As part of the development process for a collaboration with Alexander Gedeon and DaEun Jung, I made a 13 minute video/sound piece for Music for Your Inbox called Candoro.
In this video, the soundscape around the Candoro Marble Company in Knoxville, TN is treated with JI magical realism, echoing the surreal navigations of our three bodies around the physical space of the building’s Beaux-Arts architecture.
The video was shot during our time at the Loghaven Artist Residency last September.
Performers: Daniel Corral, Alexander Gedeon, and DaEun Jung
Commissioned by PARTCH Ensemble and premiered in 2021.
The text for this piece was found in the Sierra Club’s summit register archive at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. A summit register is a log book sometimes found at the tops of mountain trails, and this text came from a summit register on Mt. San Antonio in 1944. Mount San Antonio (AKA Mt. Baldy) is the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, originally called Joat by the Tongva people and called “San Antonio Peak” in the Sierra Club archives. Dale F. Stewart, who wrote this entry, reveals that he was at Caltech in 1944. At the time, Caltech was very involved in the USA’s war efforts in both Europe and the Pacific. US troops landed at Normandy only three weeks before Stewart’s writing, and the US military detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki just over one year later (several key Manhattan Project personnel were from Caltech). This military affiliation helps explain Stewart’s quick identification of the Lockheed P38. Meanwhile, JPL co-founder Jack Parsons would leave his post there by the end of the year – due in part to his deep devotion to occultist (and mountaineer) Aleister Crowley and budding friendship with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. All of this is to say that there was probably a lot on Dale F. Stewart’s mind in June, 1944 as he surveyed the vistas from Mount San Antonio.
COVID-era remote presentation at REDCAT NOW Festival, Jan 2021
What would happen if the conventional flow of Korean dance is disrupted Prompted by this question, dancer-choreographer DaEun Jung has built a compositional system inspired by Merce Cunningham’s “chance operation” and the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Assigning the segmented moves of classical Korean dance to each morpho-syllabic block of the alphabet, Byoul Part 1: 246 at 40—consisting of 246 syllables, moves, and beats at 40 bpm—finds Jung, pansori singer Melody Shim, and sound composer Daniel Corral exploring concurrences of rigor upon arbitrary, spontaneity upon rules, flow upon interruption, dependency upon idiosyncrasy, and the conditional upon the absolute.
Choreographed and Performed by DaEun Jung Vocals: Melody H. Sim (Shim) Composer/Sound Design/Video Design: Daniel Corral Costume Design: Alice Park Scenic Concept: Haeshin Park Director of Photography: Chantal Cherry Video Editor: Scarlett Kim Associate Video Editor: Anthony Storniolo Sound Recording: Sung Ryeol Kim Special thanks to Alexander Gedeon, Tom Byun, and Rosanna Gamson for your generous support, time, and space
