A score for a sleeping audience. Experimental musicians performed live on the radio, running parallel to an adult sleep cycle. Demarco generated a Dreamline, and in the morning when listeners awoke, they called in to leave messages about their dreams. Those messages will be folded into next year’s Overnight Dreamform, creating a feedback loop of dreams.

Performers: Carlos Santistevan + Alex Neville, David Forlano, Lee Montgomery, Tahnee Udero, Dylan McLaughlin, Monica Demarco + Mauro Woody, Marya Errin Jones, Hannah Colton, Clifford Grindstaff, Kenn Cornell, Ryan Dennison, Marisa Demarco

2020

Find the full audio and each performer’s contribution HERE. 

Photos by Hannah Colton and Marisa Demarco

THERE MUST BE OTHER NAMES FOR THE RIVER

Composed by Marisa Demarco, Jessica Zeglin, Dylan McLaughlin

A score for six singers with amplification. Or to be performed a cappella next to the river.

The composition is based on data from the river known today as the Rio Grande. Each singer channels the river, representing a point where flows were observed and recorded: The headwaters in Colorado; Albuquerque, N.M.; the dam at Elephant Butte; El Paso, Texas; Big Bend, Texas; and the mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. The colors for each singer’s score—performed simultaneously—are drawn from the hues in the rocks and plants near the river in those regions. After embodying the last decades, the performers project possible futures.

Score instructions for performers:

• At least a day before the performance, go to the river, and bring something small back that’s significant to you. Carry it with you for a day. Return it to the river the day after the performance.

Score note for the performer embodying the mouth of the river: 

Performer leaves final 2011 note on a loop, pulls out a large card, and writes in fat marker: River flow data kept by the International Boundary Commission is not publicly available after 2011 for more than 850 miles of the Rio Grande, from Big Bend to the Gulf of Mexico. They hold it up.

flow data / paper / watercolor paint / river water / wood / mylar

2019

Top photo: Jessica Zeglin

Bottom photo: Dylan McLaughlin

Video: Dylan McLaughin

Performers (from left): Jessica Chao, Mauro Woody, Antonia Montoya, Kenneth Cornell, Ryan Dennison, Monica Demarco

There Must Be Other Names for the River from Dylan McLaughlin on Vimeo.

A version of the score was part of the Species in Peril show at the 516 Arts Museum. It was performed at the UNM Art Museum in Spring 2019 and becomes a semester-long installation in the top floor of the museum in Fall 2020. It was also performed at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in November 2019.

516 Arts Catalog

A worn acoustic instrument

“If we don’t take up public space, we cede it. But what armor should we wear?”

hoop earrings / copper wire / VHS tape housing discards

2019

Performer: Adri De La Cruz

Photos: Tommy Bruce

An installation and worn instrument.

We lose memory, too, when we’re alone. Recordings, the ephemeral, shimmering, like dead leaves, or like rainfall.

VHS tape / zipper

2019

Performer: Diana Delgado

Footage and photos: Tommy Bruce

“You can walk along the network of ditches wherever you want without being seen by people on the paved streets. The ditches can be a road or a destination. They’re the way water—life—moves into, through, and out of town. Ditches are neither center nor margin, heart nor limb, but rather the veins shot through everything.”

cassette tape / window / map

2018

An audio collage using audio from years of field-work recording the sounds of demonstrations—and law enforcement surveillance of them—in Demarco’s job as a news reporter. When performed live in a darkened space, she incorporates light-sensitive oscillators and asks the audience to light candles. The oscillators slowly overtake and disrupt the raw protest audio as the lumens increase in the room, and then she blows them out.

light-sensitive oscillators / field recordings / voice

2017

The Society for Ethnomusicology brought scholars from around the country to New Mexico for its yearly conference. As part of a free, daylong symposium designed to launch the days of discussion, longtime experimentalists from femme-forward music festival Gatas y Vatas brought their work to the academics. Fest founder Marisa Demarco proposed to decolonize the panel itself through the performance, and she created an audio document of their approach, their intent and the result.

2018

Performers: Autumn Chacon, Monica Demarco, Marisa Demarco, Antonia Montoya

Pictured: Monica Demarco at Gatas y Vatas 7. Photo by William Blackshear and Joanna Furgal.

NO CONTEST: WE WILL NOT BE RANKED

A light-based score, intervention and parade

Pushing back against the notion of capitalist “best of” contests, our band Chicharra intervened in the local alternative news weekly’s “Best of Burque” showcase, interrogating competition and the setting of some kind of standard or “top” for music and art. They were nominated for “Best Avant Garde,” a conceptually flawed category in a popularity contest. Instead of punting the invite, I chose to use it as an opportunity to turn the concept upside down. I enlisted a dozen musicians often missed by these kinds of contests, and together they performed a score she created that’s triggered by light. The performance emphasized plurality and heterophony, a texture of many voices at once, though not necessarily together. (Think: The din of a marketplace.) They marched through Downtown, past the Best of Burque ticket-entry points, the bar crowds, and stopped at the still not functioning transit stations for long-promised Albuquerque Rapid Transit. Many paraded and played.

light-based score / hand-woven VHS veils / megaphones

2019

A sound project from the Center for Integrated Media and viralnet-v4.net, curated by Carmina Escobar, Fy Fylak and Tom Lesser. Artists were asked to respond to the word “scream” and generate sonic or written work.

voice / electronics

2019

Photo by Adri De La Cruz

A braid. A rope.

“Our hair was so long. The eye of strange adults lingering too long on the tangles as they amassed. We learned to braid, to ponytail, to escape notice. It can never look exactly right, but it gets close enough, I guess.”

braided VHS tape / dirt / projector

2018

Music: (live recording) Bigawatt & Glitter Vomit

Footage of the braiding process: Monica Demarco and Adri De La Cruz

“Survivor after survivor recalls harrowing stories of institutional betrayal, of an investigatory eye so clouded, it won’t see what’s happening to them … The survivors leave school, sometimes, one possible future abandoned … I tried to use the state’s own law—open records law—to see inside. After the polite dance of compliance, there were no more soft truths, and the UNM records custodian returned black square after black square.“

Full artist statement

printer / public records request / censored response / ink / string

2017

Worn amplifiers magnifying tiny movements as big sound.

hand-built amplifiers / speakers / contact microphones / lace / flowers

2017

Performers: Liz Rincon, Adri De La Cruz, Mauro Woody