ANDREA PARKINS - Faulty (Broken Orbit) - CD

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* Andrea Parkins will be at the Copenhagen Improv Festival on Oct 24th. The venue is Huset i Magstraede *

Faulty (Broken Orbit) re-imagines Faulty (Per-Objective), an hour long 10-channel site-specific audio work, premiered in 2007 at Diapason gallery for sound in NYC, with sponsorship from Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and the New York
Electronic Arts Festival. Faulty (Broken Orbit) is a poetic exploration of mic’ed surfaces and amplified quotidian objects activated into movement, layered against a shifting and slowly settling field of electric-accordion-driven feedback and processed instruments. This massive piece sets out to build elaborate systems in the manner of Rube Goldberg’s circuitous
contraptions, which Parkins claims as inspiration for both her customized sound processing software and compositional structures: emphasizing idiosyncrasy, tenuous states, and the threat of “things falling apart.”

About Andrea Parkins

Andrea Parkins is a NYC-based composer, sound/installation artist, and electro-multi-instrumentalist, acclaimed for her dynamic timberal explorations on electronically-processed accordion and inventive use of custom live sound processing. Together, her laptop electronics and Fender-amplified accordion create a gestural sonic language full of lush harmonics, noisy concretized disruption, and soaring electronic feedback. Andrea's compositions and audio works - electro-acoustic solo and chamber pieces, sound installations and multiplatform performance installations - have been presented in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art ("Bitstreams“), Experimental Intermedia, and The Kitchen ("New Sound/New York“), among other spaces and places; as well as at intermedia festivals/venues throughout Europe, and in Asia and Latin America. She also performs internationally as a solo artist and in wide-ranging formations with colleagues such as Nels Cline, Otomo Yoshihide and David Watson, among many others. In this context she appears on more than 40 recordings on labels including Atavistic,
Creative Sources and hatology. In March 2009, Important Records will release faulty (broken orbit), Andrea’s hour-long piece scored for amplified objects, feedback and processed instruments, based on her 2007 10-channel audio installation presented at NYC’s Diapason gallery for sound. Other projects include a trio collaboration with Wilco guitarist Nels Cline and NYC-based drummer Tom Rainey that has released 2 CDs to date, and The Skein, her duo with vocalist/composer Jessica Constable, which has a CD coming out this winter on the Henceforth label. On an ongoing basis, Andrea develops and performs a series of interactive sound/image/object works inspired by Rube Goldberg’s circuitous contraptions, a project conceived at residencies sponsored by Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in NYC, Performing Arts Forum in France, and the Cultural Board of Hamburg Germany. Her work has also been supported American Composers Forum, New York State Council on the Arts, and Meet the Composer.

“Parkins, a master manipulator of electronically processed accordion and laptop is one of the city’s most unbounded …well, what’s the word for her? Musician seems too simple, artist too vague; perhaps 'sound-ist’ is best.” -Time Out/NY

Parkins always gives her bands such a distinctive flavor: she goes right past conventional squeezebox references and treats the thing like a no-input mixing board, generatiing sine waves, or a live miniature Morton Feldman generator, slowly stacking tones." - Jason Bivins, Signal to Noise (Fall 2007, Issue #47)

“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. ... She’s the kind of musician who can make a small group intergalactic… lose your head." - LA Weekly

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