Music For Magic - Creepy Pump Organ

Enoch's Theme

Made in collaboration with Jeff Morris at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2015. Wearing headphones, I was improvising alone while being in a duet in real time with the manipulations of my own voice produced by Morris' interactive programming.

In the Middle of the Room There's a Town (collaboration with Jeff Morris)

An improvisation made at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2015. A collaboration with Jeff Morris; his interactive program meant I was duetting with multiple versions of myself, in real time.

Wait... (collaboration with live interactive electronics by Jeff Morris)

In 2012 I produced a song with the help of singer/songwriter Nick Pichet for Chicago-based performance artists Industry of the Ordinary which was featured in their retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. Lyrics by IOTO. Image is of the accompanying installation - the Narcissism Chamber. The encounterer listened to this song on headphones while looking at a live video feed of themselves.

I Am Beautiful

I Would Have Said Something But I Didn't Want To Sound - Wet Ink Reading

A piece illustrating the process of trying to "make it" as a creative professional - applying for opportunities, waiting, waiting more, getting hopeful, receiving rejections, receiving the occasional exciting chance and then back to the waiting and working and applying, one foot in front of the other. 
Performed by musicians at the Toronto Creative Music Lab in June 2017. Recorded at the 918 Bathurst Centre on June 24, 2017 by Pouya Hamidi (Canadian Music Centre), on behalf of the Toronto Creative Music Lab.

Making It

To make this piece I plowed through the field of hope and wretchedness that is the experience of trying to love someone with narcissistic personality disorder.
For fixed media, drum set, and xylophone. This track is a simulation of a real recording, using sample libraries and extended techniques recordings; it will be recorded by percussionist Joe Tucker (who also commissioned it) and released by Slash/Sound records in the near future.

motherlover

Vocals recorded in the grain silo at the ACRE residency. 
Words drawn from a poetic inventory of the office of Chicago-based dancer and artist Carole McCurdy. 
Also included in the recording: a 19th century music box. 

Text (drawn from a longer inventory):


man 
is playing cello well

teal skull

the holy hole

a woman against a green background
dances with abandon

"use it," says the man with the moustache—
he has clearly had success.

man

Notes on Carole's Office

Performed by Tiffany Ng on March 10, 2018 at the National Carillon in Canberra, Australia.

Mobilize

Viola - Elizabeth Reid
918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media, and Education
Thursday August 15, 2019

Curfew

Elisabeth Blair is a poet, composer, vocalist, and podcaster. After finishing a BA in photography in 2004, she spent many years on the singer/songwriter circuit in Chicago before moving into both free improvisation and formal composition. She received a Specialist Certificate in Music Composition for Film and TV from Berklee in 2015, and from 2015-17 studied music composition at Western Michigan University. Her works have been performed widely, including New York, Melbourne, Canberra, Berlin, Montreal, and Zacatecas.

She has been artist-in-residence at Wildacres, ACRE, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and in 2017 was a participant composer at the Toronto Creative Music Lab and composer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.  
 
Poetry forms an important part of her creative practice. Her publications include two chapbooks (Dancing Girl Press 2016; Ethel Press 2020), a forthcoming full-length collection (Unsolicited Press 2022), and poems in a variety of journals including Feminist Studies, cream city review, and S/tick. Since 2018 she's been honored to be a poetry workshop leader for the Burlington Writers Workshop. She works as a freelance editor and manuscript consultant. 
 
From 2016-19 she hosted and produced Listening to Ladies, a podcast featuring interviews with women composers.

Elisabeth Blair

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