Hubble + Jason Stein
Since the inception of his new solo guitar project Hubble, Ben Greenberg of Zs and Pygmy Shrews has sought to exploit the guitar for its ulterior qualities, simultaneously displaying a true love for the instrument while redefining how guitar music is understood. Whether distortion-drenched or clean, Ben describes painstaking result as “cyber-dread”, an apocalyptic, beat-less quasi-electronic music, conjuring Terry Riley’s pulsing minimalist structures and Gregg Ginn’s aggressive, avant-garde rock. The first full-length record Hubble Drums is set for release on Northern-Spy Records in November 2011 in support of which Hubble will tour extensively throughout the US and Europe.
About the Hubble live performance, Ben expounds, “Every Hubble set, on a stage or in a friend’s basement or in my bedroom, is a concerted effort on my part to change the air in the room, to push it towards a state of greater resonance.” Using mesmerizing guitar mastery to create extended rhythmic patters of note groupings of varied tempo, dissonance, and harmony, Ben hypnotizes the audience with slowly developing, subtle variation, until the listener is lulled into a highly vivid dream state. The set varies between a versatile and simple set-up and the more ambitious Hubble Superposition, a quadraphonic experience that splits the guitar signal into four different singals which are routed through four seperate amplifiers.
Ben’s first release Hubble Linger (NNA Tapes) brilliantly utilized the cassette format by distilling a live performance into two side-long pieces of stereo-panning guitar. The tape was well received inciting electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman to claim “…I’m fairly floored by this extended solo-trance-out from Zs guitarist Ben Greenberg, who seems to have invented a device that halts time (musical, actual, and meta-physical) ; its use is put to great effect across this 60-minute blast of cycling “stereo” chord progressions and assorted haze(s) that approaches the fervour of MBV / Belong’s filtered-out high-gain wash while retaining the minimalist patina of Charlemagne Palestine piece … awesome.”
http://northern-spy.com/artists/hubble/
Jason Stein is one of the few musicians working today to focus entirely on the bass clarinet. The Stein/Jones/Gerstein/Niggenkemper/Hertenstein Quintet will perform original pieces by Jason Stein, Darius Jones, and Ben Gerstein.
Jason Stein was born in 1976 and is originally from Long Island, New York. He studied at Bennington College with Charles Gayle and Milford Graves, and at the University of Michigan with Donald Walden and Ed Sarath. In 2005, Stein relocated to Chicago and has since recorded for such labels as Leo, Delmark, Atavistic, 482 Music and Clean Feed. Stein has performed throughout the US and Europe, including performances in festivals in Lisbon, Cracow, Utrecht, Barcelona, Debreccen and Ljubljana. He has had the opportunity to perform with a number of exciting local and international musicians including: Michael Moore, Jeff Parker, Oscar Noriega, Rudi Mahall, Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, Jeb Bishop, Michiel Braam, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Urs Leimgruber, Pandelis Karayorgis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tony Buck, Eric Boren, Kent Kessler, Tobias Delius, Nate McBride, Jack Wright, Michael Zerang, Michael Vatcher, Frank Gratkowski, Peter Brotzman, Fredrik Ljungkvist, Wilbert DeJoode, and Håvard Wiik.
“Stein is exhilarating, a young master of his fiendishly difficult horn. Stein is a player to look out for.”
- Chris May, All About Jazz
“Stein stands apart from the standard instrumental lineage. Whereas a player like Eric Dolphy or Michel Portal builds on wide intervallic leaps and verticality, Stein (like Michel Pilz, Rudi Mahall or John Tchicai) operates in a horizontal fashion, favoring a breadth of twists and turns more sideways than anything else, woven into a post-Ornette fabric.”
- Clifford Allen, All About Jazz
Ingar Zach “Dans les arbres” + Alex Waterman, Gene Coleman & Vincent Royer
There’s no end to the delights of this quite magical disc. The finest composition, like improvisation, ultimately relies on intuition, and these players seem to have an innate grasp of the right combination of sounds and textures. Dans les arbres must be one of the finest ECM Improv releases – indeed, releases from any label – in recent years. —Andy Hamilton, The Wire Magazine
This quartet stems from work that Ivar Grydeland and Ingar Zach (of the SOFA record label) created while studying for their Master’s degree in Chamber Music at the Norwegian Academy of Music between 2001 and 2003. Around the time they gave their graduate concerts, Christian Wallumrød’s “Sofienberg Variations” (ECM 1809) was released. Grydeland and Zach soon began to record with Wallumrød
Parallel to their duo, Grydeland and Zach were also working with bassist Tonny Kluften in a project-based ensemble with the obscure name, No Spaghetti Edition. In 2003, No Spaghetti Edition released their third CD (“Real Time Satellite Data”, SOFA513). On this release and on the following tour and concerts, French clarinettist Xavier Charles was a guest.
In early July 2004 they had their first meeting as a quartet. 16 months later they met for another project with No Spaghetti Edition—recording the CD “Sketches of a Fusion” (SOFA520) with Tonny Kluften and the Canadian improviser, Martin Tétreault.
In July 2006 Charles, Grydeland, Wallumrød and Zach met again. This time to work on a band sound and to compose music for the present release. The CD is called “Dans les Arbres” and it’s also the introduction of the quartet by the same name: Dans les Arbres.
Violist and composer Vincent Royer is a native of Strasbourg, France. He attended the conservatory there before completing his musical studies in Germany. Early on Royer became interested in exploring new forms of musical expression and together with the pianist Paulo Alvarès founded the Alea Ensemble in Cologne – a forum for musicians to meet and experiment with collective composition and improvisation. In conjunction with comedians, dancers and mimes Royer and the ensemble generated numerous performances and set music to silent films shown in Europe and South America. In 1995 as an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, Royer recorded a repertoire of sounds on the viola, which he then used as the basis for several instrumental compositions with electronics. During his stay in Canada Royer met visual artist Bob Verchueren and computer composer Gerhard Eckel and discovered a shared taste for the exuberant expansion of musical limits. Together in Europe they composed works based on the sounds of plants and vegetables as well as the piece “Traverse” for viola and computer, which was selected to be performed in Berlin at the International Computer Music Conference in 2000.
Vincent Royer has been invited to perform at numerous international music festivals throughout Europe and America. He has a particular interest in the works of Scelsi, Radulescu, Grisey and Murail. These composers of spectral music have all had lasting influence on Royer’s own work. His meeting in Chicago in 2001 with Luc Ferrari, composer of musique mix and musique concrète, led to a close friendship and an intense artistic collaboration. Ferrari wrote three works for the duo Royer and Belgian pianist Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven, who have been performing together since 1998. The duo Royer and Collard-Neven, with the support of the Centre de Recherche et de Formation Musicales de Wallonnie, the electronic studio of Liège, Belgium, premiered works by numerous other contemporary composers such as Suzanne Giraud, Fabrizzio Cassol, Michael Riessler, David Shea, Jean-Luc Fafchamps and Vinko Globokar. Vincent Royer has received the “Prix Xenakis” in Paris and the “Bourse Lavoisier” from the French Ministry of Culture. He is soloist and member of several ensembles, including the European Union Chamber Orchestra and the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne. He also teaches chamber music at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Liège.
His latest CD, recently released by Sub Rosa, features the complete works for viola by Horatiu Radulescu and received outstanding reviews in the Belgian musical journal “Crescendo” and the French journal “Le Monde de la Musique.”
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008.
In 2007 Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and won the Tiger Prize for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2008. Alex lectured and performed as part of the exhibition The Possibility of Action at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2008, and was in residence at the ICA in May 2009 with his ensemble, in addition to performing solo works. He installed a permanent 12 speaker sound installation out in Napa Valley in July of 2009 at the residence of Norah and Norman Stone, and is presently working on a new film project in Vieques, and starting up his record label (D.S. al coda). He also plays the music of Arthur Russell with Arthur’s Landing whenever he can. His writings have been published by Dot Dot Dot, Paregon, FoArm, and Artforum.
Zach Layton, Alex Waterman, Ryan Sawyer Trio + Michael Evans’ Swirling Lotus Blossom Bandits Band
Zach Layton
Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser, teacher, and new media artist based in Brooklyn with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental music, buddhism and indeterminacy. His work investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces and kinetic visual patterns.
Zach’s work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and he has performed and exhibited at the Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, Diapason, PS1/MoMa, Anthology Film Archives, Joe’s Pub, Exit Art, SCOPE Art Fair, Art Forum Berlin, New York Electronic Art Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, Sculpture Center, Millenium Film Workshop, St. Mark’s Ontological Theater, Dumbo Arts Festival, New York Digital Salon, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Participant Gallery, Monkeytown and many other venues in New York, South America and Europe. He has collaborated with Luke Dubois, Vito Acconci, Joshua White, Jonas Mekas, Tony Conrad, Bradley Eros, Alex Waterman, Nick Hallett, Andrew Lampert, Matthew Ostrowski, Michael Evans, MV Carbon, Seth Kirby, Matthew Welch, Christine Bard, Andy Graydon, Ryan Sawyer, Matt Mottel, Bradford Reed, Anthony Huberman, Sarina Basta, Gareth James, Emily Manzo, Patrick Hambrecht, Marissa Olsen, Angie Eng, Adam Kendall, Chika Ijima, Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Tristan Perich and Ray Sweeten among many other artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians and friends.
Zach is also founder of Brooklyn’s monthly experimental music series, “Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde” co-curated with Nick Hallett featuring leading local and international composers and improvisers, was the co-curator of the PS1 summer Warm Up music series from 2007 -2009 and curator at Issue Project Room. Zach has received grants from the Netherlands America Foundation, Free103.9′s AIRtime fellowship, Turbulence, Jerome Foundation, Experimental Television Center, NYFA, the Danish Council for Visual Art, the City of Copenhagen Artist in Residence Program, and is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Alex Waterman
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008.
In 2007, Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU, as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and won the Tiger Prize for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2008. Alex lectured and performed as part of the exhibition, The Possibility of Action at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2008, and was in residence at the ICA in May 2009 with his ensemble, in addition to performing solo works. He installed a permanent 12 speaker sound installation out in Napa Valley in July of 2009, at the residence of Norah and Norman Stone, is presently working on a new film project in Vieques, and starting up his record label (D.S. al coda). He also plays the music of Arthur Russell with Arthur’s Landing whenever he can. His writings have been published by Dot Dot Dot, Paregon, FoArm, and Artforum.
Ryan Sawyer
Ryan Sawyer aka Lone Wolf (b. 1976) grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he played drums in various punk rock bands, most notably, At The Drive-In. After 21 years in Texas, he decided to move to New York to pursue a formal education of music and broaden his understanding of music making on the drum set. While in New York, he studied under Bobby Previte, Susie Ibarra, Hamid Drake, and Thurman Barker, and was a regular fixture in the New York free jazz and noise scene, frequenting legendary venues such as Tonic, The Cooler, and The Knitting Factory. Interested in combining elements of improvisation, jazz, and aesthetics of the musical avant garde, Sawyer performed his music in underground parties and rock clubs in hopes of making his music widely accessible to the public.
Ryan has played and recorded with hundreds of improvisors and bands while maintaining his own groups (Tall Firs, Glass Rock, Stars Like Fleas) throughout the years. Some of his collaborations include, Charles Gayle, Thurston Moore, Jandek, TV on the Radio, Celebration, Scarlett Johansson, and Rhys Chatham. Ryan also led and co-wrote the New York Chapter of The Boredoms’ 88 Boadrum, a piece that incorporated 88 drummers playing an 88 minute piece of music co-written by Ryan Sawyer and Gang Gang Dance.
Michael Evans’ Swirling Lotus Blossom Bandits Band (a South-African tinged jazz-blues-improvisational band) celebrates the expatriates of South Africa (Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Louis Moholo and Johnny Dyani) that relocated to Great Britain in the early 1960’s. Tunes by Gwi Gwi’s band, Blue Notes members…Chris Mcgregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani and Llouis Moholo as well as Sun Ra, Howlin’ Wolf and Stan Kenton.
Featuring: Michael Attias : alto saxophone, Michael Evans: drums, Evan Gallagher: keyboard, Jeff Hudgins: alto saxophone and Adam Lane: upright bass, Peter Zummo: Trombone
Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/percussionist/thereminist/composer whose work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics. As well as being a drumset player, his work with unusual sound sources includes found objects, homemade instruments, the theremin and various digital and homemade analog electronics. His work with the theremin varies the quality of its sound through set-up and technique. On the theremin he has performed with dancers and in group settings playing experimental, jazz, rock, ersatz lounge and chamber music. In 2000, he was photographed playing a Moog ether wave theremin for the front of Bob Moog’s Big Briar catalog. He has performed in multiple performances of the NYC Theremin Society’s Issue Project Room concerts during 2005, 2006 and 2007. He has studied movement/sparring/drumming with Professor Milford Graves, drum technique with Joe Morello, tabla with Misha Masud, kanjira with Ganesh Kumar and Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming with John Amira. He has studied musicianship with Helen Hobbs Jordan, composition with Richard Cameron Wolf, Blue Gene Tyranny and the theremin with Pamelia Kurstin.
He has worked with a wide variety of artists of all sorts including Ron Anderson, Jeff Arnal, Audio Artists, Claire Barratt, Samm Bennett, Jac Berrocal, Carla Bley, Naval Cassidy, James Chance, Martha Colburn, Combustible Edison, Lol Coxhill, EasSide Percussion(ESP), Roger Ely(the Devil’s Chaueffeur), Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Ken Filiano, Fast Forward(Gobo), Chris Ferris, Michael Gira (Angels of Light, Swans), Gisburg, Gilbert Godfried, God Is My Co-Pilot, David Grubbs, Alexander Hacke(Einsturzende Neubauten), Susan Hefner, Steve Horowitz’s Code Ensemble, Jarboe (Swans), Pamelia Kurstin, Skip LaPlante’s Music for Homemade Instruments, Zach Layton, Gen Ken Montgomery, Neil Leonard, Aimee Mann, Karen Mantler, Sean G. Meehan, Donald Miller, Eric Mingus, Gordon Monahan, Joe Morris, Anders Nilsson, Evan Parker, Andrea Parkins, Maxime De La Rochefoucauld, William Parker, Yvette Perez’s Birdbrain, Gino Robair, Lary Seven, Elliot Sharp, Moe! Staiano, LaDonna Smith, David Simons, Jesse Stewart, Toronto Dance Theatre, Stephen Vitiello, Christopher Walken, Jason Willet, Peter Zummo’s Noisy Meditation Band and John Zorn.
He continues his ongoing collaborations with: Jeff Arnal(MEJA duo), Anders Nilsson & Ken Filiano(Fulminate Trio), Peter Zummo’s Noisy Meditation Band, Lary Seven and composes music for and performs with Susan Hefner and Dancers. Recorded examples of his work can be found on EasSide Percussion’s ESP release on Avant records, MESuperstar on A.T.M.O.T.W. records, Karen Mantler’s Farewell and Pet Project releases on XtraWatt records, Just Drums 2 – The Project(a compilation of 35 drummers) on Fever Pitch records, MEJA(Michael Evans/Jeff Arnal) on C3R records, Fulminate Trio: s/t on Generate records and Deviant Shakti: Ladonna Smith and Michael Evans on Trans Museq records.
Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society + C. Spencer Yeh
Bassist & composer Joshua Abrams has been in the thick of Chicago’s vibrant music scene for fifteen years, playing & recording as a leader & as a sideman in projects across the genres. He co-founded the “back porch minimalist” band Town & Country (thrill jockey/box media) & with Matana Roberts & Chad Taylor the trio Sticks & Stones (thrill jockety/482 music). He has released four records under his own name as well as two under the moniker Reminder that navigate the realms of jazz and improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, beatmaking, minimalism and field recordings (Eremite/Delmark/Eastern Developments/Lucky Kitchen). He has appeared on over 50 recordings including records by Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake and Bonny “Prince” Billy. “Natural Information”, Abrams first record for Eremite focuses on creating sustained meditative, hypnotic, highly rhythmic spaces. At the music’s heart is the guimbri, a 3 stringed lute traditionally used by the Gnawa of Morocco in trance ceremonies. Abrams presents new melodies, structures, and situations for the traditional instrument to create a space that contrasts the rate/mindstate of contemporary technologically paced living. He will be performing with Chicago drummer Michael Avery.
C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan (1975), moved to the US in 1980, studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, lived in Cincinnati, Ohio for over a decade, and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Yeh works as a solo artist and improviser, most notably with his project, Burning Star Core. He has collaborated with a variety of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Okkyung Lee, Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, John Wiese, Nate Wooley, Wally Shoup, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Clare Cooper, Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, Issue Project Room, No Fun Fest, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, and ZKM Karlsruhe. His video and sound works have been showcased internationally.
Brian Chase is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Growing up on Long Island, he started taking private drum lessons at an early age which lead to earning a Bachelors of Music from the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Brian is probably best known as a member of the rock group Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band that has toured extensively throughout the world and has been nominated for three Grammys. Other recorded projects include a minimalist punk rock band called the Seconds, a duo ensemble with saxophonist Seth Misterka, and Jeremiah Lockwood’s Sway Machinery. Performance collaborations have also included Alan Licht, Okkyung Lee, Matt Welch, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Kid Millions’s Man Forever. Brian is also interested in the Just Intonation tuning theory and, heavily influenced by the work of La Monte Young introduced to him by guitarist Jon Catler, has begun an ongoing recording and performance project in which the principles of Just Intonation are applied to drums and percussion. Influential drum and percussion teachers are and have been Susie Ibarra, Greg Bandy, and Michael Rosen. Away from the drums, Brian is a regular practitioner of Ashtanga yoga.
Columbus Ohio’s Ryan Jewell lends his percussive skills to a vast and wide variety of settings, from holding down the drum chairs in the Siltbreeze bands Psychedelic Horseshit and Pink Reason to improvised explorations with C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core), Nate Wooley (Melee), and Jack Wright, not to mention his much regarded electro-acoustic solo sets. He has played throughout the United States, Canada and Europe and has recorded for Chocolate Monk, Teen Action, and Dreamship Records.
http://www.myspace.com/ryanxing
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/ryan+jewell.html
Trumpeter Greg Kelley has performed experimental music, free jazz and noise w/ musicians throughout the globe {Keiji Haino, Kevin Drumm, Jandek}, releasing a number of recordings in the process {RRR, Twisted Village, Freedom From, No Fun, Erstwhile}. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of ‘music’.
http://ordinaryfanfares.blogspot.com/
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/greg+kelley.html
Vic Rawlings (prepared amplified cello, surface electronics) is active in the Boston improvised music community. His performances focus on the metamusical potential of unstable sounds and silences. He is an instrument builder specializing in modifications of existing instruments. In addition to his extensive cello preparations, he continually develops an electronic instrument from extant analog circuitry, producing, in effect, an analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface.
He performs regularly as a soloist and as a member of undr quartet, The BSC, and in duo and trio ensembles with Michael Bullock, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Sean Meehan, Jason Lescalleet, James Coleman, Tatsuya Nakatani, and Howard Stelzer. Collaborators have included Eddie Prevost (AMM), Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Daniel Carter (Other Dimensions in Music), Laurence Cook, Jaap Blonk, Masashi Harada, and Stephen Drury.
Rawlings appears on the record labels Audio Dispatch, Grob, Sedimental, Emanem, Boxmedia, Chloe, Absurd, and Rykodisc. He has performed as a soloist/ composer with Nicola Hawkins Dance Company and has composed scores for films by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva. He has toured throughout the US and in France.
http://www.vicrawlings.com/vicrawlings.com/Improvised_Music.html
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/vic+rawlings.html
The Thirteenth Assembly + Pierre-Yves Macé presents Miniatures/Song Recycle
Forged from a shared history of collaborations ranging from intimate duos to Anthony Braxton’s sprawling Sonic Genome Project, The Thirteenth Assembly features four distinguished musician/composers working together as equals to create distinctively eclectic, yet cohesive music. Drawing on years of familiarity, as well as its members’ diverse backgrounds in genres ranging classical, folk,rock, jazz and the avant-garde, this collective ensemble has performed across the United States and Europe since 2007, and released its debut recording (un)sentimental (Important Records) in 2009.
“Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, guitarist Mary Halvorson, violist Jessica Pavone and drummer Tomas Fujiwara are among the most exciting new jazz musicians to emerge on the New York scene,” declares the Wall Street Journal’s Martin Johnson, “and it is hard to talk about any one of these players without mentioning the others. Each of these musicians is a masterly soloist, and they all are creating music that is delicate, complex and eclectic. There isn’t much—if any—repertoire written for cornet-viola-guitar-drum ensembles, but with the appealing blend of unique sonorities and lithe rhythms found on (un)sentimental,that may soon change.”
Critics have credited the group with “truly remarkable capabilities”(Nick Storring, Exclaim!), “a knack for detailed and apropos framing of each others’ solo turns” (Bill Meyer, Dusted), and “an admirably relaxed sense of self, and a shared conviction to keep all options open” (Nate Chinen, New York Times). AllAboutJazz.com’s Troy Collins adds, “The unified ensemble sound of The Thirteenth Assembly is centered around empathetic communication and a willingness to subvert ego for the good of the group; there is no grandstanding here, only four longstanding friends conspiring to make adventurous yet accessible music. A stunning achievement,(un)sentimental demonstrates the endless possibilities of contemporary music by players at the top of their game.”
Pierre-Yves Macé (1980) is a French musician whose musical practice
encompasses improvisation on machines, a background in piano and classical percussion, jazz-rock/prog-rock bands, dance accompaniments, and an interest in literature and musicology. He received his PhD in Musicology in 2009, which explored phonography and the “sound document” in contemporary music. His first recordings, Faux-Jumeaux, was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2002. Subsequently, he released Circulations (Sub Rosa, 2005), and Crash_test ii (Tensional integrity) (Orkhêstra, 2006) for a string quartet. He has held residencies at CalArts in Los Angeles, CNMAT in Berkeley (2004), and GRM in Paris (2006, 2008). Macé has performed in the Octobre Festival in Normandie, MIMI, Villette Sonnique, Brocoli Transnumériques. His artistic collaborations include projects with ON (Sylvain Chauveau & Steven Hess), That Summer, Louisville, artist Hippolyte Hentgen, and writers Mathieu Larnaudie, Philippe Vasset, and Christophe Fiat. He is also a member of the Encyclopédie de la parole, a speech encyclopaedia crew whose goal is to constitute a compositional plan through which different forms of recorded speeches may be compared.
Miniatures / song recycle (2010) for piano and tape (including 12 anonymous found voices):
“I began working on this miniature project when I was asked to perform something for piano and laptop. My first concern was to avoid the typical ambient stuff which melts piano and electronics into long and extended movements. As a limited pianist, I also decided to use the instrument more as an accompaniement to something else (a lead part) than as a soloist in itself. All those thoughts lead me to work on a collection of very small pieces which rigorously alternate between “music concrète” miniatures, and songs made of recycled material. The processed voices we hear on those songs come from anonymous a cappella recordings found on the web (and to a lesser extend on films) ; reversed and cut into small fragments, they constitute a completely new musical material which is then accompanied by the piano. Set up that way, the collection of « songs » unexpectedly evoke a traditional lied form, a song cycle made of recycled raw material.”
Chicago Underground Duo
The Chicago Underground Duo formed in 1997 as an organic offshoot of the larger Chicago Underground Collective. The Duo consists of Rob Mazurek (cornet, electronics, piano) and Chad Taylor (percussion, electronics, vibes, mbira, guitar). Both stalwarts of the Chicago Jazz scene, their performances are dually based on notated compositions composed by both artists and on pure improvisation.
Mazurek and Taylor have released five CDs together, their most recent release being Boca Negra (Thrill Jockey, 2010). They have toured extensively in the U.S, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Brazil and are considered to be the most musically adventurous performers of the Chicago Underground incarnations.
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...