Avant Music News

From Roulette:

HARVESTWORKS INSIDE: Pamela Z / Elliot Sharp
Thu May 14 – 8:30 PM
The 2009 edition of Harvestworks’ Spring performance series ‚”Harvestworks Inside” with three exceptional programs exploring gesture and physical computing in live performance. Pamela Z will present new work for voice, electronics, video, and gesture controllers. Elliott Sharp will perform new works as part of his ongoing Tectonics project.

HARVESTWORKS INSIDE: Zach Layton / Sawako
Fri May 15 – 8:30 PM
Zach Layton performing new works exploring synaesthesia, geometric forms and minimal surfaces, kinetic visual patterns and sonic gestures. Sawako: a signal alchemist in the urban life environment who explores the virtual and actual world through sound.

HARVESTWORKS INSIDE: Bill Hsu & James Fei / Sha Xin Wei
Sat May 16 – 8:30 PM
Bill Hsu and James Fei perform a new work for reed instruments and electronics, using an interactive system that tracks timbral and gestural information. Sha Xin Wei: “Ouija, New York” an open rehearsal event that explores movement and collective intentionality experiments with dancers in responsive media.

MIKEY IQ JONES
Wed May 20 – 8:30 PM
Vocalist/percussionist/composer Mikey IQ Jones (of Brown Wing Overdrive) presents an evening of new songforms, improvisations, and compositions centered around Jones’s bodily & technological manhandling. His kitchen-sink collusionist aesthetics will center around the real-time manipulation and structuring of raw vocal, idiophonic, membranophonic, and domestic materials into thickets of rhythm and harmony via an assortment of samplers. In English: He’ll be singing, banging on an assortment of drums, percussion, and household junk, sampling (and sometimes looping) the elements live, and in essence performing new pieces which are to be released sometime in late 2009. There will also be costumes and props, because it’s Mixology time, and that’s just the way he rolls.

MATTHEW OSTROWSKI
Thu May 21 – 8:30 PM
New York based Matthew Ostrowski has been active since the early 1980s, working in improvised music, music theater, electroacoustic composition, and audio installations. An unreconstructed formalist with a continuing interest in density of microevents and rapid change, he has wasted much of the last ten years developing interfaces for real-time musical performance, attempting to emulate the multidimensionality and flexiblity of acoustical instruments in the electronic domain. Tonight Ostrowski will perform a new multichannel work, “Patterns of Changing Light”, in which he will try to come to terms with various poles of electronic music: texture and gesture, sampling and synthesis, acousmatics and diegesis. In addition, he will play some old chestnuts, and special guests are definitely possible.

HAHN ROWE
Fri May 22 – 8:30 PM
Drawing from his background in a wide field of genres including rock, classical, film, theater, improvised, and electronic music – composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe has developed a uniquely personal sonic language, creating atmospheric, sensual, and polymorphic soundscapes. He has shown a keen ability to bridge and meld acoustic sounds with the infinite textures available through analog and digital processing into a strangely organic and emotional sonic realms. Hahn has performed and/or worked with artists such as Hugo Largo, Glenn Branca, David Byrne, Hassan Hakmoun, Foetus, Mimi, and Antony and the Johnsons among many others. Tonight’s performance will feature solo, digitally de/re-constructed violin – fluidly transforming from sensual-textural microsonics to the lush and quasi-symphonic.

EVIDENCE WITH BENTON-C BAINBRIDGE: LOSPERUS
Sat May 23 – 8:30 PM
Losperus is a new performance paradigm for sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood’s duo, Evidence, in which they leave behind their laptops and software – placing commonplace electrical devices and found objects into unstable relationships with each other, and using friction and gravity to build humming, whirring, rattling contraptions on the fly. Tonight they are joined by visual artist Benton-C Bainbridge who will be making live visuals in much the same spirit, taking an ‘acoustic’ approach to visuals and spatially amplifying the Losperus devices through light and shadow with hacked slide and film projectors.

BERANGERE MAXIMIN plays ‘Stuck In a Nasty Little Film’
Tue May 26 – 8:30 PM
French composer/performer Berangere Maximin presents ‘Stuck in a Nasty Little Film’, a new piece for laptop, spoken word, and various objects with video by Anton Yakutovych. Performing first as a singer, Maximin later studied electroacoustic music with the composer Denis Dufour at the Perpignan Conservatoire. Interested in preserving the spirit of live music in the studio, she works out of her own Home Sweet Home Studio, shooting sounds in a dark silent room, recording soundscapes and acoustic sounds, using sampling, digital effects, and performing on a variety of objects.

JARRYD LOWDER & JULIE FOTHERINGHAM: “Stress Positions”
Wed May 27 – 8:30 PM
“Stress Positions”, the newest of a series of short performances by the duo of Julie Fotheringham (dance/movement) and Jarryd Lowder (video/music/sound) evokes, conflates and confuses motifs of torture for the purpose of extracting information (as in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”) and torture for the purpose of extracting pleasure/pain (a la BDSM). Jarryd Lowder is an artist working with electronic audiovisual media and is an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Julie Fotheringham performed as a dancer/acrobat in Cirque du Soleil before coming to New York to make her own work in contemporary dance/performance art.

o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi): “A Large Gap at the Level of My Head”
Thu May 28 – 8:30 PM
“A Large Gap at the Level of My Head” is an experiment in composing with a series of specific cues to attendants. The original sound event won’t yield, nor aim at a single common experience, but rather impose an unique auditory event to each listener. The piece is also a study of listening: not about the source of the sound, but about phenomena of perceived. o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi) is a Brooklyn based sound artist, social composer, and a core member of SHARE (http://share.dj) known for her works formed through experiments in restructuring and analyzing one’s relationship with sounds in sociological, cultural, and/or psychological environments.

AARON SIEGEL ENSEMBLE
Fri May 29 – 8:30 PM
The Aaron Siegel Ensemble will be premiering two movements of a work for percussion and pianos entitled, “Preparing the Past.” Drawing on tangled narratives of memory and anticipation, “Preparing the Past,” juxtaposes the moment of observation with the trail of its reflections. Also on the program will be selections from Siegel’s “Book of Notions,” for piano and vibraphone. Aaron Siegel writes experimental music that lies at the intersection of abstraction and intuition. His work ranges from solo compositions and chamber music to improvised ensembles and collaborative theater pieces. He has been hailed as an “evocative composer,” with “meditative ease and grace” working at the “frontiers of sound research. The premiere recording by the Aaron Siegel Ensemble, “Every Morning, A History” was praised by Signal to Noise as being representative of the flowering DIY chamber music scene in Brooklyn.

DAVID ROSENBLOOM: Sound and Light I
Sat May 30 – 8:30 PM
Sound and Light I is an integration of sound and light: live music and recorded video, with the video image manipulated in real time, particularly in relation to color and saturation, and in turn acting as a score element for the musicians, David Rosenbloom, guitar; David Hofstra, bass; and Stephen Moses, drums. David Rosenbloom has been active as a musician, composer, and painter in New York since the late 70′s no wave period. His projects have included the Electric Chorus & Orchestra, Chinese Puzzle, The Experimental Chorus, and the Outlanders; he performed, toured and recorded with Glenn Branca, and was a member of Rhys Chatham’s early band Meltdown. His work tends to focus on sonic and structural experimentation with an emphasis on dense, melodic textures.