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.

MV Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and artist. Her work frequently involves tape machines, voice, cello, analog synthesizers, field recordings, along with hand built electronics. She has recently been developing and performing new works which utilize physical computing and sensor controlled synthesis. Carbon is interested in spatial integration and site-specific consideration.

She has performed nationally and internationally with her solo work as well as in collaborations at spaces including Arnolfi (UK), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Nefertiti Jazz Club (Sweden), PS1 Contemporary Art (NYC), Roulette(NYC), The Sage, (UK), The Stone (NYC), the Tate Modern (UK), and Tesla (Berlin) . Her work with the dark-wave electronic duo, Metalux,has releases out on a number of experimental and independent labels including LOAD, 5RC and Hanson. Her solo release, The Dislodged Perihelion (LP), is coming out sometime in the future on Ecstatic Peace.

Her paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries including the Butcher Shop (Chicago), D’Amelio Terras (NYC), Louis V.E.S.P.(NYC), MCCaigwelles Gallery (NYC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PGH), Salon Invisible (Chicago), Three Rives Arts Festival (PGH), and West Nile (NYC).

ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Michael Gira has handpicked performance artist, harpist and accordionist Baby Dee to open the show, this time featuring keyboards accompanied by cello.

Formed in 1982 and led by Gira, a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Swans instigated and heavily influenced New York’s NoWave scene. They are considered one of the most influential post-punk bands to date, often incorporating droning vocals, thunderous rhythms, and varied, complex instrumentation.

“THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction,” says Gira of the pending new album. “It just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that. I’ll be using what I learned in the last several years to inform the way this new material develops, while carrying forward from where Swans left off with its final album Soundtracks For The Blind, and in particular, Swans Are Dead.” (More here from Stereogum)

The Swans Presented by ISSUE Project Room in collaboration with Haunting The Chapel and the Blackened Music Series

Brooklyn Masonic Temple

Friday, October 8, 2010

8:00 PM (7:00 PM Doors)

317 Clermont Ave (@ Lafayette Ave)

Metalux is M.V. Carbon and J. Graf

www.metalux.cc

Portraying physical and architecturally improbable spatial themes, Metalux seeks to situate the individual within a tangled web of technological interfaces. Their music can be heard as abstract sonic fiction.  The processed human voice, with manipulated guitars, bass and samples, depicts a fictional engagement with the environment.  Instruments alternate in carrying dominant themes, rhythm and melody.  Metalux employs the use of rock music, only to suggest their compositions’ distant relationship to pop music. Using modified electronic instruments, bass, guitars, vocals and percussion, Metalux expands pre-written ideas with improvisation.

MV Carbon and Aki Onda duo

MV Carbon on cello and electronics, voice and tapes.

Aki Onda on tapes and electronics.

MV Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and artist. Her work frequently involves tape machines, voice, cello, analog synthesizers, field recordings, along with hand built electronics. She has recently been developing and performing new works which utilize physical computing and sensor controlled synthesis. Carbon is interested in spatial integration and site-specific consideration.

She has performed nationally and internationally with her solo work as well as in collaborations at spaces including Arnolfi (UK), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Nefertiti Jazz Club (Sweden), PS1 Contemporary Art (NYC), Roulette(NYC), The Sage, (UK), The Stone (NYC), the Tate Modern (UK), and Tesla (Berlin) . Her work with the dark-wave electronic duo, Metalux,has releases out on a number of experimental and independent labels including LOAD, 5RC and Hanson. Her solo release, The Dislodged Perihelion,(LP) is coming out sometime in the future on Ecstatic Peace.

Her paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries including the Butcher Shop (Chicago), D’Amelio Terras (NYC), Louis V.E.S.P.(NYC), MCCaigwelles Gallery (NYC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PGH), Salon Invisible (Chicago), Three Rives Arts Festival (PGH), and West Nile (NYC).

Jenny Graf Sheppard (J.Graf) is an artist and improvisor who works with various mediums. Graf is concerned with the construction of sounds in order to radically shift social space. Using sound, video and collaborative performance that often take cues from the “audience” to direct the work, her work addresses such broad issues as gender, age and social convention. Her improvisiation and scored pieces include long-term investigations such as The Guitars Project and Proud Flesh.

J. Graf has been an active participant in the ongoing thriving international avante garde music scene since 1996. Building vivid, compelling soundworlds using intuitive homebrewed electronics, guitar and voice, her music as one half of Metalux and Harrius as well as her solo project J.Graf has bent the ears and minds of those who venture into her world.

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set to live guitar improvisation. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Shelley Hirsch. http://www.akionda.net/

ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Co-presented by Crossing the Line, the fall festival of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)

Eliane Radigue will introduce the American premiere of her 2009 acoustic composition Naldjorlak, a two and a half hour work in three movements. The concert will mark only the 3rd performance in ISSUE Project Room’s future home at 110 Livingston: a McKim Mead & White-designed jewel box theater, featuring marble floors and 40-ft high vaulted ceilings.

Naldjorlak - After more than 30 years of infinitely discrete electronic music, Eliane Radigue abandoned her cherished Arp 2500 synthesizer to devote herself entirely to acoustic composition. Monumental in length but delicate due to the acoustic treatment of the pulsing and murmuring sounds, Naldjorlak was conceived as a trilogy with incredibly subtle harmonics, sub-tones and partials interacting continuously. The piece was elaborated in close collaboration with three virtuoso musicians who will be performing the piece: cellist Charles Curtis and basset horn players Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez.

The suspension of time, the dialog with eternity, the proximity to silence, an appeal to contemplation, and exceptional concentration… all that has characterized Eliane Radigue’s music since 1970, is now more relevant than ever. But, Naldjorlak takes her even further on her musical journey, because with these three performers, she has found the ideal means of coming ever closer to the “impalpable chimerical” music of her dreams.

Eliane Radigue -  Born in Paris, France Radigue studied electroacoustic music techniques at the Studio d’essai at the RTF, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1957-58). She was married to the artist, Arman, and devoted ten years to the education of three children, deepening classical music studies and instrumental practice on the harp and piano at the same time. In 1967-68 she worked again with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio Apsome.

Radigue worked for a year at the New York University School of the Arts in 1970-71. Her music, its source an Arp synthesizer and medium recording tape, attracted considerable attention for its sensitive, dappled purity. She was in residence at the electronic music studios of the University of Iowa and California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Becoming a Tibetan Buddhist in 1975, Radigue went into retreat, and stopped composing for a time. When she took up her career again in 1979, she continued to work with the Arp synthesizer which has become her signature. She composed Triptych for the Ballet Théâtre de Nancy (choreography by Douglas Dunn), Adnos II & Adnos III, and began the large-scale cycle of works based on the life of the Tibetan master, Milarepa.

In 1984 Radigue received a “bourse à la creation” from the French Government to compose Songs of Milarepa, and a “commande de l’état” in 1986 for the continuation of the Milarepa cycle with Jetsun Mila. Notoriously slow and painstaking in her work, Radigue has produced in the last decade or so on average one major work every three years. Very recently, in response to the demands of musicians worldwide, she has begun creating works for specific performers and instruments together with electronics. The first of these was for bass player Kaspar Toeplitz, and more recently the American cellist Charles Curtis.

Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence), Albany Museum of the Arts (New York), Galerie Rive Droite (Paris), Gallery Sonnabend (New York), Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), and Galerie Shandar (Paris); at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d’Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), University of Iowa, Bennington School of Music, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996). She has appeared on many broadcast programs including France Culture, France Musique, distribution via satellite covering over 50 stations in the U.S. including special programs on KPFK (Los Angeles) and KPFA (San Francisco).

Charles Curtis

The cellist Charles Curtis performs a unique repertoire of major solo works created expressly for him by La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue and Alison Knowles, rarely-heard compositions by Terry Jennings and Richard Maxfield, and works by Cardew, Wolff, Feldman and Cage. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s four-hour long solo composition, Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord, has been heard in Paris, Berlin, Lyon, New York, Dijon, Polling and Bologna. Éliane Radigue’s recent Naldjorlak for solo cello has received over thirty performances worldwide and, as part of a new trilogy, was premiered in the Auditorium of the Musée du Louvre last October. Lucier’s compositions for Curtis include music for cello and piano, cello and sine waves, and solo cello with large orchestra. A former faculty member at Princeton University, and for eleven years the first solo cellist of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, Curtis is now professor for contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego, and tours and records internationally. In the Bavarian village of Polling Curtis performs and teaches every summer in the Regenbogenstadl, a space devoted to the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. His performances in recent seasons have taken him to the Guggenheim in New York, the CAPC in Bordeaux, the Galerie Renos Xippas in Paris, the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin, Dundee Contemporary Arts, the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg, the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, as well as Chicago, Ferrara, Austin, Los Angeles and Harvard University. He continues to perform and record the traditional repertoire for cello, both as soloist and as artistic director of the chamber music project Camera Lucida.

Carol Robinson

Composer and clarinetist, Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life. Equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms, she performs in major concert halls and international festivals (Wien Modern, RomaEuropa, MaerzMusik, Huddersfield, Archipel, Musica, Musica Contemporanea, etc.). In addition to working closely with composers, she pursues the new in more alternative contexts, collaborating with video artists, photographers, and musicians from divers horizons. Improvisation is her passion. Carol Robinson plays all types and sizes of clarinets, including more exotic instruments such as the Lithuanian birbyne.

She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Her works often combine acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination for aleatoric systems. Particularly interested in dance, she has collaborated with choreographers Susan Buirge, Nadège MacLeay, Thierry Niang, François Verret, and Young Ho Nam. In 2008, she was awarded a composition fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy.

Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. A CD of her composition Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was released by PLUSH in 2009. Other recent releases include solo monograph recordings of music by Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio for MODE, Phil Niblock for TOUCH as well as classical music and jazz for SYRIUS, BTL and NATO. A DVD of the aleatoric musical system Cross-Currents is currently in production for the label Shiiin, with support from IRCAM,

Carol Robinson was born in the United States and graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory. After receiving a H.H. Wooley grant to study in Paris, she settled in France.

Bruno Martinez

Bruno Martinez was born on September 13, 1963 in Maubeuge France. Principal Bass Clarinetist at the Paris Opera since 1992, he has performed with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Charles Dutoit, Kurt Sanderling, Myung Wung Chung, Armin Jordan, Georges Prêtre, James Conlon, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Witold Lutoslawski, Yehudi Menuhin, Valery Gergiev, Esa Pekka Salonen, Bernhard Haitink, Semyon Byshkov, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and others.

Bruno Martinez appears as soloist and chamber musician in France and worldwide. Between 1996 and 1998, Bruno Martinez was the Principal Bass Clarinetist with the Lucerne (Switzerland) and d’Aix en Provence International Festival Orchestras. He has premiered several contemporary works. He is also active in feature film recordings among which as clarinet and basset horn soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra for “Alice et Martin” de A.Téchiné. Education: – In 1984, awarded 1st Prize from the Paris Conservatory (CNSM), studying with Guy Deplus – In 1986, awarded “Virtuosity” Prize from the Geneva Conservatory (Switzerland), studying with Thomas Friedli – In 1987, accepted in the “Masters” chamber music seminar at the CNSM, Paris studying with Maurice Bourgue -In 1988, received a French and Canadian government scholarship to study at the Banff Center School of Fine Arts (Canada).

Pauline Oliveros – A native Texan, Oliveros has influenced American music extensively in her career spanning more than 60 years as a composer, performer, author and philosopher. She pioneered the concept of Deep Listening, her practice based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation, designed to inspire both trained and untrained musicians to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations.

During the mid-’60s she served as the first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College, aka Center for Contemporary Music followed by 14-years as Professor of Music and 3 years as Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001 she has served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is engaged in research on a National Science Foundation CreativeIT project. Her research interests include improvisation, special needs interfaces and telepresence teaching and performing. She also serves as Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College doing telepresence teaching and she is executive director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. where she leads projects in Deep Listening, Adaptive Use Interface. She is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement. A retrospective from 1960 to 2010 was performed at Miller Theater, Columbia University in New York March 27, 2010 in conjunction with the Schuman award. She received a third honorary degree from DeMontort University, Leicester, UK July 23, 2010. Recent recordings include Pauline Oliveros & Miya Masoka and Pauine Oliveros & Chris Brown on Deep Listening, http://paulineoliveros.us, and http://www.deeplistening.org/

David Grubbs - Grubbs has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks). He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. He is an assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). Grubbs was a 2005-6 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.

Anne Bourne – With improvised streams of extended cello and voice, Anne integrates the experience of listening and composing for dance, film, experimental context, digital image media, chamber music, and words. She has created with Andrea Nann, Michael Ondaatje, Susie Ibarra, Eve Egoyan, Alvin Lucier, Nicolas Collins, John Oswald, Tom Kuo, Peter Mettler, Fred Frith, and Pauline Oliveros. Anne is interested in each musical expression being an offering of sonic activism, in the sense of resolution between tones, peoples, landscapes, and individual paradoxes through listening.

Carol Robinson’s Billows:

Billows is a twelve-section piece for basset horn or birbyne and a reactive electronic environment. Drawn from a series of recent pieces for solo instruments with live electronics Billows explores the shifting components of timbre and time.

Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life, equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms.

Robinson often works closely with composers, but she also pursues new and alternative contexts for her work through collaborations with video artists, photographers, and musicians from diverse backgrounds. The freely converging musical world of her group Sleeping in Vilna is typical of what interests her. Improvisation is her passion. She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Her works often combine acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination with aleatoric systems. Particularly interested in dance, she has collaborated with choreographers Susan Buirge, Nadège MacLeay, Thierry Niang, François Verret, and Young Ho Nam.

In 2008, she was awarded a composition fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was released by Plush in 2009. Other recent releases include solo monograph recordings of music by Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio for Mode Records, Phil Niblock for Touch, as well as classical music and jazz for Syrius, BTL and Nato.

Carol Robinson was born in the United States and graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory. After receiving a H.H. Wooley grant to study in Paris, she settled in France.

What is share?

Before creating February in 2005, drummer Jonathan Kane was a co-founder of the No Wave legends, Swans and instigated their half time, slow rhythmic crawl. He played in LaMonte Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band, and is the only drummer in Rhys Chatham’s 100 electric guitar orchestra. He plays with a galaxy of downtown luminaries including Kropotkins, Transmission, and Elliott Sharp. As teenagers in the 70s, Jonathan and his brother Anthony took their freshly inked fake IDs to Chicago where they ended up opening for the likes of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and James Cotton.

Come dance, trance, and (most importantly) make some NOISE for the band that WFMU describes as “Avant Roadhouse, the music that makes me proud to be human”.

‘Wedding the brutal severity of Delta country boogie and Seventies German pulse rock – all dead-ahead motion and mounting detail…Epic.” – Rolling Stone

“Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. Interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock, he has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic.” – New York Times

“Intensely propulsive motorik blues…its muscularity and greased relentlessness is never less than exhilarating.” – Uncut

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