A Surround Sound Evening of Agitprop Sound
Sunday, August 25, 2024 8:30 pm
The Red Room, Baltimore

Checkpoint (2019) – Donia Jarrar
Fit the Description (Ferguson, 9-13 August 2014) (2014/2024) – Chris DeLaurenti
for george, breonna, ahmaud, and christian (2020) – Jazmine (JT) Greenintermission
Responsibility (2024) – Steve Barsotti
Biome Study (2024) – Lyn Goeringer
With additional selections to be announced

Checkpoint
Original audio samples collected by the artist on Checkpoint were recorded in various parts of Palestine,
most notably at the illegal apartheid wall and Qalandia Checkpoint, which separates Ramallah from
Jerusalem. Field recordings include sounds of the soldiers, the sound of the caged turnstile spinning andthe echoes of the saxophone on the other side of the checkpoint. The choir was sampled from the artist's
2nd grade music class at the adjacent refugee camp. The saxophone improvisation is by Freya Aquaron.
Checkpoint appears on the album Hidden Assemblages: https://phonodelica.bandcamp.com/
Dr. Donia Jarrar (she/they) is a first generation Egyptian-Palestinian-American composer, pianist,bassist, singer-songwriter, improviser, producer and educator known for her unique use of fieldrecordings, working with oral histories and their relationship to the composition and shaping of newmusical works across varying genres. She releases music under the solo moniker Phonodelica.
https://www.doniajarrar.net/

Fit the Description (Ferguson, 9-13 August 2014)
On August 9, 2014, protests erupted just outside of St. Louis, Missouri in the United States after thekilling of Michael Brown, a young Black teenager, by a white Ferguson Police Department officer. The
following peaceful protests against the racist practices of the Ferguson Police Department were met byregional and local law enforcement with an astonishingly militarized show of force.
While many radio and television reports packaged the subsequent events in Ferguson with a nearpornographic fixation on looting and property damage, skeptical viewers and listeners had to go on-lineand piece together a mosaic of video feeds and social media reports to get a sense of what people there
were thinking, feeling, saying, and doing. I owe a great debt to the activists and protesters who shared
their (sometimes private) posts with me personally as well as online.
This work attempts to collate multiple live video and social media streams from August 9th and thesubsequent protests in the wake of Michael Brown's death. You will hear events in Ferguson from multiple
and occasionally contradictory viewpoints. Grief, shock, and anger mingle with exuberant defiance, astuteobservations, fear, steely resistance, and wisdom.
Chris DeLaurenti (he/him) brings his microphones into unusual soundscapes including politicalprotests, abandoned nuclear power stations, and orchestra intermissions. He makes sound works forinstallations, albums, live performances, and radio broadcasts ranging from N30: Live at the WTO
Protest November 30, 1999 (2000) and Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven
Stravinsky Holst (2007) to Live at Occupy Wall St. (2012), To the Cooling Tower, Satsop (2015), and J20
and the Women’s March: Live in DC January 18-21, 2017 (2017). His most recent album, soft gradient(2024) surges and churns through lush textures made from treated magnetic tapes, binaural fieldrecordings, antique objects, and a one-of-a-kind modular synth, the pHREAKER by AHC Audio.
https://petitbardo.bandcamp.com/album/soft-gradient
https://delaurenti.net/

for george, breonna, ahmaud, and christian
Originally made for the podcast u+1f60c, this meditation on fear and injustice honors George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Christian Cooper. A noted birder, science writer, and advocate forthe natural world, Christian Cooper was falsely accused of harassment by a white woman who called 911
while he was birding in Central Park. George Floyd, an innocent Black man, was suffocated and killed bypolice in May 2020. Breonna Taylor, an innocent Black woman, was killed by a hail of bullets from police
executing a bungled no-knock warrant. Ahmaud Arbery, an innocent Black man, was chased and killed bythree white men while out jogging in February 2020. These racist killings of unarmed, non-violent Black
people spurred nationwide protests and calls for police reform and abolition during the summer of 2020.
“Colouour” by Moses Sumney is sampled in this work; hear more of his music at
https://mosessumney.bandcamp.com/track/colouour-2
Jazmine (JT) Green (she/they) is a sound and visual artist, podcast producer, and poet. Their project
CMD+JAZMINE seeks to escape the rigid bounds of audio storytelling by firmly embracing rhythmic
experimentation, harmony, and deep dynamic range through the lens of a cyborg who desperately wants
to be human: https://www.jtgreen.me/cmdjazmine

Responsibility
Responsibility melts and mangles a voice which some will find all too familiar. Lies, deception, and selfish
insincerity are mocked by smeared and skidding analog tape effects slowed into an ironic sludge of
untruth or sped-up into warbling nonsense. Amid ricocheting distortion, one-word memes (“Russia”) andincessant, echolalic phrases (“I take full responsibility,” “black population”) propel this manic microchorale. Ultimately this tossed word salad squeezes out a final, fantasized confession.
Steve Barsotti (he/him) is an educator, post-production audio engineer, and sound artist. For the last
30 years he has taught creative approaches to electronic music, sound art, and audio production atcolleges and universities in Chicago, Seattle, and San Diego. He is currently the Chair of the San Diego
Section of the Audio Engineering Society.
Steve has recorded, mixed, and mastered audio for feature-length documentaries and documentary shorts
as well as streaming content, podcasts, and instructional videos. A noted member and former co-leader of
the Seattle Phonographers Union, Steve spearheaded two SPU albums Seattle Phonographers Union(and/OAR, 2009) and Building 27 WNP-5 (Prefecture Music, 2014). His solo albums Along These Linesand Say “tin-tah-pee-mick” feature amplified objects, custom-built instruments, unusual electronics, andsubtly complex field recordings. https://www.kazbar.org/

Biome Study
This piece of music focuses on three separate planes of listening: the act of listening in a field, the act oflistening at the soil level, and the third, listening to the interiority of wood being consumed by carpenter
bees. Composed using sounds recorded with the biome of the Soil Factory (Ithaca, NY) in mind, this work
considers the fragile network of trophic levels in any given biome, and how each trophic level is dependent
on the survival of all involved, regardless of its depth.
Lyn Goeringer (she/they) is a composer, sound artist, improvisor, and performer who makes their own
instruments and multi-media pieces that focus on the unusual and everyday within sound, video, andelectronics. Their work relies on intense focus and attention to bring the listener to a point of intentional
hearing — a world where unusual objects bring haunting soundscapes to life, and everyday objects
become sonic in ways we do not usually get the opportunity to hear. Informed by reductionism andessentialism in improvisation and compositional practice, their works investigate individual sounds andimages, giving them the time and space they need for their inner complexity to rise to the surface.
https://www.lyngoeringer.com/portfolio/