Steve Gunn & John Truscinski + Spectre Folk + Bill Nace + Tom Carter
Steve Gunn
Steve Gunn plies his trade in the Northeast, calling Brooklyn home. He’s best know for the major role he plays in the group GHQ. Over the course of numerous excellent releases, it became clear that Gunn was a real force in experimental music. Once his solo music started being unearthed, there was no turning back. Steve will be performing a mix of improvisational blues based guitar works.
Spectre Folk
“As a founding member of The Magik Markers, prolific solo artist , and collaborator; Pete Nolan‘s work exists in it’s own space/time. Untethered to any scene or movement, Pete‘s sound has it’s roots in the classic psych/folk/noise underground without betraying the originality that seperates true artist from flash-in-the blog hype spew.” -Jeff Conklin
Tom Carter
Born barely south of the Mason-Dixon line, and just in time for the Summer of Love, Tom Carter led a decidedly non-hippy existence being shuffled around various farm and mining towns in Maryland and Ohio by his newspaperman father, before finally making his way to Texas in 1985, just in time to watch all the good hardcore bands die. Already obsessed with American pre-punk and British post-punk, Carter dove into the lysergically spiked musical waters of Texas with both feet, augmenting rudimentary guitar skills with unreliable instruments, cranky analog electronics, and disintegrating practice amps. Over the ensuing decades, he managed to forge his evolving ideas of complete tonal immersion (and the quest for the perfect fuzz tone) into a layered sonic toolkit of rough beauty and unrefined proficiency.
Best known for his work with acclaimed psych-drone iconoclasts Charalambides, which he co-founded with Christina Carter in 1991, he has branched out into other collaborations since 2001, playing and recording with long-term projects Zaika (with Marcia Bassett) and Badgerlore (with Rob Fisk, Ben Chasny, Liz Harris, and Peter Swanson), as well as in frequent collaborations with Bay Area sound artist Robert Horton. Other fellow travelers have included Christian Kiefer, Tetuzi Akiyama, Thurston Moore, Shawn David McMillen, Dredd Foole, Loren Connors, Pip Proud, Inca Ore, Jandek, Bardo Pond, and Matt Valentine, among many others.
Most recently, Carter has focused on his solo performances and recordings, touring constantly from 2007-2008, and finally settling in New York City in early 2009. His solo work covers a vast territory, but latter-day sightings show him to be concentrating on looped guitar drones of immensely-stacked grit and beauty, with heaps of psychedelic melodic content missing from the repertoires of many noise and drone bands.
Bill Nace
Bill Nace is an itinerant guitarist in the improv-minstrel mode. His best known projects are X.O.4(with jake meginsky and john truscinski), Northampton Wools(with thurston moore), Vampire Belt (with chris corsano) and in duo with chris cooper, but he is happy to work without a net in a variety of settings.—–Byron Coley
Kyle Bobby Dunn, Richard Lainhart, Sarah Lipstate (Noveller), Michael Waller & Cammisa Forrest
Kyle Bobby Dunn is a Brooklyn, New York composer from Canada. His compositions are “patience incarnate – (Pitchfork Media)” and examine the human condition in mostly large, emotionally grandeur and epic pieces for guitar, strings and piano that translate the beauty and horror of our time, memory, feeling, and actions. Dunn’s compositions here are fully rich in timbre, painterly, wanderingly romantic and haunting – and with a proper attention span, can transport the listener to the deepest, furthest and most forgotten landscapes and recesses of their time on this planet. The meaning, the lack thereof, the things we’ve completed or left unfinished, the disappearance of thought and befriended strangers. This is a space odyssey of the inner workings of subtle human disconnectedness, connectedness, laze, drowse, cheese binges, and vague arousal.
Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.
Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, Infrequency, VICMOD, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 150 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape (http://www.arts-electric.org/stories/081005_newyorksoundscape.html).
Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, a full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.
http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
Sarah Lipstate (Noveller)
Noveller is the solo project of Brooklyn-based sound artist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate. She has performed in Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Army, and as a member of Glenn Branca’s 100 guitar ensemble. In March 2008, Lipstate joined Brooklyn art-rock outfit Parts & Labor as their guitarist. She contributed to the band’s critically-acclaimed release Receivers and completed several U.S. and European tours before leaving the band in July 2009.
Last year, Lipstate performed as part of the Underground at the Abrons performance series at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In December, she played at the Un Son Par Là, Music of Today festival in Nîmes, France. She recently performed in the revival of Rhys Chatham and Karole Armitage’s “Drastic-Classicism” as part of the Think Punk! program at The Kitchen in NYC. Following that performance, she joined Rhys Chatham and his cast of guitar-allstars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a performance of his minimalist punk classic “Guitar Trio”. Along with 199 other guitar players, Lipstate performed in Chatham’s “A Crimson Grail” for 200 guitars which debuted at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park in August 2009.
In April, No Fun Productions released her debut LP Paint on the Shadows. Following the release, Lipstate performed at No Fun Fest at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. In September, the label released her full-length CD follow-up titled Red Rainbows and Lipstate performed at No Fun Fest Sweden in Stockholm.
Her short films screened at the SXSW film festival in both 2006 and 2007, and earned Lipstate the “Diamond in the Rough Cut” award for exceptional emerging filmmaker at Cinematexas 2006. Her short, Memory Scars, screened at the Reel Venus Film Festival at Anthology Film Archives in NYC in October 2008. She debuted a new short film, Interior Variations, at the New Museum in NYC as part of No Fun: Infinite Sound and Image in May.
She has previously performed as a member of Cold Cave, Parts & Labor, One Umbrella and Sands.
Lipstate received a BS in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin in December 2006, and currently resides in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.
http://www.sarahlipstate.com
Michael Waller has been active as a visual artist and composer in the New York City experimental music community; heavily involved with DIA ‘s Dream House and Diapason Gallery over the last five years.
His vocal raga and composition studies with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela have provided a beautiful inspiration to his focus on modal, drone, and electronic means. This deep intrinsic experience of ‘involving overtones’ is the essence of his aesthetic, mediating the extatic bliss in the work of Scelsi, Niblock, and Stockhausen.
His most notable composition “In an Irreverent Mode: ‘Read as Partials’” (2008) was performed by Alex Waterman (Either/Or ensemble), Yvonne Troxler (Glass Farm Ensemble), Gregor Kitzis (Xenakis and S.E.M. Ensemble), with Elizabeth Hoffman (Composer / NYU Professor) at Tenri Cultural Institute.
Cammisa Forrest: “They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it. I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn’t any more than in everybody’s secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it’s the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.”
MATA Interval 3.1 with Casey Thomas Anderson, G. Douglas Barrett, Anthony Ptak, Charles Stankievech, Jacob Sudol
Every musical event is accompanied by an often unacknowledged and yet not-so-silent partner. The built environment reflects, refracts, and remakes sound, and performer and audience act and listen under the influence of its formal language. Architectures of Sound assembles an evening of unusual performances that attend to this convergence of sound and built space. Artists Casey Thomas Anderson, G. Douglas Barrett, Anthony Ptak, Charles Stankievech, and Jacob Sudol will present new work that interacts with the singularities of the performance space – its materiality, its geometric form, its historical specters and its vanishing present.
About INTERVAL
Started during the 2007-08 season, MATA Interval is a bi-monthly concert series dedicated to small-scale performances by emerging performers and composers based in New York City. Produced in conjunction with ISSUE Project Room, Interval’s programming is developed and produced by selected participants in MATA’s Curatorial Associate program. The intimate and community-based character of Interval encourages risk taking and allows MATA to showcase a wide array of aesthetics from the city’s vibrant musical culture.
Bram Stadhouders+ Audrey Chen, Nate Wooley, Gill Arno trio + Kenta Nagai
BRAM STADHOUDERS (NL)
Bram Stadhouders (b. 1987) is a freak/free ambient jazz guitarist and composer from Tilburg, The Netherlands, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Playing the guitar from age 6, he won several classical guitar competitions during his childhood years and got the chance to play with his rock and jazz groups on major Dutch festivals. His own talent, both in playing the guitar as in improvising music was recognised in 2008 when he was elected the most promising improvisation talent of The Netherlands, a very prestigious price for up and coming musicians. His music is very atmospheric, meandering in between free jazz, ambient and classical composed music. (http://www.myspace.com/bramstadhouders)
Audrey Chen/ Nate Wooley/ Gill Arno Trio
Audrey Chen
AUDREY CHEN is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.
Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synth, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.
Recently, her primary focus has been her SOLO project but she is also involved in many various collaborations. Among musicians, she has worked with Phil Minton, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jerome Noetinger, C. Spencer Yeh, Alessandro Bosetti, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, Gianni Gebbia, plus many more. Some current projects include: duos with Phil Minton, Frederic Blondy, Robert van Heumen, Katt Hernandez, Nate Wooley, and Id M Theft Able. Trio with Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh. Plus three new quartet projects with Jeff Carey/Morten J. Olsen/Raed Yassin, Miya Masaoka/Hans Grusel/Kenta Nagai and also with Frederic Blondy/Michael Johnsen/Jerome Noetinger.
Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD USA but primarily maintains an active touring schedule throughout Europe. www.myspace.com/audreychen
SOLO sound on myspace and: http://download.yousendit.com/FC35C831016A0A28
Gill Arno
Gill Arno was born in Italy and lives in Brooklyn, NY. His work explores areas where sound and image overlap, and is often constructed with found objects and found sound. In the project /mpld/ he utilizes two old modified slide projectors to create performances where static images become pulsating and fade continuously into one another. The projector’s mechanical sounds are tapped and manipulated to reveal their musical potential. Other activities include performances with the New York Phonographers and in various other collaborative and improvised settings. He publishes books, recordings and other multiples via his own imprint, Unframed Recordings, and runs Fotofono, a small studio in Brooklyn where sometimes public events are held.
www.m-i-c-r-o.net/mpld
www.unframedrecordings.net
www.fotofono.net
Nate Wooley
Nate Wooley (b. 1974) grew up in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the space between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father, and after studying he moved to Colorado where he studied more with Ron Miles, Art Lande, Fred Hess, and improvisation master Jack Wright. His tenure with Jack began to break Nate out of self-imposed molds and into the sound world that he has embraced as his own.
Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as collaborating with such diverse artists as Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, Marilyn Crispell, Joe Morris, Steve Beresford, Akron/Family, David Grubbs, C. Spencer Yeh, Daniel Levin, Stephen Gauci, Harris Eisenstadt, Taylor Ho Bynum and Peter Evans.
Kenta Nagai
Kenta Nagai crafts sound and vision from his base in NYC and Princeton, NJ. His fretless guitar playing is featured on Eugene Chadbourne’s “Guitar Festival Summer 1999”. On shamisen, a traditional Japanese string instrument, Nagai has performed widely including the Sculpture Center in Long Island City and Carnegie Hall. From 1999 until 2002 he was a composer in residence at The Cave Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Peg Simone + Wrekmeister Harmonies + MV Carbon and Zach Layton duo
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(listen): the Sun is Leaking – Peg Simone
Peg Simone, out of NYC, employs the slide to bone-chilling effect, fracturing raucous rock choruses and sepia-toned ballads into ghost images with its off-tuned eeriness & pure blues tones stuttering across hectic post-punk rhythms. Her upcoming release “Secrets From The Storm” is due in February/March 2010 & will be released on Table of the Elements. Peg is also a guitarist in Jonathan Kane’s February and collaborated with Kane on the upcoming album for their own 22 minute version of When The Levee Breaks titled “1927/Levee” with intro narrative written by Holly Anderson.
Chicago-based sound artist J.R. Robinson has been creating live, ambient tonefields in museums around the US and Europe over the past two years-including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and The Art Center Berlin.
Robinson has injected these recordings into collaborations with some like-minded heavy hitters from the noise, post-rock and jazz worlds such as David Yow (Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid), Mark Shippy & Pat Samson (US Maple), Azita Youssefi, John Herndon & Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Keefe Jackson, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Ken Vandermark. The result (dubbed Wrekmeister Harmonies), is a distinctive hybrid of sound art and avant-garde musics, evoking the essences & influences of masterworks like Joe McPhee’s Nation Time, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and the sound collages of Stockhausen.
Biofeedback Generated Music: Biomuse Trio
About the Biomuse Trio
The Biomuse Trio was founded in 2008 to perform computer chamber music integrating traditional classical performance, laptop processing of sound, and the transduction of bio-signals for the control of musical gesture. The work of the ensemble encompasses hardware design, audio signal processing, bio-signal processing, composition, improvisation, and gesture choreography. The Biomuse Trio consists of Gascia Ouzounian, violin, Ben Knapp, biomuse, and Eric Lyon, computer.
About the Performers in the Biomuse Trio
Ben Knapp leads the Music, Sensors, and Emotion (MuSE) research group at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research at SARC focuses on the understanding and measurement of the physical gestures and emotional states of musical performers and their audience. For over 20 years, Ben has been researching and developing user-interfaces and software that enable the composer and performer to augment the physical control of a musical instrument with more direct neural interaction. From the invention of the Biomuse with Hugh Lusted in 1987 to the introduction in 2005 of the concept of an Integral Music Controller (a generic class of controllers that use the direct measurement of motion and emotion to augment traditional methods of musical instrument control), Ben has focused on creating a user-aware interface based on the acquisition and real-time analysis of biometric signals.
Eric Lyon is a composer and computer music researcher. During the 1980s and 1990s, his fixed media computer music focused on spectral and algorithmic processing of audio, with a tendency toward extreme modifications of samples, variously sourced. From the early 1990s, Lyon became involved with live computer music, performing solo, and in the Japanese band Psychedelic Bumpo, with the Kyma system. Later in the 1990s, he gravitated toward software-based live processing, starting to develop Max/MSP externals in 1999. This work resulted in his LyonPotpourri collection of Max/MSP externals, and the FFTease spectral package, developed in collaboration with Christopher Penrose. In recent years, Lyon has focused on computer chamber music, which integrates live, iterative DSP strategies into the creation of traditionally notated instrumental scores. Other interests include spatial orchestration, and articulated noise composition. Lyon teaches computer music in the School of Music and Sonic Art at Queen’s University Belfast.
Gascia Ouzounian is a violinist working in new and intermedia music, and an historian of contemporary music and sound art. She has performed with ensembles including Theatre of Eternal Music, Sinfonia Toronto, Bang On A Can All-Stars, Hutchins Consort, and Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, undertaken residencies at STEIM and Banff Centre, and appeared in festivals including NIME, ICMC, Belfast Festival, and Sonorities. Ouzounian studied violin performance and music technologies at McGill University, and critical studies/experimental practices in music at UC San Diego. She has recently recorded three albums of chamber music by La Monte Young and Morton Feldman, scored a Student EMMY Award-winning film, and premiered ‘Eden Eden Eden’, an overnight work for 13 musicians and film projections made in collaboration with film artist Chloe Griffin.
Her writings appear in Journal for the Society of American Music, Organised Sound, Contemporary Music Review, Women & Music, Revue Circuit, and RADIO Journal. Ouzounian is a Lecturer at the School of Music and Sonic Arts at Queen’s University Belfast.
This Saturday, March 17, St. Ann's Church will host the second installation of String Theories, the joint partnership between ISSUE Project Room and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn that provides artists with an opportunity to premiere new expe...
