sfSoundSalonSeries: Jonathan Zorn

Jonathan Zorn presents two compositions for speech and electronics.
Language as Dust, an essayistic sound poem exploring the consequences of electronic mediation within spoken and written language. The text of the piece freely repurposes sources relating to the history of vocal technologies as well as psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the voice, including: Aristotle’s De Anima, Thomas Edison’s anticipated use of audio recording, abstracted lyrics of “How High the Moon,” misheard vocoder communications, and transcriptions of Electronic Voice Phenomena.
And Perforation, features Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” rewritten using Google Translate and Word‘s Auto Summarize function. Logically, the resulting texts are spoken through a vocoder.
Jonathan Zorn works as a composer, performer, and curator of experimental, electronic, and improvised music. His electronic music pairs improvising musicians with interactive computer systems to create hybrid, human-machine ensembles. Zorn’s interest in vocal utterance has resulted in a series of pieces in which spoken language is interrupted by electronic forces, drawing attention to the gap between speech and sound. Zorn has been active as an improvisor on bass and electronics for 15 years and has performed at Red Cat, the Walker Art Center, the Verona Jazz Festival, the Library of Congress, the Seattle Festival of Improvised Music, Line Space Line Festival, and the Chelsea Art Museum. His work has been published in Ord und Bild, the SEAMUS Journal, Notations 21, and UbuWeb.