It’s a little more than a week until her performance at the Montalvo Arts Center, and Nicole Lizée is still looking to recruit one final band member: a cricket. The insect has been chirping incessantly since she took up residency at Montalvo as a participant in the center’s Lucas Arts Program.
“It’s the most sonorus, resonant cricket I’ve ever come across in my life,” Lizée says by phone from her studio apartment on the sprawling Montalvo campus. This Thursday, the Quebec-based composer will merge live instrumentation and a menagerie of analog and digital electronics with the sounds of the great outdoors in a concert titled Open Air Electronica. “I want to find a way to have this cricket become a part of this [performance] because it keeps great time. It’s louder than some of the electronic equipment I have.”
As a kid in rural Saskatchewan, Lizée played with the malfunctioning devices her salesman father brought home. Breathing new life into human-made analog devices still thrills her at 44. The musician incorporates many found objects into her aesthetic. There is the crackling and warbling of damaged LPs, glitchy blips pulled from discarded video games and the lo-fi buzz of an old stylophone. And on Thursday, possibly a Saratogan cricket, or a chorus of them.
In her Montalvo performance Lizée will work with readily available materials in the natural world—exploring how the timbre of her repurposed gadgets change when buried in a hole or covered with leaves.
Joining Lizée as collaborators are Ben Reimer, a Montreal-based percussionist and adjunct professor at McGill University, and The Living Earth Show, a San Francisco-based contemporary music duo. In addition to playing electronic devices, they’ll provide meticulous accompaniment with tools like chopsticks on surrounding rocks or hollow logs.
The pair have worked with Lizée for a couple of years and see themselves as interpreters for the Open Air Electronica performance. Realizing her artistic vision for this experimental project—primarily created on-site in less than two weeks—excites them.
“Her percussion writing is extremely complex and complicated while still being extremely idiomatic,” percussionist Andy Meyerson of the Living Earth says. “There’s a tremendous amount going on.”
Open Air Electronica
Mar 22, 7pm, $10+
Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga
