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Faulty (Broken Orbit) re-imagines Faulty (Per-Objective), an hour long 10-channel site-specific audio work, premiered in 2007 at Diapason gallery for sound in NYC, with sponsorship from Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and the New York Electronic Arts Festival. Faulty (Broken Orbit) is a poetic exploration of mic’ed surfaces and amplified quotidian objects activated into movement, layered against a shifting and slowly settling field of electric-accordion-driven feedback and processed instruments. The piece sets out to build elaborate systems in the manner of Rube Goldberg’s circuitous contraptions, which Parkins claims as inspiration for both her compositional structures and customized sound-processing software: emphasizing idiosyncrasy, tenuous states, and potential for things to fall apart.



Andrea Parkins
www.andreaparkins.com


Andrea Parkins is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer, and improviser who engages with interactive electronics as material and process. As a “sound-ist,” she is known for her pioneering textural/gestural approach on her electronically processed accordion, and investigation of embodiment and chance with an array of sonic materials: including amplified objects and drawing tools, electronic feedback; and acoustic, electric, and custom-built software instruments.

Parkins' projects encompass multi-channel fixed-media works, improvised electroacoustic performances, electronic music composition; and sound for contemporary dance, experimental film and intermedia performance. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Kunsthall Bergen, Kunsthalle Basel, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, among others. Festival appearances have included NEXT/Bratislava, Cyberfest/St. Petersburg, Akousma/Montreal, and many more. Parkins has collaborated or performed with artists such as Ute Wassermann, The Necks, George E. Lewis, Miya Masaoka, Nels Cline, and contemporary dance theater artist Vera Mantero.

Parkins’ recent projects include her 2016 performance/installation, Two Rooms, Variation 1, for 40 loudspeakers and Solo Performer, created for the acousmonium at L’Usine C in Montreal; her ambisonic installation, Studio Drawing 27-4-19 for 25 Loudspeakers, presented at the 2020 FRST Mini-Festival of Electroacoustic Music in Visby, Sweden, and her series of large- scale amplified performance drawings, first presented during her 2017 fellowship at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency. Previous projects include Two Rooms from the Memory Palace, a generative multi-room fixed-media work, premiering at the 2015 New York Electronic Art Festival; and her 8-channel installation, Faulty (Broken Orbit), featured in the US-Australia sound art exhibition, “With Hidden Noise” (2012-2015). Her performance/ installation Austell 1 (2012), at Fragmental Museum, NYC, funneled live sound from the Long Island City rail yards into a reverberant warehouse space, with interventions from a walking bell ringer and Parkins’ processed accordion feedback. Parkins portable audio work was presented at Cyberfest 2011 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in 2010 she was invited by artist Christian Marclay to perform interpretations of his graphic scores at the Whitney Museum’s retrospective festival of Marclay’s work.

Parkins has been an invited resident artist at Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Elektronmusikstudion-EMS Stockholm, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center (NYC), and by Frei und Hanseastadt Hamburg Kulturbehoerde. Her recordings are published by Important Records, Confront Recordings, Atavistic, Henceforth Records, Infrequent Seams, and Creative Sources; and her writing is published by Errant Sound.

REVIEWS
“Parkins, a master manipulator of electronically processed accordion and laptop is one of the city’s most unbounded …well, what’s the word for her? Musician seems too simple, artist too vague; perhaps 'sound-ist’ is best.” ~ Time Out/NY

"Parkins always gives her bands such a distinctive flavor: she goes right past conventional squeezebox references and treats the thing like a no-input mixing board, generating sine waves, or a live miniature Morton Feldman generator, slowly stacking tones." ~ Jason Bivins, Signal to Noise (Fall 2007, Issue #47)

“The big, varied, confidently conceived abstractions Parkins yanks from her squeezebox, laptop, effects devices and maybe piano — cloudy and cranky one minute, surgically sharp the next. ... She’s the kind of musician who can make a small group intergalactic… lose your head." ~ LA Weekly