NASHVILLE, TN. (Top40 Charts/
Reflex Records) - Folk Songs for the Five Points is a collection of experimental folk songs capturing the sounds and spirit of one of New York's oldest and culturally richest neighborhoods. Folk Songs for the Five Points was created entirely from audio fragments recorded on location in the Lower East Side as part of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum's
Digital Artist in Residence Project. Recorded and remixed by cross-disciplinary artist
David Gunn and featuring new compositions by Angolan composer and instrument-builder, Victor Gama (Reflex Records), this new CD combines oral histories, local music, and ambient field recordings to create a unique document of the Lower East Side. The new Folk Songs CD will be available for purchase on The Tenement website at www.tenement.org/store on February 13th.
Folk Songs for the Five Points is a rich array of voices and sounds, from the street cries of market sellers in Chinatown to the screech of the subway, from church sermons to buskers on Spring Street. Gunn has reinterpreted and transformed these sounds, creating surprising and evocative pieces like a queasy re-imagining of ice cream van music and a deconstructed performance by celebrated Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera.
The CD has its roots in a critically acclaimed Digital Artist in Residence Project (www.tenement.org/folksongs) commissioned by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and is part of an ongoing series of works by The Folk Songs Project. For The Tenement, Gunn and his collaborators in The Folk Songs Project, Alastair Dant and Tom Davis, created an interactive website where users could remix various sounds and music to create their own "folk songs". Gunn recorded a wide variety of sounds, based upon the suggestions of local residents and chance events as he walked the streets of the Lower East Side. Composer Victor Gama was invited to come to New York to create a series of new compositions inspired by the neighborhood. These compositions, performed upon the "toha" (an instrument conceived and built by Gama), were recorded in one take on a hot evening in an unrestored apartment of The Tenement's historic tenement building. (For more information about The Folk Songs Project, visit www.folksongsproject.com.)
The album was conceived as a collection of "folk songs" - not finished compositions, but snapshots of moments in time. With this in mind, Gunn employed a primitive approach. Avoiding the clinical aesthetics of modern electronic music, he used only the simplest editing and effects processes to retain a sense of immediacy and the unpredictable aspects of the source recordings - tape glitches, wind noise, and radio interference. The result is a powerful, compelling sense of a living, breathing community of sounds: digital folk music.
