Frankie Mann

Noted for the often gently humorous social commentaries of her live electronic and computer music (eg. "I Was a Hero" from "The Mayan Debutante Revue", and "How To Be Very Very Popular"), Frankie Mann is also a skilled programmer who has built her own electronic performance instruments since attending high school in North Carolina (where she had her first orchestral composition performed when she was only eleven years old). Mann has performed throughout Europe and the United States, and has received many grants including a Fulbright/Hayes Fellowship for Computer Music Research at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht, Netherlands. With bass vocalist Eric Barsness, she performs the first of two works on this videotape, a splendid tongue-in-cheek duet about a certain kind of couple relationship in "I Land", with brilliant lyrics by Mary Griffin. The second composition, "The Brown Mountain Lights", is a live electronic performances featuring the voices of real witnesses relating, in poetically-tinged and eerie language, legends and speculations about a mysterious local North Carolina phenomena. In her interview, Mann describes the circumstances surrounding the building of her first synthesizer from a magazine article (eg. getting it to work by throwing it across the room), and shares other fascinating stories related to her work. Click here to view clip.