Another piece I did in Hsinchu at the invitation of the Taiwan Computer Music Association: a work for extended vocal techniques, and also using a Sakha (Siberian) Jew’s harp (or khomus), thereby losely incorporating elements from typical computer generated sounds.

Enjoy!

Sonic spectrum and Poetic Silhouette: Soloconcert in Taiwan

I present a soloprogram at the First International Arts Festival at the National Chiayi University, in Chiayi, Taiwan, October 18 2012.

Poster Chiayi Arts Festival

Program description for the concert:

The twentieth century constituted a watershed of new vocal and sonic arts, and brought voices from distant times and places closer than ever before. And yet, in the twenty-first century the voice still retains its secrets. Vocalist Mark van Tongeren returns to the simple question: how does the naked voice of a single human being sound, when we strip everything away from it? As it turns out, a voice never comes alone. With his current theme The Polyphony of the Body, van Tongeren exposes the colourful, polyphonic nature of the singing human voice. Drawing upon his studies with traditional overtone singers from the Sayan and Altai mountains of South Siberia, extended-vocal techniques and sound poetry, van Tongeren’s performance moves from the introvert to the extrovert, from blissfull harmony to unpredictable noise. Instruments such as the shruti-box from India, Jew’s harps from Siberia and live electronics are his companions for Sonic spectrum and Poetic Silhouette.

歐瑟之 與 溫馬克 2012年四月七日星期六在北京雜家的演出

敬告諸君：本週六，我將和老朋友歐瑟之一起在北京演出。歐瑟之目前在北京做駐村藝術家，持續他環繞”影子”這個主題的各種創作，我倆隸屬的歐貝克實驗樂團，也在他的影響下做了不少有關”影子”的演出。既是寄居於北京心臟地區的胡同，歐瑟之自然也把握機會浸淫在中國傳統的皮影藝術中。

過去幾個禮拜，我和歐瑟之藉著skype跨越兩岸，各自從台灣和北京交流這次演出的構思，我也已經看過演出中會用到的圖像、畫作與燈光道具，表演中甚至會出現傳統工匠依歐瑟之設計所特製的皮影戲，而那延續幾百年的半透明乾皮偶，想當然耳會在歐瑟之的筆下顯現不同的風情。

至於我的部分，則是召集了眾多好夥伴 : 各種樂器、發聲物件、以及老字號的第二代聲音特效器。雖然從荷蘭運回台北造成一些損傷，但他們卻能跟我的歌聲共奏一曲 ”和諧的亂彈 ”。如果你對這種新和音感到好奇，可以點擊此處先聽為快。

我們的劇目叫 “ 釘恩鍍恩”，這是荷蘭語，意為 “ 幹活兒 “。在那一個鐘頭的時間裡，雜家坐落的那個古意盎然小寺院，將被我們轉化為一個既寫實又超現實的新奇空間。

眼下只能言盡於此。

如果你恰巧人在北京，不妨過來瞧瞧。

http://www.douban.com/event/16197356/

http://wwww.onnen.com

http://www.oorbeek.net