Omnicircus: House of the Deafman

Omnicircus: House of the Deafman

Description: 
Goya goes multidisciplinary
Composers: 
Frank Garvey
Performers: 
DeusMachina
Omnicircus
Diana Trimble
Dwayne Calizo
Shafqat Ali Khan
Daniel Berkman
Catalog Number: 
#538
Genre: 
world
experimental
electronic
Collection: 
indie
theater
India
Location: 

San Francisco, CA

Price: 
$15.00
Release Date: 
Jan 1, 2001
Liner Notes: 
View
1 CD
House of the DeafmaniTunes Artist's PageiTunes Album Page
Song TitleTimePrice
1.Goodbye00:36$0.99
2.Tweedledee-dee02:25$0.99
3.Nightsounds04:20$0.99
4.Deaf On Hollow Winds07:07$0.99
5.Hunky Dory03:27$0.99
6.Three Fates03:57$0.99
7.Deafman 103:02$0.99
8.Bonedance02:58$0.99
9.Nada04:14$0.99
10.Fat Chance02:01$0.99
11.More-a-the-Same03:51$0.99
12.Deafman 206:24$0.99
13.Compulsion03:21$0.99
14.Strawman05:06$0.99
15.Red Cloud Rise02:00$0.99
16.Guernica/ Goodbye07:10$0.99
One Sheet: 

The stage action takes place in a magical, endless night during which Goya gets drunk and contemplates suicide. His nightmarish Black Paintings come to life in the play in the form of Omnicircus robots and virpets (virtual digital puppets), and the painter is visited by the ghost of his great love, the Duchess of Alba. This multi-media CD-ROM includes MPEG video of the extraordinary robot performers, the entire script for the staged work, and the equally-transporting music from the staged production. 

The visionary genius behind it all, Frank Garvey, writes: "I compose world-confusion psycho-surrealist junkyard ritual music, something like an industrial-psychedelic taiko ensemble made from old tractor parts somebody set on fire to destroy the evidence. Out of this vortex luminous voices unexpectedly ascend, creating beauty and poetry out of anguish and chaos..."  Garvey's OmniCircus is an interactive installation and performance space in San Francisco with a secondary home at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The resident music group at the OmniCircus is DeusMachina, whose ranks include some of the most powerful performers in the Bay Area and beyond. This recording includes three amazing singers - vox artists Diana Trimble, Shafqat Ali Khan, and Dwayne Calizo - and the multi-instrumental talents of Daniel Berkman, here featured on the beautiful West African harp, the Kora. In 1999 Frank Garvey established the Center for Robotic and Synthetic Performance (CRSP) in Pittsburgh, Pa. The CRSP is a vehicle for the creation of new technologies, performance languages and engineering visions which interface science and tool-making with the primal effort to understand (and change) the human condition through the arts. 

Reviews: 

ALL MUSIC GUIDE

"a very strange multi-media, pluri-stylistic work. The cross-over instrumentation on DeusMachina is what makes this CD such a mesmerizing experience... come together to create a surrealistic and unclassifiable sound-narrative. But most importantly: it works like a charm. House of the Deafman is the kind of record you put on when you want to enter a totally different world, regardless of your affinities with avant-garde or world music; the kind of record you cherish, simply because it can be compared to nothing else." - Francois Couture