PONY SAYS TAKASUGI/MARINO

In their concert PONY SAYS TAKASUGI/MARINO, the trio Pony Says performs two large-scale works by the American composers Steven Takasugi and Jessie Marino, which oscillate between mechanical virtuosity, collective listening experience, composition, and improvisation. In their stylistic diversity, the works represent a cross-section of the trio's aesthetic identity. Pony Says is now exporting this programme as a concert tour at three concerts made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

In Die Klavierübung (The Piano Exercise), Steven Takasugi stages a performative showdown between musicians and machine. Based on sampled sounds of six pianos out of tune with each other, Takasugi first composes a hyper-complex, purely electronic work on the computer. He combines this machine-perfect, but in reality unplayable tape with sound doublings of the live musicians: numerous passages are fanned out to the trio instrumentation of electric guitar, keyboard and percussion and supplemented by secondary instruments. This constellation reflects the sound space of the tape; Takasugi literally composes the ensemble as a human sample database. In a sonic performative confusion, which the composer calls "strange doubling", the musicians interact with the electronic counterpart. The audience's perception is challenged, deceived, and surprised: which sounds are produced by humans, which by machines?

In The ideal hour / collages with Tom, Jessie Marino places improvisation as the starting point at the centre of attention and links this to a "listening session". The subject of this collective listening is the album Pieces for Kohn (1976) by Tom Hamilton, in which the American composer refers directly to paintings by his contemporary Bill Kohn. In a mutual exchange, composer and musician translate their listening experiences into different approaches to the original. The result of this associative exercise takes the form of a lecture performance: Jessie Marino, in the role of conferencière, leads the audience through a flood of spoken text, images and video snippets, commented on and flanked by musical derivatives of the ensemble. The play with language is in the foreground. Banal everyday phrases, set pieces of interpersonal interactions and narrative text detach themselves from their original semantic content and unfold their own melodic and rhythmic qualities as the ensemble's "fourth instrument". The result is an entertaining, almost nostalgic "road trip", a memory of an event that never happened.

Further information:
ponysays.de

Dates

November 4, 2022
Old Fire Station, Cologne

November 6, 2022
impuls-Festival, Halle

December 3, 2022
Kunstraum 34, Stuttgart