ARTIST/COMPOSER CHRISTOPHER JANNEY’S SONIC FOREST TO TAKE ROOT AT ELECTRIC ZOO IN NEW YORK AND USC IN LOS ANGELES THIS FALL

FR:      ALEXANDRA GREENBERG/MSO
 

Artist/composer CHRISTOPHER JANNEY’s interactive sound and light installation Sonic Forest continues through this fall in New York and Los Angeles.  Over Labor Day weekend (September 5 and 6), the installation will take part in New York’s Electric Zoo electronic music festival on Randall's Island Park and then make its way west to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles October 12 for a week-long residence.

Electronic Zoo festival producer Mike Bindra of Made Events states, “We're excited to include Christopher Janney's Sonic Forest installation into our programming at Electric Zoo. The Sonic Forest provides an interactive, aural and visual component that will entice festival goers into a unique environment. We hope that this is the beginning of many more artistic collaborations in the future." The piece will run from 11:00 am to 11:00 pm each day with a drum jam in the last hour.

At USC, the piece will take part in the school’s celebrated “Vision and Voices” series, a university-wide initiative that highlights excellence in the arts and humanities and hosts various theatrical productions, music and dance performances, conferences, lectures, film screenings and many other special events.  Janney's Sonic Forest will be located in the heart of the university's campus on Hahn Plaza and will be available for interaction from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. daily. 

Beyond his week-long installation, in an effort to promote interdisciplinary education within the USC community, Janney will lecture in a number of the university’s schools on his work and philosophy during the course of the week, including the Thornton School of Music, the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Cinematic Arts and the School of Architecture. For the inauguration of Sonic Forest:USC, Janney has composed a “truly immersive sound experience” to be performed in the Forest by the percussion section of the USC Trojan Marching Band on Monday, October 12, at the precise moment of dusk (6:46 p.m.). A panel discussion will then follow at 7:30 p.m. in the Annenberg Auditorium titled “Public Space, Public Art and Public Life” hosted by USC Professor and Director of the Norman Lear Center, Marty Kaplan.

Sonic Forest, triggered by both public interaction and electronic instruments, is composed of 16 eight-foot tall aluminum poles that contain audio speakers, lights and photo-electric cells. As people move closely by these “electronic trees,” they trigger both melodic and environmental sounds, in a sense “playing the forest.”  When no one is moving in the space, the piece generates a series of preprogrammed patterns.  During various parts of the installation, independent drummers join the environment, turning the Forest into a dance festival unto itself. Over the past five years, Sonic Forest has been featured at numerous major U.S. music festivals, including Bonnaroo, All Points West and Coachella, as well as European festivals including the Download Festival, Hyde Park Calling, Wireless, and Glastonbury in the UK, the Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands and the Zaragoza World’s Fair in Zaragoza, Spain.

Ashley Capps, co-producer of the Bonnaroo Festival, has praised Janney's work, saying, “I love the Sonic Forest! In the morning, it was the place to hang and have a cup of coffee while listening to the exotic birds.  In the afternoon, it was a great place to meet up with friends or take a nap (when you shut your eyes, you were in an enchanted forest.) At night, we danced for hours to the continuous drum jams on into the early morning.”

Janney, who is trained as an architect and a jazz musician, noted that the basis of his Sonic Forrest project is to have "music wrap around you like a blanket. The challenge for a festival artwork is to create a communal musical instrument, one that a person can walk through and play with either alone or with a group.  At many festivals, we run 24/7 with drum jams in the sunrise hours.  People get religion!”

Christopher Janney has created public interactive sound and light artworks and performances all over the world. Sonic Forest is part of Janney’s Urban Musical Instrument series that also includes Reach!, a permanent installation on the N-R platform of the 34th St. subway station in New York City, and Touch My Building, which activates the entire façade of a nine-story building in Charlotte, NC. He also created Heartbeat:mb, a performance toured throughout the world in which world-renowned dancer/choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov danced to the sound of his own heartbeat.

In addition to his artwork, Janney has been a visiting professor at both the Pratt Institute and The Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York where he taught his course titled Sound as a Visual Medium. A book on his work, titled Architecture of the Air, was published in January 2008 and is available through Amazon.com.  For more information on Christopher Janney, visit: www.janneysound.com

For more information on the CHRISTOPHER JANNEY, contact:
MSO    818-380-0400
Alexandra Greenberg x223, agreenberg@msopr.com