Kalun Leung - Performer, Fabrication
Felix del Tredici - Performer, Concept
Past Performances:
International Trombone Festival, Muncie, IN (2019)
New York University, NY (2019)
Arete, Brooklyn, NY (2019)
Glass Box Theatre, New York, NY (2018)
I presented this piece with Felix del Tredici and Siw Laurent at my graduating recital at The New School in May 2018. Felix and I met Siw a week before my recital at the Creative Music Studio workshops in Greenwich Village. Her role in our collaboration presented itself in the most natural and serendipitous way - she brought to the workshop a sense of Shamanic dominance that emanated from her soul, voice, and Nordic frame drum. For months, Felix and I have been dreaming up a piece that involved the trombone as an object/installation, sympathetic resonance and feedback, and BDSM theatrics. Siw witnessed our informal workshopping of the piece in the basement of the Greenwich Music School that weekend and it became immediately clear that the piece needed her involvement.
The improvisation lasted around 10 minutes, a soundscape of slide-controlled karaoke mic feedback and Siw's powerful vocalizations and drumming. Felix and I became slave to the instrument; we embodied ourselves as anchors tied via pulley to the trombone slide, control of the slide limited to the rope that tied it to our mouths. As we floated farther from the mothership, the slide would extend upwards, changing the pitch of the feedback duet while Siw's energy blanketed our eventual demise.
Boiler Plate Description
Die Posaune (trombone in German), is an interactive sound art sculpture and performance that explores the sonic possibilities of the slide trombone as a self-generating sound object. The trombone, essentially a variable-length tube, is appropriated in this work as an enclosure for propagating microphone feedback. The resulting frequencies occur naturally and are unique to the trombone’s shape and material properties.