My collaborative trio Seven Count, touring and recording consistently since 2016, has released 4 albums with a signature combination of acoustic improvisations and electroacoustic sampling.
In addition to recording and touring our music, we have also mounted 5 exhibitions at galleries and museums as a collective.
Invitation, a 2017 exhibition at Border Patrol Gallery, in Portland ME, was an intimate exploration of sonic participation, set inside a custom-rigged FM micro-radio station, where open gallery hours featured improvisatory interactions with visitors, often culminating in on-air conversations and performances.
Audio from these radio interactions were subsequently published as An Invitation Clock
…along with an associated zine of visual documentation and writing.
In Request Line (BUOY Gallery, Kittery, ME, 2017), we expanded the radio station and performance installation concept to a wider architectural scale, continuing our exploration of spatial and experiential programming that aims towards the questioning of roles and modes of participant and audient.
Our subsequent exhibition, After the Tone, presented by Lake George Arts Project in coordination with their annual Jazz Festival, served as the debut of the Seven Count Real Deck.
Now in its 2nd printing, the deck distills Seven Count’s creative process and sonic philosophies into cards that impart prompts for creative strategy and divination, in the tradition of the tarot and of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.
Our most recent exhibition and highest profile to date, (re)Sounding, was a research-driven reinstallation of the historic musical instrument collection at the Bennington Museum (VT), for which we performed on numerous historic instrument in their varied states of decay, as well as invited other composers to make music with them, for an accompanying in-gallery sound installation (sections of which we also released as a digital album).
Our research on the instruments led to a substantial exhibition catalog essay, which exhumes the instruments’ histories, along with associated historical modes and meanings of American sonic cultures, relation to legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, misogyny and militarism. You can read or download the catalog here:
This project was one of my proudest examples of public scholarship, bringing sound studies approaches and questions to a broad and diverse public, and conveying archival and critical research via sensorial and embodied, as well as textual, modes of delivery.
Adam Tinkle 