02/04 @ 8:00pm

Maria Chavez & Shelley Burgon + Mike Wexler + Corridors

Shelley Burgon w/ Maria  Chavez

Multi-instrumentalist Shelley Burgon is best known for her improvisatorial work using harp and laptop. She is a member of the chamber group Ne(x)tworks and the band Stars Like Fleas. Shelley has performed her music for series such as the the MATA Festival, Issue Project Rooms Points in a Circle, free103point9 Wave Farm and Summer Winds. In May 2009 she was honored to premiere a new piece for the Merce Cunningham Hudson Valley Project at the Dia:Beacon. Shelley holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. She can be heard as a collaborator and guest on many labels including Hometapes, Skirl, Tzadik and Ipecac. She is inspired by Maryanne Amacher and is currently at work on a solo electronic record.

www.myspace.com/shelleyburgon

www.nextworksmusic.net

www.myspace.com/starslikefleas

Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. With a collection of new and broken needles that she calls “pencils of sound” and a selection of records, she creates electro-acoustic sound pieces.

Chavez made her New York City debut in a duet with Thurston Moore, collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide as part of the 2007 Wien Modern Festival, and recently shared a stage with Pauline Oliveros and Lydia Lunch during Vienna’s Phonofemme Festival 2009.

Having also performed at such internationally acclaimed venues as STEIM (Amsterdam) and Sonoteca (Lima, Peru), she was awarded a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Grant by New York’s Roulette Intermedium in 2008. In June and July, 2008, she was selected to be part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as an artist in residence for a series of performances in and around Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses sculptures at DIA: Beacon.

Chavez recently completed the score for a short film by video artist David Gacs and performing artist Matthew Day entitled “Through my Geography,” which can be viewed on her MySpace page.

This September, she will perform at San Francisco’s Electronic Music Festival, a turntable festival in October in Berlin entitled T.I.T.O, in Gdansk and Krakow, Poland, Prague and more performamces to be announced.

Corridors (Byron Westbrook)—>myspace.com/corridors

Byron Westbrook (b. 1977) is an artist working with the dynamic quality of physical space using multi-channel sound and images. His audio/video performances under the name CORRIDORS involve the distribution of processed instrumental and environmental recordings through a multi-channel environment with a focus on energy distilled from sound and light. He has presented at venues such as Tonic, Roulette, Diapason Gallery, Les Voûtes (FR), Wien Konzerthaus (Austria), Issue Project Room, The Stone, NonEvent (Boston), Sonic Circuits Festival (DC), Institute of Intermedia (CZ), Experimental Intermedia, Exit Art Gallery. He has shared performance bills with Tony Conrad, Sawako, Mountains, Stefan Tcherepnin, Lichens, Jason Kahn, Jon Mueller, James Blackshaw and Soft Circle, among many others. Westbrook has also collaborated with Paris-based composer and former Kitchen curator Rhys Chatham in the drone metal group Essentialist, as well as performed in the ensembles of Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Duane Pitre and Jonathan Kane. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artists Commission through Roulette Intermedium. In 2008 he was an artist in residence at HotelPupik at Sclhoss Schrattenberg. He is also currently the technical coordinator of Experimental Intermedia Foundation, NYC.  He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

www.byronwestbrook.com

www.myspace.com/corridors

Mike Wexler—->myspace.com/mikewexler

Mike Wexler is a self-taught guitarist and singer whose long-form songs incorporate extended instrumental fingerstyle guitar passages, a post-lyric lyrical sensibility and the desire to reconcile the demands of song structure to those of recent investigations into the nature of acoustic phenomena à la the spectral school of composition. His musical inquiries probe the progression, the drone, the single tone as a complex of sounds–in short, to make of the tension between harmonic movement and stasis something more than an equilibrium. Wexler also draws inspiration from songwriting auteurs past and present who bring to bear the influence of forward looking musicians and writers on their work (Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt and Annette Peacock spring to mind as spiritually kindred, although not particularly apt as comparisons).

www.myspace.com/mikewexler