Women in Resistance Film Festival

One of my longest collaborator is the Bulgarian choreographer, dancer and film maker Zornitsa Stoyanova (BodyMeld). One of her films, Explicit Female, that I did the music for was featured in the German festival Poetry Film Festival – Women in Resistance.

“Explicit Female” is a visual poem that takes on pregnancy and the act of birth as its theme. Making another human in one’s body is often thought of as magical, beautiful, and peaceful. This film illuminates all that, plus the hidden trauma of the experience. Using mirror psychedelic effects, the body gets transformed into sensual ever-changing vaginas, organic-looking aliens, shapes and colors that later remind of DNA division. Deeply sensual, the sci-fi imagery lures the imagination while furthering the feel of otherness and alienation. An automatically generated voice speaks of the female body’s durability and the complete destruction of identity that happens to a new mother. “Explicit Female” is part of a bigger performance of the same name that evening.

Here’s a preview of the film from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival:

Berlin Projects

Good morning or evening friends. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US! I hope this day is filled with the feelings of gratitude and abundance for the collective interdependence of life. I am halfway through my three-month residency at GlogauAIR in Berlin and I just wanted to share some projects in my life for which I am grateful.


Spektrum Performance

When I arrived in Berlin, I performed at one of my favorite venues in Berlin: Spektrum. I gave a concert of my field recording landscapes sounds where I created a surrealists collage of environmental sounds from around the world during my travels. I also made a video of found footage from around the world wide web that I showed at the performance. I am very grateful to Aude Françoise from SCOPE, Ienke at Spektrum and DJ Solitue who presented a mix of former Liebig12 residents and for connecting me with Spektrum last year.



Scope Sessions

The second event I did was a talk on my work and process at Scope Sessions. I focused on my work synthesizing Deep Listening, meditation, Buddhist philosophies, field recording, and ambient music. I also played some samples of my work. It was very well received and help crystallize some things for me in my world. I am also very grateful to meet the host Tobias Raayoni Last.

Speaking at Scope

Speaking at SCOPE Sessions


Red Bull Session

Last week was very busy for me here in Berlin! I welcomed two close friends to town at the same time. My collaborator from Mixes from the Field, Sharon Renee Stewart was in town. We met some Deep Listening friends, did some walking and field recording. At the same time, my old buddy and music legend King Britt was in town. We hung out for three days, recorded an episode for my podcast, and recorded at Red Bull Studios Berlin. I’m super grateful to King for inviting me to the recording session with Hainbach, Christina Wheeler and Clara Hill where I got to play one of my favorite instruments, the Fender Rhodes piano! The sessions were magical and the sound at Red Bull was extraordinary. I can’t wait to hear the final mixes of this collaboration.

Sharon Recording at Templehof

Sharon recording at Templehof

The crew at Red Bull Studios


Listening Bodies Project

This time in Berlin has allowed me to deepen my working relationship with choreographer/dancer/movement researcher Monica Genitle. We organically came together to develop a teaching framework that combines my music and Deep Listening practices and her somatic body practices. We’ve done two classes here in Berlin. One at Lake Studios Berlin for dancers and one sound walk workshop at GlogauAIR and SomoS (we had a fairytale-like sound walk in the first snow of the season at night). We will do one more class exploring synesthesia and ASMR as listening body practice at Liebig12. And on Dec 10/11 we will offer a two-day workshop at Tatwerk in Berlin. We will have more exciting Listening Bodies news next week about our plans in 2019!

From the Listening Bodies Sound Walk

From the Listening Bodies Sound Walk along the Paul-Lincke-Ufer
ListeningBodies.com for more information…
Once again, thank you all for your support.

Have a safe and peaceful holiday.

<3 MRM

Antarctica

For The Fidget Fall Experimental Music Festival Nora Gibson and myself were asked to create a music and dance work. We decided to show a work-in-progress for a large media project Antarctica. Antarctica is the story of the end of human data, the end of history, the end of information. It was presented as a 20 minute film projected on three translucent floating screen and with singing by Steve Quaranta.

Below is an excerpt from the film:

ANTARCTICA Development Preview from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.

Event Horizon

This live film score was performed on piano and iPad using the application Samplr to process the sounds from the piano. The mix was recorded from the house sound board by Frank Bellina. The performance was part of the Event Horizon experimental music series at the Rotunda in Philadelphia on June 14, 2013.

video sources are from archive.org and treated by Mikronesia

Full audio recording of concert:

ALOTones

ALOTones was an advertising campaign from Agency Magma in NYC. For this campaign I was commissioned to write seven original tracks for the seven flavors of ALO. On the side of each bottle of the drink in stores was a QR Code where the person could scan the code and download an original piece of Mikronesia music that was written to embody that flavor. Here’s a sample track:

As a viral video campaign Agency Magma created some videos of artists drinking the ALO Drink, listening to my music and creating original illustrations in response.

Here’s one of the video experiments:

Here’s a video explaining the whole campaign and the product in more detail:

Assembling Minutiae

For the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2008. I composed a piece of music called “Pure” for a new dance / film piece by my colleagues Perpetual Mvmt<>Snd. The music I came up with was a slowly building wash of sine waves that uses frequencies found in the note middle C on the piano. The hypnotic sequence builds slowly and almost inaudibly as the lowest frequencies are introduced.

The live dance performance (by Emily Sweeney) was presented at NEXUS/Foundation for Today’s Art at the Crane Arts building. The set was designed by interdisciplinary artist bilwa. The minimal white washed film was created by Blaine Seigel and had movement by Emily Sweeney, Rebecca Patek and Jil Stifel.

Below is an excerpt from the film.

Assembling Minutiae (Excerpt) from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.

Harold Budd – Midnight Leaves of London

As part of the 2008 Bath Music Festival prolific pianist and composer Harold Budd put out a call for people to create videos of themselves recording his composition “Midnight Leaves of London”.

Filmmaker Derek Moench and I did a few variations for this project including a cool David Lynch inspiried reverse performance. We also did this more glitchy one below: