Lovesphere 27 by Lovesphere

This album was recorded on the side porch of Lovesphere House on March 18, 2022.

Lovesphere is a 67-year performance event currently in its 27th year. Lovesphere festivals take place on the Spring Equinox and typically involve an outpouring of creative energy. You are invited to host a Lovesphere celebration in your town or house. Simply get some friends together and do creative things on the Spring Equinox. Paint a mural together! Put on a play! Do spontaneous choreography in the park!

A lot of people think Lovesphere sounds like some hippy stuff. If that is a problem, just spell it "Love's Fear" and it will be more goth. We are not talking about Love in the sense of romance or even "getting it on." Although Spring is all about fecundity and fertility, we're taking it into the sphere of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. What can you give birth to out of our souls, using our hands or voices or whatever instrumentality calls to us? A holiday of creativity isn't a busman's holiday for artists, it's more like a science conference where researchers share ideas.

The first Lovesphere, perhaps, was held in 1996 at AKA and Exit Art in Soho (the Manhattan one.) We call this Lovesphere Zero because we enacted Lovesphere unconsciously before our first conscious Lovesphere in 1997 at the Museum of Sound Recording, where the same participants gathered a year later, this time in a loft in Brooklyn filled with analog recording gear headed up by Dan Gaydos. It began with an Anarchist Wandering Band in Grand Army Plaza and concluded 36 hours later on the roof of the building on Douglass Street. English artist Debbie Sutton created a multi-tiered ice sculpture, Gametones played on Michael Natale's handmade gamelan, Mammals of Zod performed a 4-hour improvised drama about a group of artists going underground to tunnel into space. Audience members brought sleeping bags and woke up having dreamed parts of the performance.

The next few got bigger and bigger. Lovesphere 5: Eurydice was featured in a segment on Japan's "Alarm Clock" morning show and Lovesphere 6: Psyops took a week in four or five venues including two operas. I didn't really feel like doing it again like that so I proposed we do musical theater for the next few Lovespheres, and Lovesphere 7: the Golden Spiral was a twisted retelling of Lovesphere in which the descendents of the original artists, having mutated and degenerated significantly, mutinied against their "Captain" only to realize that they were not in deep space after all but simply deep in a cave. This was followed by Lovesphere 8: Feng Shui Assassin in which they try to pay rent by moving in with an old man with rent control, then Lovesphere 9 in which Moldavian conjoined twins win a talent competition only to be separated, but one of them eventually gets her real estate certification so it's not a sad ending.

Girl George organized Lovesphere 10 which was a blast, Lipbone Redding organized a great Lovesphere 11 and Meg Montgomery did 12 in Newark. Something in here gets foggy, I know Cassandra Weston organized a brilliant comprovised theater piece we called a Communophenomenological Manifesto and she also worked with Lauren Farber and the Eonta gang on a couple of Tender Buttons- themed Lovespheres. Perhaps the best Lovesphere of the teens was the one Terri Ferrari organized at the historic Vail-Leavitt theater in Eastern Long Island.

Since I came to Greensboro in 2016, we've been celebrating Lovesphere here with the brilliant people we have the good fortune to have met. A lot of them have also heavily involved WUAG-FM, the radio station of UNCG; for instance Lovesphere 24 included a performance with the incomparably brilliant Laurent Estoppey on the airwaves while a whole gallery full of artists were collaborating with him in real time in a live event at Greensboro Project Space. Eugene Chadbourne, Lipbone Redding, The F-Art Ensemble, the Difficulties and Knives of Spain all did great Lovesphere performances.

Lovesphere 25 was going to start out with a radio performance marathon and then go on to include a few live events, but the lockdowns happened, but fortunately the radio performance had to go on earlier than we would have liked so we managed to make that happen. Lovesphere 26 was deep in the wasteland of despair and it was all we could manage to get some people together for a outdoor spontaneous concert. But we did, and it was great. I think it was the first time any of us had really played live together for a year.

Lovesphere 27 - we're not out of the woods, but man, we're not dead either. This was a wonderful day of music making and togetherness. Cassandra Weston played trumpet in one of the best performances of the day, with Jen Sanchez and Lawrence Holdsworth, but I pressed the wrong button and did not record it. That is always how it is. I also had a decent set on bass that was not captured, and history will also miss Jen's turn on drums due to my engineering errors. We also did not manage to document the magic performance by the Lazer Bearz.

But what we did capture here is not too shabby! Mark Dixon erected a 15 foot ice robot whose clanking was constantly musical. Lipbone Redding rolled up in his Flying Machine and played Captain America's shield. Judson Clinton hauled a Baldwin Electropiano with a cast-iron soundboard up the steps. Lawrence Holdsworth interpreted the gizzards. Jen Sanchez created a wormhole portal and Bryan Crotts brought it all back home. I was pushing my homemade pimento cheese and pretending to hold a yard sale and forgot to play as much bass as I wanted to!

The Perceiver of Sound League is a group of individuals
united for the spiritual practice of artistic production,
the study and practice of sound production and perception.

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