Brian Fending is a programmer, multimedia artist, and freelance percussionist based in sunny Buffalo, NY. His undergraduate (Performer's Certificate, BM, 1996) work was completed at SUNY College at Fredonia under Theodore Frazeur, D. Thomas Toner, and Kay Stonefelt. Graduate study found him at Miami University (MM, 1999) with William R. Albin. Brian has performed with the electroacoustic improvisation group Gray Code, with guitarist Jonathan (Morris) Matis in the post-everything duo Fending/Matis and with various other chamber ensembles and jazz groups. His tag cloud of musical and technological interests is so varied, it's just a long list.
DISCOGRAPHY
Gray Code: Live in Philadelphia (Metatron Press, 2000)
- vibraphone, percussion
Fending/Matis: Shiny + Round (Metatron Press, 2001)
- modified drumset, vibraphone, percussion
Tom Keil Trio: Singles (2004)
- an EP of three studio tracks with Tom Keil (g), Leif Nicklas (b), BF (d)
Gena Rowlands Band: La Merde Et Les Etoiles
- udu on 1 track
Fending/Matis: Three Rocks (Sockets, 2006)
- drumset, percussion, udu
WORKS
Duo with Craque (unnamed) (2008)
Craque has done the start of his part - I need to finish recording as soon as my workload permits this Spring and pass it back so we can start some mad mixing. MAN, this is going to be a fun listen.
Beelzubub Slept Here (2008)
A work in progress, I get all literary and expound upon mostly John Milton's view of this lieutenant of hell in a musical work that evokes sympathy and revulsion. Perfect for picnics. It's in the sketch phase right now, and may go into 2009 since I have a hard time finishing a project a year and would rather finish the Craque project this year. :)
Subversations 1.0 (2006)
Premiered at Sqeaky Wheel Media Arts Center (Buffalo, NY) as part of the Buffalo Infringement Festival (Buffalo, NY, 2006)
The Premise
Record a bunch of stories, chop them up, write a program to reassemble the pieces in a reasonably intelligent but still unpredictable way. Each iteration is different from the previous, but all have a beginning, middle, and end.The Tech
A laptop running Apache with PHP chugs on an array containing data about all 565 MP3-encoded story segments from a total of eight storytellers. The logic and rule-driven functions therein create a unique XML doc (actually, it's XSPF) containing the sequence of tracks. A Flash-based XSPF player (musicplayer.sourceforge.net) then plays the MP3s in real time with no gaps between (because it's all running locally from the laptop), thus creating an experience that would be difficult to obtain if Web-deployed.
Music for the Working Type: a sound art installation (2005)
Premiered at These Are My Instructions; An Instruction Art Exhibition/Event (Baltimore, MD, 2005)
Perhaps the most important virtue to uphold while working in an office is awareness. Awareness of sounds, of the speed of your mind, of just how exciting or inexpressibly numbing each part of your day may be. And when it reaches an extreme at either end of the spectrum, layering all of it together is the next step. Challenge your deprived senses. Make work of being at work, but of the variety that stimulates your mind. Kill your job, keep your television. MFTWT (not MTWTF) layers the most exciting and dulling times of a worker, portrayed via two stereo arrays, and juxtaposes these contrasting periods in a suite of environmental sound not unfamiliar but somehow new from the treatment.
