Coming to Philadelphia

Source: BOWERBIRD.

WED MAR 1
SCOTT WOLLSCHLEGER: DARK DAYS
at University Lutheran
Bowerbird is pleased to present pianist Karl Larson performing work from the recently released album Dark Days featuring solo piano compositions of Scott Wollschleger. Dark Days chronicles Scott’s solo piano repertoire written between 2007 and 2020. Aspects of style that are heard on his first album Soft Aberration are present again, but now filtered through the introspective immediacy of the solo piano medium, as we hear coloristic harmonies, a penchant for using displaced rhythms and repetition to subvert phrasing expectations, and an intuitively driven approach to form and structure.

WED MAR 15
TAK ENSEMBLE
at The Rotunda
Bowerbird is pleased to present the TAK Ensemble in Philadelphia. Painting a portrait of new American composition through intensely virtuosic and visceral works TAK Ensemble will perform works by Tyshawn Sorey, Natacha Diels, Ashkan Behzadi, Erin Gee, Golnaz Shariatzadeh, and David Bird.

PROGRAM
Natacha Diels: Second Nightmare for KIKU
Ashkan Behzadi: Arqueros
Erin Gee: Mouthpiece 28
David Bird: Series Imposture
Tyshawn Sorey: For jaimie branch

FRI MAR 17
IKUE MORI + CHARMAINE LEE
at The Rotunda
Bowerbird is pleased to present Ikue Mori and Charmaine Lee at The Rotunda for an evening featuring solos from each artist as well as a duo performance.

Since her emergence in New York’s No Wave scene in the late 1970s as a percussionist in DNA, Japanese native Ikue Mori has used auto didacticism to forge one of the most singular aesthetics in contemporary music. Since switching from a richly intuitive approach to drums to electronics during the 1980s she’s refined an elusive, liquid sound that translated her rhythmic vocabulary into a shape-spilling mass of daydreaming gurgles, bloops, smears, rattles, and fractals that’s at once serene and unsettling. She’s a master improviser, adapting a recognizable sonic palette from real-time processing according to the needs and variables of each situation. Over the years she’s formed inextricable bonds with musicians like John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Craig Taborn, and Sylvie Courvoisier, among others, steadily enhancing within and adapting to each disparate context.

New York improviser and composer Charmaine Lee has quickly become a force in experimental music circles in the last few years, parlaying her voice with staggering extended technique and electronics to create a forceful, elusive practice that shares more in common with noise and experimental approaches than conventional singing. Her wordless, cacophonous improvisations viscerally transmit ultra-high- pitched frequencies, manic vocal fry, and guttural shrieks manipulated with distortion, feedback, and objects like glass and water to deliver an unsettling attack that is simultaneously brittle and violent. Mori and Lee will each perform solo, followed by a duo set—a young partnership marked by exquisite tension, piercing timbre, and quicksilver exchange.