Music & Performance
A poet-lyricist songwriter and a sound artist, producer and designer Nik has written and performed music in the genres of folk, alt-rock, punk-funk, sub-jazz world, contemporary opera/sonic theatre as well as music for dance and video installation. Musical reference points range from Waits, Cohen and Nick Drake to Eno and Greinke.
Nik has also written, produced and performed in a series of ‘Sonic Theatre’ works, and is currently engaged in the creation of web-based multimedia installations.
Snakes & Ladders
MUSIC & LYRICS BY Nik Beeson
PERFORMED BY Nik Beeson w/Neil Gardiner (trombone) & Alan Davis (percussion) on ‘Beauty Rises’
RECORDING BY Anthony Smith & Brad Armstrong
MASTERING BY Brad Armstrong @ Home Cookin’ (Not in Kansas, No Denying, Apocalypso, Beauty Rises)
PRODUCED BY Nik Beeson
DIVE: Odes for Lighea
COMPOSITION & SOUND DESIGN BY Nik Beeson with Fides Krucker
TEXT BY Richard Sanger
PERFORMED BY Fides Krucker, Nik Beeson, Rick Sacks, Rob Clutton & Neil Gardiner
PRODUCED BY Nik Beeson
‘DIVE: Odes for Lighea’ is a full length CD recording of the music for the opera/sonic theatre project, ‘DIVE’, which premiered in Toronto in July 2015. Based on Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s ‘The Professor and the Mermaid’, it is a semi-fantastical portrayal, set in fascist Italy, of love, awakening, and possibly madness, told through the love between a classics Professor and a mermaid.
‘DIVE: Odes to Lighea’ has the journey of the Mermaid, performed by Fides Krucker, as its dramatic narrative core. She is the musical presence that sonically animates the opera, and the music and vocal parts have been scored in very close collaboration with Krucker. In the course of the recording the Mermaid passes through multiple stylistic disguises: a howling banshee sonically crushing a crowd of fascists; a devastated then furious jilted “Tata” singing melodies derived from Greek folk music; a wry old crone of a waitress informing a young male lead that he’s been dumped through a crumbling descending folk melody; a seductive young waitress in a seedy bar sings a Waits/Mingus/Partch rendition of clients debits (actually the many explorers who were her former lovers); an ecstatic fascist maid improvises over a time-stretched speech by Mussolini; and finally the divine and wild being herself, seducing over lilting ambient melodic waves, inspiring awe and wonder in calling into action the ocean itself with Straussian majesty, and then exploding into the towering wild rage of a storm.
These music works use a wide range of styles and sonic techniques:
a speech by Mussolini and his ecstatic crowd is crushed by a mighty mermaid ‘roar’, washing out into waves, gulls, a buoy bell; traditionally scored and electroacoustic Arias; fat analog synths and wolves; Crystal Baschet, Vibraphone and Mbira; Cloud Bowls’ (glass instruments designed and built by American microtonal pioneer Harry Partch); a remix of Persian traditional master improvisers; ambient melodies for mbira, vibraphone & dulcimer.
‘DIVE’ was composed in close collaboration with Fides Krucker. We researched sonic material from wolves and whales to the northern Italian Tarantella tradition. Fides improvised to soundscapes and bed tracks and these improvisations could be layered up, or kept fully intact.
* Fascism & the Wild in ‘DIVE: Odes for Lighea’: a short essay by Nik Beeson
* ‘Ten Questions on DIVE for Nik Beeson’ – BarczaBlog (July 23, 2015)
Howlings
MUSIC BY Nik Beeson
ENGINEERED BY John Magyar @ Psychospace Sound
PRODUCED BY Nik Beeson
“…sometimes reminiscent of Eno’s work, it comes closest to the ambient landscapes of American composer Jeff Greinke, expressing at times subtle feelings of dread, at others a tinge of melancholy, and even hints at a new form of aural beauty.“
“Beeson’s Howlings is one of the most accomplished and pleasurable electroacoustic CDs I have encountered, and I would advise those who enjoy adventures in music to search out this recording and enter into a sonic space that will enchant and mesmerize.“
Richard Truhlar – MusicWorks
Howlings’ is comprised of three electronic works using divergent compositional techniques and technologies, and yet all sharing a common lineage of expression. All share aspects of minimalism and ambient music -limited sound sources, gradual evolutions and repetition – and yet all can be poignantly dramatic, sometimes explosively so…
Lupus Angelus – A single short improvisation on a KORG Poly-Six was judiciously treated in a multi-tracking environment. The result is an astonishing blend of ‘howlings’; whales, wolves, whole schoolyards of children shrieking, peaking and crumbling into a preternatural sonic sub-basement, all to emerge once again…
Soulscaping – Using guitar and delay processing simple repetitive, gradually evolving, and rhythmically pulsing melodic patterns create a shifting sonic bed which is countered/overlayed by an ethereal and yet sometimes anguished voice.
Sud – Using a variety of delay processing improvisations, found sounds, samples, layers of loops, and intensive multi-tracking Sud is an orchestrated evolution or narrative. The whole process is structured by two very subtle rhythmic elements falling apart and meeting again twice, an almost implicit sonic cycle. Throughout these cycles innocuous sonic elements build, brood, increase in intensity and complexify. The co-incidence of the rhythmic elements coincide with/result in sudden ruptures, collapses, outbursts, catastrophes, resulting in radical and permanent shifts in the sonic environment.
Performance
OH
WURF
Mediador
Rhizome
MONA
Nik & Fides Krucker collaborated on a series of Sonic Theatre vignettes under the moniker ‘OH’. Darkly humorous, their performances explored relationships and madness to the music of Cole Porter and Arnold Schoenberg.
WURF is a puppet who cuts his strings.
A concept that met a realisation in a performance in 2000. High-Xposure, a highly experimental vertical dance company (climbers meet choreographers) for whom I had been doing music and movement, was commissioned by Toronto’s Theatre Centre to create a piece for the Body Geometry Festival. In November 2000 WURF (as ‘spectacle’) premiered. Suspended by a 60′ rope with which he could swing all the way to the balconies, and controlled by 4 human puppeteers suspended 20′ off the ground, WURF scissored to his fall, ‘giving birth’ to a sequence of events far beyond his control.
Conceptually WURF is a marionette, floating and swinging in a state of grace, blissfully unaware, willess and gravitiless. Offered a pair of scissors and a head lamp to see with, WURF awakens, becoming conscious. Cutting himself free from his pre-tensile cocoon WURF falls. So begins WURF’s journey; a journey from a kind of paradisal choiceless unity into the endless tensions and boundaries of the dualistic world. An infant in movement, WURF must develop the skills to move in a world forever pulling down, rather than up. Restless, impatient with the limitations imposed by gravity, WURF begins to resist it. Pushing and stretching the limitations of human movement, swinging across gravitational extremes, WURF attempts to create the tension and hence momentum required to break out of the skin of mortal limitations and re-enter the sphere of grace. In an archetypal act of escape and resistance WURF learns to climb, and so WURF ascends, reversing his original fall, the consequences of which are yet to be known.
‘Mediador’ is a parody on the relationship of capital and media to democracy, highlighting the influence of media over public opinion, and money over media. It was first performed in 1997 at ‘Plunderpalooza: A Festival of Cultural Appropriation’ (which also featured John Oswald, Mark Hosler (of ‘Negativeland’), and Monty Cantsin (aka Istvan Kantor)). Written by Nik Beeson, produced by Nik Beeson and Julie Notto, and directed by Alex Poch-Goldin, the piece was performed by Nik Beeson, Calla Lachance, Evan Jennings, Julie Notto and George Versen. Mediador, in its first incarnation, was a tightly choreographed spectacle featuring theatre, dance, live and pre-recorded video and live music.
To continue remounting the show on a shoestring, and to make it more accesible to a wider variety of venues, the piece was stripped back so that it could be performed as a duo. After its first spectacle-like incarnation Pam Johnson and Nik Beeson performed Mediador in numerous venues, from night clubs to barns, from Anarchist festivals to an International Socialist gathering in a living room. Mediador was last performed for the 1999 Toronto Fringe festival.
More on Mediador here…
rhizome – a root-like subterannean stem, commonly horizontal in position, that produces shoots above and roots below…also called “rootstalk”. From Greek rhizoun,to cause to strike root.
The poem, Rhizome, was the original stimulus for the creation of Cirque-Samsara. Conceived by Nik Beeson as a section of a larger project called ‘WURF’ Rhizome took on a life of its own. Based on the poem ‘Rhizome’, Nik and Sherri Hay began rehearsing a contact dance based improv/structure suggesting birth, growth, separation, and collapse. They then called on Kelly Thornton to direct the piece, Julie Notto to do vocal improvisations, Greg Hopen to play Saxophone and Shakahachi and Teilhard Frost to play didgereedoo…a wonderful crew of wondrously creative folks. Rehearsals became very open creative improvs astutely directed by Kelly… Vocal warm-ups and improvs led to a choral reading of the piece – sound, textures, rhythm supporting Sherri reading the poem as a central theme. The choral reading was followed by the dance piece, a structured improv building to a peak with a most vicious and frenetic collapse.
Rhizome was performed at Residance, The Bathurst Street Theatre and Livestock.
Rhizome
becomes
a seed
sprouting,
into a green stalk,
into a root,
developing.
A green leaf,
branching from the green stalk,
which grows,
which grows and develops,
another green leaf above the first leaf.
Growing and developing,
developing another root,
supplying another green leaf,
and the development of the stalk.
Gathering order of roots.
Transporting medium of stalk.
Leaves rotating symmetrically to receive the light.
An interacting community of roots, stalk, leaves.
Roots communicating nourishment, transported by stalk, into expanding formation of leaves.
Expansion, growth and development of the order of roots and stalk and leaves.
Systems of order of roots, digging deeper and farther to supply the outermost tips of grand leaves,
and the most distant leaves at the top of the tall stalk.
Organization of systems of orders of roots,
Transportation and communication of nutrition by stalk.
Symmetrical rotational development of expansion of leaves.
Flexible institution of conjunction of separate elements and functions ……
Complexification of organization of systems of orders of roots.
Distance of transportation and communication of information and nutrition by stalk.
Quantification of symmetrical rotational development of expansion of leaves.
Limits of available energy.
Limits of available energy.
Limits of available energy.
Turning point of expanding growth.
Rigidification of flexibility.
Destitution of institution.
Disjunction of conjunction.
Disintegration of integration.
Disparation of elements and functions.
Apathy and entropy.
Withering of roots,
collapse of stalk,
fall of leaves,
decay of all,
becomes,
Rhizome.
‘MONA’ wove together a series of excerpts a novel I had been working on into a performance art piece which was performed as the opening lecture for the Subtle Technologies Conference, a gathering of scientists and artists from a very wide range of expertise, in Toronto on Saturday May 14, 2000.
‘MONA’ featured a non-binary/organic computational system that breached the security of the Darlington nuclear facility, and could not be defended against.