The Gold Record Studio was a free public recording studio at the Laney College Swap meet. The public was invited to the flea market every Sunday from April 15 through May 20, 2007 to record a GOLD RECORD on the spot, with guest Bay Area musicians. The open-air, bare-bones studio was equipped with an antique record cutter, a stack of homemade blank plastic records, a full set-up of instruments, and a packed roster of guest musicians. In the first two weeks, Gold Record Studio recorded members of a Serbian prog-rock band, a record producer from Cameroon, a neighborhood video artist/indie rocker, DJ Ready Red from the Ghetto Boys, a family of amazing drummers, an accordionist who promised to return with his entire zydeco band, and a new age acoustic guitarist named Don Ho, among many others. Participants have ranged in age from about 8 to 65, and have included Chinese, Mexican and African immigrants, as well as local audiophiles, amateur musicians, and professional recording engineers, producers and musicians.
Jon Brumit works creatively with collaboration, social design and structured improvisation. He designs tools, instruments, and scenarios for interaction which often produce unpredictable
results - occasionally humorous, often sonorous, and always highly interpretable - typically arising from public situations and obtuse interventions. His projects have taken numerous forms ranging from traffic conductions over a musical bridge to radiobased community works to city-wide lint collection and prototyping strategies for providing services to homeless or other communities in need of fresh socks, dash covers, or custom flocking, among others. His projects have been supported by the Creative Work Fund, Oakland Arts Council, CEC ArtsLink, Meet the Composer Grant, as well as through commissions to produce new works and performances by the San Jose Public Arts Commission, YBCA, ISEA / Zero One, MOCA Detroit, and the Novi Sad Contemporary Museum. He has been awarded national and international residencies including Headlands and the AIR program at the SF Dump, as well as residencies in Serbia, Germany, and Maine, and has been featured or reviewed in print and other media including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Artforum.com, and Punk Planet as well as NBC, the AP, and Discovery Channel.
Lisa Mezzacappa’s music lives in the intersection of improvisation and composition. Her projects as a doublebassist, composer, curator and collaborator explore new contexts for developing interactive musical languages, always with the goal of bringing these sounds to wider audiences. She has studied with Michael Formanek, Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman, and has performed and workshopped with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Meredith Monk, Bob Moses, Myra Melford, Art Baron, Terry Riley and David Murray, among others. She was artistin-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2006) and the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). Recent projects have married improvised
music with film, pop music, games, video installation, and interactive site-specific public events. Phonological, with artist Deborah Aschheim and musicians Katy Stephan and Michelle Amador, is an ongoing songwriting/installation project about language and memory. Quiet Films/Loud Bands is a film and improvised music series at 21 Grand, Oakland. JAZZPOP is
a concert series celebrating eclectic and adventurous jazz music every summer at the UCLA Hammer Museum. She has been awarded grants from the City of Oakland, American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer. She currently performs in nearly a dozen original jazz, pop and chamber ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives.
This project was supported by the Oakland City Council and funded by the City of Oakland’s Cultural Funding Program.
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