Zach Herchen

From YouTube:

Viennese Percussionist Martin Breinschmid with his version of the "Typewriter" Live at the BASF concert hall Ludwigshafen, Germany 2008, Strauß Festival Orchestra Vienna

Turns out they posted a video of the performance on YouTube (in two parts)!

Earlier this month I performed Chris Chafe's Electrode with the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLORK). The setup for the piece was rather interesting. I had a Jam Link, mixer, and microphone in my living room on the East Coast. Through the Jam Link I received live audio cues and sent sounds from my saxophone back to the stage in California. Basically, Chris would send the satellite performers sounds from his daxophone, which we would imitate and respond to. It was a lot of fun and definitely a unique experience playing a live concert some 3,000 miles away.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a neat article about SLORK.

I had great time at Sick Puppy's (SICPP) Iditarod last weekend. The concert lasted about 7 hours and was the perfect conclusion to a week of intense rehearsals and performances. During the concert I performed Chaya Czernowin's Sahaf (pictured above), Victoriah Cheah's Elasticity, Jason Belcher's Continuous Cities 2 and Lavender and the Newt, Ryan Krause's separate piece(s, and a group improvisation with Eli Stine on electronics.

You can read a review of the Iditarod by The Boston Globe here.

NEC's SICPP ends today with the Iditarod (a marathon concert of all the music we've been preparing this week) in Brown Hall. Here's the program with rough timing (* marks pieces I am playing on):

4 to 5pm
For Liam Malloy* (large group improv with electronics)
Goldberg: Legno Metallico
Crumb: Quest
Fukushi: Silica

5 to 6pm
Belcher: Walden Songs
Cheah: Elasticity*
Saariaho: Cendres
Belcher: Continuous Cities 2* and Lavender and the Newt*
Rose: Dr Clash and His Assistant
Feldman: 4 Songs to e.e. cummings
Czernowin: Afatsim

6 to 7pm
Dominique: Doppelganger
Czernowin: Sahaf*
Feldman: Violin Voice and Piano
Rzewski: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Wolff: Malvina
Salkind-Pearl: Autumn Voices

7 to 8pm
Psathas: Matre's Dance
Hansler: Look! The Lamb of God!
Crumb: Celestial Mechanics
Andriessen: Hoketus

8 to 9pm
Pape: CaDance
Wolff: Sonata for 3 Prepared Pianos
John Luther Adams: Dark Waves
Berio: Naturale

9 to 10pm
Poliks: barely
Feldman: False Relationships and the Extended Ending
Dun: Silk Road
Krause: Separate Pieces*
Reich: Piano Phase

I am in the midst of New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICCP, affectionately called Sick Puppy). Lots of music, lots of rehearsals, and all of its awesome. In the final concert on Saturday I'll be performing Sahaf by Chaya Czernowin, Elasticity by Victoria Cheah, Separate Pieces by Ryan Krause, Trude and Lavendar and the Newt by Jason Belcher, and two improvisations with sound artist Eli Stine.

ok, back to rehearsals...

From the YouTube page:

An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the 'photocopy effect', where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.

Sean Cunningham and I will be performing (via the internet) in a concert at Stanford University on June 2nd. Organized by Chris Chafe, the performance will be based on improvised reactions to live samples from Stanford. We will be using Musician Link's Jam Link device to send our audio signal to the stage and hear sounds sent from there. Its strange, but a lot of fun to use. Though, the best part may be that I get to perform from my living room, haha.

Man Down's new album is officially out on Amazon and iTunes, and other download stores!