Danimal Calls was a site-specific, experimental music performance that took place in my studio for my final critique of MFA. My understanding and experience of performing as a musician comes from sticky, concrete basements in Pittsburgh. Watching as music had the power to incite people to choke slam one another through tables, sexualize my equipment, and provoke confrontation from angry neighbors and police, I began to develop questions about what people sought out in attending events with live music. Through my personal observation of others and myself, I saw musical performances as a space to release animalistic impulses. DJing under the moniker DJ Danimal, I am always searching for sounds and effects that I consider to be primal. I often sample porn and animal videos on youtube, record sounds from hacked/DIY instruments, and utilize a mix of other experimental recording techniques to create moans, growls, and other coarse sounds. I then utilize those sounds to fill out the instrumentation in my house/techno driven music. This performance removed the repetitive drum structure from electronic dance music leaving behind raw experimentation from my primordial library of sounds.
My studio is my natural habitat. From this ecosystem, many of my audio experiments and instruments made their first howls between the walls of this work space. By utilizing two hacked keyboards, a shovel guitar, my DJ controller, a white noise machine, an 8-channel mixer, and a new site-specific instrument made from a metal projector screen case, I played a final composition in this birth place before it was my time to migrate. The sound resonated from my nest and into the architecture of the surrounding building, allowing listeners to wander as the sound bounced throughout the site. The composition consists of phrases that are periods of experimentation with specific mixtures of instruments forming a non-replicable performance. These hacked instruments, much like animals, have desires of their own, often shutting off and distorting at their pleasure. I was stranded in the wild for much of the performance, freely improvising and responsively mixing.