First Fridays: Ian Dicke's Cowboy Rounds

First Fridays is pleased to announce its second concert of the season. Ian Dicke will perform his piece Cowboy Rounds, a song cycle for piano/vocalist and live electronic processing. This work “remixes” pre-existing source material from the John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip at the Library of Congress. The lack of copyright of these field recordings invites current and future generations of musicians to continue developing the songs, whether through digital manipulation of the recorded material or reconstructing elements of the recording through live performance. In this sense, Cowboy Rounds is deliberately caught between the ideological constructs of permanence and ephemera, building intersections between new technologies and old traditions. In another remix of archival sound sources, Ben Dicke will play drum set to a historical recording of the sound-poem Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters, translating rhythmic vocal sounds into percussive music.