April 16, 2009
Athens Banner-Herald
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Athens collective remixes recordings from Indonesia
By Julie Phillips

Silence is one of those concepts you have to think about. The absence of sound.

We don’t experience real soundlessness often, even when we’re alone, at rest. There’s the low drone of the heat, maybe, the steady whish of our breath, a song on replay in our mind.

To experience true silence, you have to go deep.
Maybe that’s how the term came to Kai Riedl. The creator of a project named Our New Silence, Riedl seeks his silence in meditation and finds inspiration in music. An instructor at the University of Georgia where he teaches classes on Asian religions, Buddhist ritual and music in religious culture, Riedl also is a musician, formerly with the well-loved but now-defunct Athens band Macha, popular in the late 1990s and early ’00s.

“Our New Silence” was a phrase he’d had floating around in his mind for a while – a band name maybe, he says.
Instead, it became the title for a project that brings Athens musicians together with musicians in Indonesia, a country where he finds intriguing sounds, and a new silence.

Indonesia

Riedl first took a trip to Indonesia – to the island of Java – about 10 years ago with one of his former bandmates, Josh McKay. The two were led there by their interest in the music from that country. Macha was a band that infused a variety of instruments into a traditional four-member rock band lineup – zither, dulcimer, gamelan and more. Mostly instrumental, the band had an exuberant sound that mixed world music into American pop.

On Riedl’s first trip, and on his four subsequent returns, he toted along recording equipment, which got a little more sophisticated with each visit, he says.

“I had a handheld cassette the first time I went over – then the next time I took a Marantz (recorder), then an Mbox (a digital recording device). …” he says, adding that friend and sound engineer Suny Lyons accompanied him on later trips, further elevating the quality of the recordings.

Riedl says he returned to the same general area each time, revisiting cities including Bandung and Yogyakarta.
“There are different layers exposed the more you go to certain cities,” he says. “The goal wasn’t to accumulate so much as it was to get to know the music.”

He felt that through his connection, he could bring something back with him to share about this mostly Muslim country.

“At the time, there was a lot of Bush sentiment, and it was sort of my form of political activism – I felt like if people could experience the music, it would relax some of our fixed concepts about the Islamic world.”

His attraction to the music, he notes, also is for its qualities – it’s cyclic, with simple melodies using pentatonic scales in many cases, he says. One or two instruments create interlocking patterns. On his Web site, he notes it’s music that has influenced the likes of John Cage, Phillip Glass, Debussy, Steve Reich and Bela Bartok. “There’s a really high degree of invention you can create within these simple frameworks,” he says.

The sounds he recorded from musicians on the street or through various people he met captured him. In some cases, they captured the musicians as well. “Most of the people we recorded had never heard themselves before, so when they listened back (to the recording) they were really fascinated,” he says.

The photo used for his flyer for Our New Silence features one such musician, a man from Bali whose specialty, interestingly, was in cremation music.

From under the headphones, the man’s face tells part of the story, the “thumbs up” the rest.

Athens

Back home, Riedl cataloged the music he recorded along the way in a project he calls Javasounds. This week, he begins the online release of the first of 12 albums of music, over the course of 12 weeks. The cost is $1 per album. He’s not interested in making money, he says, but instead in offering “a reliable introduction to Javanese music. If you listen to these recordings, you’ll have a well-rounded idea about the sonic palette and styles of music there.”

Along the way, he saw other potential for the songs, as well. As a musician, he wanted to play with the sounds, remix and reinterpret them and explore the textures. He invited about a dozen other musicians to do the same – among them Heather McIntosh of the Instruments; Page Campbell of Hope for Agoldensummer; solo artist Killick; Kyle Dawkins of the Georgia Guitar Quartet; and Patrick Ferguson of Five Eight.

And that’s the project that became Our New Silence. With a grant through UGA’s Ideas for Creative Exploration, on Saturday he brings some of the musicians who participated in the remix project together for a free concert at Ramsey Concert Hall in the UGA Performing Arts Center.

Riedl says he tried to match up the musicians he chose for the project with textures and songs that would best complement their styles. He’s happy with the results, and looking forward to Saturday’s concert and to working even more with the project as well. Hopes are to bring in more musicians and singers, to reinterpret other songs from Javasounds, and to bring some of the musicians from Indonesia to Athens in the fall for some live collaboration. Longshot is maybe even taking Athens musicians to Java to play.

Saturday’s performance, he says, really is just the first iteration of Our New Silence. And in it, music is the medium for something greater, a means for communication without words.

“I do meditate quite a bit, so I cherish silence,” Riedl says. “But even in silence, you can sometimes still hear music … Somehow, this is a combination of those things.”

April 15, 2009
Athens Banner-Herald
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Bradbury’s future becomes multimedia opus
By Mary Jessica Hammes

There’s a war about to happen, but no one notices, distracted by a constant stream of visual clatter from wall-sized television screens and noise pumped into ever-present earbuds.

Printed media is way out of style – in fact, it’s viewed as so dangerous that what’s left either is torched or illegally hoarded.
Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451” remains an introductory primer on what “dystopia” means for countless schoolchildren, and it still resonates with plenty of adults, like local jazz musician Dan Nettles.
“I find the themes in it to be timeless,” he says. “For many people, this is the first experience reading about a world committing cultural suicide.”

In 2007, Nettles wrote music inspired by the story for a stage production in Brunswick. The experience compelled him to explore the story even more, creating a multimedia show that involves a six-piece live band, theatrical readings and video. After receiving support from the Ideas for Creative Exploration program at the University of Georgia, Nettles’ band, Kenosha Kid, is presenting “Fahrenheit” at Ciné.
“There are characters and themes in the book that inspired me to create 10 musical settings,” says Nettles. “The audience will be swept away by the music and visuals, and the readers will provide a dialogue that expounds upon that.”

Bradbury’s story takes place in a future where books are outlawed, readers are branded mentally unstable and exiled to asylums, and firemen spend their time setting fires (to books, specifically) instead of putting them out. One fireman, Guy Montag, radically alters his world view and soon is on the run, chased by his former colleagues and seeking refuge among a secret community of other literate cast-offs.
Nettles has composed pieces inspired by themes and characters in the book, so there is music that recalls the mechanical hound, that awful creature sent to track down and destroy the book-readers; walls that are made up almost completely of television screens that essentially take the place of family; the ideas of burning and destroying versus the cool safety of water (Montag escapes via a river); and a society that is both embroiled in an endless war and too distracted by television to notice the latest attack.

Also, “I think there’s a lot of commentary on the oversaturation of media – the idea of a billboard or the Internet or television always in your face, always telling you how your life can be better,” Nettles says.

Bradbury himself has maintained the book was not a commentary about censorship or the government, but a reaction against the then-nascent but blossoming world of television.

In one of many videos you can see at his Web site (www.raybradbury.com), he says, “I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV. … ‘Fahrenheit’s’ not about censorship, it’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of gigantic screens and the bombardment of factoids. We’ve moved into this period of history that I described in ‘Fahrenheit’ 50 years ago.”

Nettles’ project brings together artists from all over the country. “I think it’s in the spirit of the ICE grant to gather people like this,” Nettles muses, considering his friends. The musicians are Jacob Wick and Aryeh Kobrinsky, both of New York City; Greg Sinibaldi of Seattle; Neal Fountain of Athens; and Jeff Reilly from Los Angeles. Stationed on either side of the band will be readers Dan Bollinger of Athens and Laylage Courie of New York City; meanwhile, local filmmaker Eddie Whelan will be in the projection booth, his images glowing as a backdrop behind the performers.

“We have a history,” says Nettles of the performance group. “Many of them are on my last record. When I have an opportunity like this to make something really special, these are the people I’d like to involve. Each one of them is an incredible bandleader or composer already.”
You can expect the musicians to create two distinct environments. Sometimes, the musicians will channel the voice of the oppressor (the bad, soulless types). Some songs will sound like they were made in “a world in the distant future that’s never heard music from the heart,” Nettles says. “It’s music someone would make if they’ve never heard of Muddy Waters.”

Other times, the music becomes the voice of the dissident outlaws (the good guys) – passionate, smart, strong.

“In a society like this that’s crushing the culture, there’s always going to be individuals clinging to creative endeavors,” Nettles says.

April 17, 2009
Red and Black
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Musicians collaborate to explore traditional Indonesian sounds

By Sarah Pelham

This weekend, the classic Athens sound will mingle with music that originated half a world away.

Saturday, a collection of local musicians will present their interpretation of traditional Indonesian music.

“I work under the premise that if you open your ears, your mind will follow,” Kai Riedl, a University religion instructor, said. “I’ve seen the power of exposing yourself to new ideas and how it can re-frame your world.”

Our New Silence consists of University and local musicians reinventing traditional Indonesian music to create a new palette of abstract rock, pop, folk and experimental songs.

Riedl selected musicians to collaborate with him on the Our New Silence project after recording Indonesian music during several previous visits to the country.

“The idea of starting to record music in Indonesia was pretty choiceless,” Riedl said.

The musician in him itched to tinker with the sounds he heard, and the teacher in him compelled him to extend the experiment to all of Athens.

“I think that exposure to some of the more cultural aspects of the Islamic world can add a different perspective that’s not caught up in language,” Riedl said.

Kyle Dawkins of the Georgia Guitar Quartet blended a pop beat, an American banjo and an Indonesian plucking-instrument, called the kapaci, to create his piece for the Our New Silence concert.

“It was really fun for me to string it all together in some way,” Dawkins said in a telephone interview. “It was like being in a sandbox or something … I think it’s such a creative fusion of ideas from both cultures – American, Athens music culture and Indonesian music culture.”

At the show on Saturday, a sample of the original Indonesian music recording will be played prior to each musician’s abstraction to give the listeners context.

Ideas for Creative Exploration, the University’s interdisciplinary initiative that provides small grants for creative research in the arts, funded the Our New Silence project.