Past Concerts
Non-Event and Axiom present
KYLE BOBBY DUNN
ALLISON MARIA RODRIGUEZ
THE PRESENT TENSE
AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media
141 Green Street
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
617.653.7774
8 p.m. / $7 suggested donation
KYLE BOBBY DUNN is a young, New York-based minimalist composer and sound artist who draws his material from outdoor locations, generating sounds from site-specific environments and processing them using analog setups and a laptop. His latest full-length release, Fragments & Compositions is out now on Non-Event founder emeritus Rob Forman’s Sedimental label.
ALLISON MARIA RODRIGUEZ presents a video installation and performance exploring the psychology of memory and trauma.
THE PRESENT TENSE presents Too soon/Too late, an experimental, time-based performance and sound piece featuring artists, Sandrine Schaefer and Philip Fryer.
Non-Event concerts are supported in part by a grant from the LEF foundation.
Non-Event, Basstown, and the Goethe-Institüt Boston present
RASTER-NOTON SHOWCASE
with SIGNAL + solo sets by
ALVA NOTO, FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER, and BYETONE
Listen to a podcast, featuring music by all four acts, in the Non-Event podcast section!
Middlesex Lounge
315 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA
(617) 868-MSEX
Doors: 9pm, Show: 10pm
21+ / Admission: $10
SIGNAL is Raster-Noton’s supergroup, featuring Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), and Frank Bretschneider. The trio performs intense, hypnotic music to a spectacular backdrop of graphical information that reveals the complex geometry of the sounds in play. Most of their sound sources are taken from a huge memory bank of music from long jamming sessions dating from the early days of Raster-Noton. These are processed and folded into a taut and energetic web of electrostatic rhythmic clicks, bristling static, and deep bass pulses that are unexpectedly sensuous and undeniably funky. Their most recent release Robotron came out in 2007. This will be SIGNAL’s Boston debut.
Video: Signal Live in Copenhagen
Musician and visual artist CARSTEN NICOLAI (aka ALVA NOTO) works in the transitional area between art and science. In his intensely dynamic work, Nicolai plays with the rules of physicality. Clicks and glitches are not used as ornamental additions, but make up the essential elements of the work, which is often structured around the rhythmic grooves of hip-hop and R&B. Nicolai has performed in many of the world’s most prestigious spaces including The Guggenheim, MOMA SF, MOMA Oxford, NTT Tokyo, Tate Modern, and Venice Biennial. This will be Nicolai’s Boston debut.
FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER is a founding member of Raster-Noton and one of the pioneering figures in ultra minimal post techno. Using the most basic sound sources (sine waves and white noise), Bretschneider creates minimal, flowing pieces with delicate textures and complex rhythmic patterns. Described as “abstract analogue pointilism,” “ambience for spaceports,” and “hypnotic echochamber pulsebeat,” Bretschneider’s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translations of the qualities found in music into visual phenomena.
Video: Frank Bretschneider Live
OLAF BENDER (aka BYETONE) is a founding member of the Raster-Noton label, as well as its lead designer. Bender creates his music digitally, assembling sine tones into complex sound fabrics of deep sub-bass and rhythmic clicks and crackles. He creates abstract animations to support his abstract music —transforming the rhythm of the music into a graphic equivalent, which he controls in real time. His new album, D.O.A.T. (Death of a Typographer), is due out on Raster-Noton shortly.
Links: http://www.raster-noton.de
Non-Event concerts are supported in part by a grant from the LEF foundation.
Non-Event presents
Charles Curtis and Aleck Karis
performing Morton Feldman’s “Patterns in a Chromatic Field”
Williams Hall at the New England Conservatory
30 Gainsborough Street
Boston, MA
8:30 pm, FREE
About the artists:
Cellist CHARLES CURTIS studied at Juilliard under Harvey Shapiro and Leonard Rose. Since the early eighties he has pursued a dual path, working in the worlds of experimental rock and sound art while continuing as a highly respected performer of the traditional cello repertoire. In 1983 he was a founding member of the ground-breaking poetry-rock group King Missile, and he appeared in the downtown New York rock scene with groups such as You Suck, Dogbowl, Borbetomagus and Bongwater, on record and in live shows. In 1985 he was awarded the Gregor Piatigorsky Prize of the New York Cello Society, and was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University. In 1987 he began a long and fruitful relationship with La Monte Young, becoming director of the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble and giving premieres of Young’s work throughout the world. He also established an ongoing practice of experimentation with sound, electronics and improvisation, originally with composer/performer Michael J. Schumacher as Dual, and later leading his own groups combining experimental rock with spoken texts and sine wave environments. From 1989 until 2000 he was first solo cellist of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra of Hamburg, and he has appeared as soloist with major conductors and orchestras worldwide. Currently, Curtis is Professor of Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California, San Diego.
For over twenty years ALECK KARIS has been one of the leading pianists in the New York contemporary music scene. Particularly associated with the music of Elliott Carter, Mario Davidovsky, and John Cage, he has championed their works all over the world. Among his numerous solo piano discs on Bridge Records are acclaimed recordings of Stravinsky, Schumann, Carter and John Cage. Recently, Karis performed Birtwistle’s marathon solo work Harrison’s Clocks in London and New York, Feldman’s “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” in New York, and appeared at the Venice Biennale. At home with both contemporary and classical works, Karis has performed concertos from Mozart to Birtwistle with New York’s Y Chamber Symphony, St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony and the Erie Symphony. He has been featured at leading international festivals including Bath, Geneva, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Miami, New York Philharmonic’s Horizons Festival, Caramoor, and the Warsaw Autumn Festival. He is the pianist with Speculum Musicae. Awarded a solo recitalists’ fellowship by the NEA, Karis has been honored with two Fromm Foundation grants “in recognition of his commitment to the music of our time.”
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event Presents
OKKYUNG LEE, STEVE BERESFORD, and PETER EVANS
with special guest
Skinny Vinny (Josh Jefferson & Andrew Eisenberg)
LILY PAD
1353 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA
(617) 395-1393
7:30 pm / $8
About the artists:
A native of Korea, classically trained cellist OKKYUNG LEE combines elements of jazz, traditional Korean music, found sounds, and noise with extended techniques. Since moving to New York in 2000, she has performed and recorded with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Derek Bailey, Nels Cline, Chris Corsano, Sylvie Courvoisier, Thurston Moore, Jim O’rourke, Zeena Parkins, Marc Ribot, and John Zorn.
Internationally known as a free improviser on piano and electronics, STEVE BERESFORD has also composed scores for three feature films, numerous television shows and various commercials. Amongst the other genres he has delved into, often in partnership with leading practitioners, are: Bollywood, electronica, Jazz, African music, lower case, Japanese pop, hip hop, MOR, string quartets, fanfare bands, French chanson, cheesy pop and, especially, free improvisation. Last year he found himself playing piano for Grace Jones at The Royal Festival Hall and acting as Ray Davies’s musical director.
Trumpet player PETER EVANS has been a member of the New York musical community since 2003, when he moved to the city after graduating Oberlin Conservatory. Peter currently works in a wide variety of areas, including solo performance, chamber orchestras, performance art, free improvised settings, electro-acoustic music and composition. As a performer, he has been working to break through the technical barriers of his instrument and enjoys playing with steady configurations of improvisers; each band explores a specific concept or style as much as possible.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event Presents
An Evening of Experimental Music
IKUE MORI
with special guests
Jessica Rylan, Howard Stelzer, Vic Rawlings, and Jorritt Dijkstra
Mobius
725 Harrison Ave
Boston (South End)
(617) 542-7416
details TBA
About Ikue Mori:
Ikue Mori moved from her native city of Tokyo to New York in 1977. She started playing drums and soon formed the seminal NO WAVE band DNA, with fellow noise pioneers Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. DNA enjoyed legendary cult status, while creating a new brand of radical rhythms and dissonant sounds; forever altering the face of rock music.
In the mid-80’s Ikue started in employ drum machines in the unlikely context of improvised music. While limited to the standard technology provided by the drum machine, she has nevertheless forged her own highly sensitive signature style. In 2000 Ikue started using the laptop computer to expand on her already signature sound, thus broadening her scope of musical expression. She has subsequently collaborated with numerous improvisors throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, while continuing to produce and record her own music. Current working groups include MEPHISTA with Sylvie Courvoisier and Susie Ibarra, projects with Kim Gordon, the duo project PHANTOM ORCHARD with Zeena Parkins, and various projects with John Zorn.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event Presents
A Valentine’s Evening of Experimental Music
featuring
ANDREA NEUMANN, JACK WRIGHT, and VIC RAWLINGS
Mobius
725 Harrison Ave
Boston (South End)
(617) 542-7416
8pm / $8
ANDREA NEUMANN (b. 1968) studied piano at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin. Since 1996 she has been primarily active as improviser and composer in the areas of experimental and new music. In the process of exploring the piano for new sound possibilities, she has reduced the instrument to strings, resonance board and metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the sounds, she has developed numerous new playing techniques, sounds, and ways of preparing the dismantled instrument. Neumann has released recordings on Erstwhile, Sedimental, Rossbin, Charhizma, Zarek, and the Japan Improv label.
Over the past twenty-five years JACK WRIGHT has established a reputation as a bold saxophonist and an influential musical personality. He has played in virtually every venue available to experimental improvised music in the US, and many in Europe as well. His music shifts radically in style and approach from one year to the next, yet is always somehow identifiable as his own. Currently, he plays primarily alto and soprano saxophones. The Washington Post says of Wright: “In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king.”
VIC RAWLINGS (prepared/ amplified cello, circuitry) is an improviser and instrument builder. His performances focus on the metamusical potential of unstable sounds and silences. He has developed instruments that are specific to this compositional aesthetic. As an instrument builder he specializes in modifications of existing instruments and has developed extensive cello preparations.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event Presents
a Special 10th Anniversary Performance by
THE UNDR QUARTET
w/BRENDAN MURRAY
James Coleman: theremin
Greg Kelley: trumpet
Vic Rawlings: prepared/ amplified cello, c
Non-Event and Semata Productions present
a FREE concert of experimental music featuring
BRANDON LABELLE
w/JARROD FOWLER
Piano Craft Guild (entrance at rear)
791 Tremont Street
Boston, Ma (South End)
8pm FREE!!!
About the artists:
BRANDON LABELLE is an artist and writer working with sounds, places, bodies, and cultural narratives. He presented a solo exhibition at Singuhr galerie in Berlin (2004), and an experimental composition for pirate drummers as part of Virtual Territories, Nantes (2005). His ongoing project to build a library of radio memories, “Phantom Radio”, was presented fall 2006 as part of Radio Revolten, Halle Germany. He is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum 2006).
JARROD FOWLER used to be a drummer. His music has become so abstracted and conceptualized that his percussive practice bears little resemblance to that of his contemporaries. His work is influenced by the late- and post-modern fields of philosophy, conceptualism, hip hop, poetry and noise. He is the author of Translation As Rhythm (Errant Bodies 2006).
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event presents
an evening of experimental music
featuring
DAVID STACKENÄS & TATSUYA NAKATANI
with FORBES GRAHAM
Studio Soto
63 Melcher Street
Fort Point, Boston
$5-10 (suggested donation)/ 8:00 pm
About the artists:
Born in 1974, guitarist DAVID STACKENÄS started playing guitar at the age of 10. After completing his music studies at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm in 1998 he began working freelance in the thriving free improvised music and jazz scene in Sweden. With his acoustic sound and his percussive energy Stackenäs is one of Sweden’s most creative and original guitar players. He performs and records in the ensembles ANIMES (with percussionist Raymond Strid and bassist Johan Berthling), TRI-DIM (with reedist Håkon Kornstad and percussionist Ingar Zach), and in duos with reedists Martin Küchen and Mats Gustafsson. In 1999 and 2001 he toured with Mats Gustafsson’s NU-ensemble (with Günther Christmann, Carlos Zingaro, among others) and in October 2000 he did a week of concerts in Ystad, Sweden with the members of Sonic Youth, Loren Mazzacane Connors and Jim O’Rourke.
TATSUYA NAKATANI (percussion) is originally from Osaka, Japan. In 2006 he performed in 80 cities in 7 countries and collaborated with 163 artists worldwide. In the past 10 years he has released nearly 50 recordings on CD. He has created his own instrumentation, effectively inventing many instruments and extended techniques. He utilizes drumset, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an intense, organic music that defies category or genre. His music is based in improvised/ experimental music, jazz, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retains the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.
FORBES GRAHAM is a composer, trumpet player, and electronic musician currently based in the Boston area. He has appeared on over 30 recordings, including studio appearances on such labels as Metal Blade, Tzadik, and Troubleman. Forbes has performed and recorded with a very diverse group of artists, including Erase Errata, Rakalam Bob Moses, Steve Lantner, Daughters, Raqib Hassan, Jim Hobbs, The One Am Radio, and Luther Gray. His composition “Variations on the Fibonacci Sequence” was commissioned by the Greenwall Foundation and world premiered at the 2007 Festival of New Trumpet. Forbes has also written music for the new music/rock ensemble Normal Love. He has appeared at numerous festivals including High Zero and The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music. His work incorporates many genres including drum n’ bass, jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and hip-hop.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event presents
an evening of experimental music
featuring
JULIEN OTTAVI
SETH CLUETT
MIKE BULLOCK
Studio Soto
63 Melcher Street
Fort Point, Boston
$5-10 (suggested donation)/ 8:00 pm
About the artists:
JULIEN OTTAVI is one of the most adventurous and extreme members of a new generation of European sound artists. Ottavi studied sound and photography at the art school of Nantes. He is a founding member of Formanex, an electro-acoustic quartet performing graphic scores from the 20th and 21st centuries, including works by Cardew, Cage, Wolff, Feldman, Brown, and Ralf Wehowsky, as well as the founder of the Nantes-based experimental music organization Apo33 (responsible for running the label Fibrr among other activities). He has releases on Erstwhile, Erratum, Fibrr, Sigma Editions, and Sirr Records.
SETH CLUETT is a composer and visual artist whose work includes photography, drawing, video, sound installation, concert music, and performance. His pieces are an exploration of the role of sound in everyday life, engaging the boundary between the auditory and the other senses as an active field of experience for the audience. His work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Sedimental, Crank Satori, BoxMedia, and Wavelet Records.
Formerly of Boston, MIKE BULLOCK is a composer and improviser based in Troy, NY. As a solist, in duo with cellist Vic Rawlings, and with electronic duo rise set twilight (with Linda Aubry), Mike has performed across the US and in France and the Czech Republic. He has collaborated with Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley (of nmperign), Mazen Kerbaj, Christian Wolff, Lê Quan Ninh, Daniel Carter, and Theodore Bikel. His recordings appear on Grob, Intransitive, CIMP, Emanem, Kissy, Fargone, Rounder, Naxos, and his own Chloë imprint.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event presents
an evening of local experimental music
featuring
TIM FEENEY & VIC RAWLINGS
THE HUMAN HAIRS
MAX LORD
Studio Soto
63 Melcher Street
Fort Point Channel, Boston
$5-10 (suggested donation)/ 8:00 pm
About the artists:
TIM FEENEY seeks to explore and examine the timbral possibilities inherent in everyday found and built objects. He treats his percussion setup as a friction instrument, using bows, scrapers, and rosined drumheads to capture and amplify frequencies that go unheard when an object is struck with a traditional mallet. He supplements this acoustic console with an electronic instrument, arranged from no-input mixers, contact microphones, and effects pedals, that synthesizes and alters the spectral characteristics of low-fidelity sine tones, feedback, and noise.
VIC RAWLINGS (prepared/ amplified cello, circuitry) is an improviser and instrument builder. His performances focus on the metamusical potential of unstable sounds and silences. He has developed instruments that are specific to this compositional aesthetic. As an instrument builder he specializes in modifications of existing instruments and has developed extensive cello preparations.
The HUMAN HAIRS is a boy-girl duo dedicated to extended vocal techniques and arch art jokes, aided and abetted by noisemakers, karate outfits, rare old sound poetry records, last week’s newspapers, and bad synthesizers. The band began in 2007, but is already making a splash around their native Somerville, Massachusetts by playing in galleries and bars to the ear-plugging befuddlement of locals. Screeching, squealing, purring, yelling, blubbering, snorting, talking like Donald Duck, gargling, whispering, and spitting cough drops across the room are only a few of this band’s finely honed skills. Saul Jacobowitz and Angela Sawyer make a great big mess that’s fun for all.
MAX LORD is a percussionist who works with treated instruments and electronic sound. He is one of few musicians to adopt the Buchla Marimba Lumina, an expressive electronic mallet instrument. His drumset is often augmented by boxes of wires, large sheets of metal, and most recently amplified wire brushes. As an improvisor, he is known for restless changes of mood and texture, a sense for the absurd and frequent high-volume excursions. Last year he decided he should have a CD and released Electronic Music 2000-2005, a compilation of moody studio experiments with Marimba Lumina and the kitchen sink of electric tricks. He performs somewhat regularly in the northeast, both solo and in group improv situations.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event presents
THOMAS ANKERSMIT
with
ERNST KAREL
BILL NACE & LIZ TONNE DUO
Studio Soto
63 Melcher Street
Fort Point Channel, Boston
$10 (suggested donation)/ 8:00 pm
About the artists:
THOMAS ANKERSMIT (alto saxophone, analog modular synthesizer, computer) is a Dutch musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. Originally an improvising saxophonist, his activities expanded to include live electronic music and installation pieces based on architectural acoustics and infrasound. He has been performing solo and in collaboration with other artists such as New York minimalist Phill Niblock, Kevin Drumm, Jim O’Rourke, Gert-Jan Prins, Borbetomagus and Alvin Lucier since 1998. Since 2003, Ankersmit most frequently collaborates with Phill Niblock and Milan-based electroacoustic improviser Giuseppe Ielasi. His saxophone work focusses on the abstract, timbral extremes of the instrument, combining sustained streams of intense multiphonic sound with acoustically amplified micro-events occurring inside the instrument. His electronic music combines realtime performance on analogue modular synthesizers with digital editing and multitrack recording. Often working closely with engineers and scientists, his recent performances incorporate modular synthesizers and computers with prototype hyper-directional loudspeakers to create spots and corridors of sound and silence in the three-dimensional space.
ERNST KAREL (analog modular electronics) has been performing and recording electroacoustic music in a wide range of collaborative settings since the early 1990s, including a long-running partnership with Kyle Bruckmann as EKG. Recently relocated to Boston from Chicago, via a year in Berlin, he works with modular analog electronics, recordings, etc. His work has been released on labels such as Locust, Sedimental and Formed. He will be debuting a new work for this performance.
Western, Massachusetts mainstay BILL NACE (prepared guitar) is known for his meaty yet “aware” guitar work with Chris Corsano, Chris Cooper, Dylan Nyoukis and Thurston Moore. Here he teams up with longtime (and formerly Boston based) improvising vocalist LIZ TONNE (voice), known for her solo work as well as a member of the undr quartet and the BSC. This will be their first live performance together inspired by their successful on-air radio performance on WMUA in August.
The Non-Event Local Showcases are back in a new location!
Non-Event presents
an evening of local experimental music
featuring
JESSICA RYLAN
JARROD FOWLER
ELI KESZLER & ASHLEY PAUL
Studio Soto
63 Melcher Street
Fort Point Channel, Boston
$5-10 (suggested donation)/ 8:00 pm
To listen to a podcast featuring music by all of the artists, check out the Non-Event Podcast.
About the artists:
Using her own home-built synthesizers in sound installations and high-energy musical performances, JESSICA RYLAN defies genre. The intuition of folk meets the academic techniques of the avant-garde: a cappella and hissing white noise, acoustic guitar, and dancing to cone-ripping saw wave blasts. Her sound has traveled through galleries in the Netherlands to rock clubs in the US. Her latest release, Interior Designs, was released in March on Important Records. Rylan has received grants from the Penny McCall Foundation and the LEF Foundation. She is currently a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
JARROD FOWLER is a percussionist based in Boston, MA who reflexively questions the ontology of rhythm through solo and collaborative works. His music has been published on Errant Bodies, UbuWeb, Oph Sound, and JMF. His
second full-length CD, Percussion As Percussion, will be released by Information
As Material this fall.
ELI KESZLER is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who primarily uses percussion to create his sound, which balances droning harmonics created from bowed percussion with intense and fast free rhythm. In addition to his solo work, he has performed, recorded or collaborated with artists such as Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell (Art Ensemble of Chicago) Greg Kelley, Geoff Mullen (Last Visible Dog), Steve Pyne (Redhorse), Anthony Coleman, T Model Ford (Fat Possum Records) pianist Ran Blake and the legendary Jamaican musician, Lyn Taitt. Keszler recently released his second solo record RLK on REL records. He is planning another solo release on REL in the future, in addition to a cassette on Geoff Mullen’s Rare Youth label with his group Redhorse.
ASHLEY PAUL is a multi-reedist, vocalist and composer who uses a wide range of sounds varying from potent attacks to whispered melody. She is currently working on a solo record collaging field recordings with multi-reeds, floating vocals, and an assortment of other instruments including Rhodes, bells, harmonium and bowed guitar. She is a founding member of the award-winning quartet, Everything’s A Little Glorious, and has performed with Anthony Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Joe Maneri, Ran Blake, and George Russell.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event and Make it New present
Raster-Noton R.P.M. (Revolutions Per Minute)
SENKING, FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER, and BENDER
(First Boston Performances!)
Middlesex Lounge
315 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA
(617) 868-MSEX
Doors: 9pm, Show: 10pm
Admission: $7
21+
Listen to a podcast featuring music by all three of the artists in the
Non-Event Podcast Section
SENKING is Cologne’s Jens Massell, who also records as Fumble and as part of Poto & Cabengo. As Senking, Massell makes darkly atmospheric music that is deep, dubby, and intensely cinematic. His most recent CD, List, is out now on Raster-Noton. This will be his first U.S. performance.
FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER is a founding member of Raster-Noton and one of the pioneering figures in ultra minimal post techno. Using the most basic sound sources, sine waves and white noise, Bretschneider creates minimal, flowing pieces with delicate textures and complex rhythmic patterns. His latest CD, Rhythm, has just been released on Raster-Noton.
Olaf BENDER is a founding member of the Raster-Noton label, as well as its lead designer. Bender (formerly known as Byetone) creates his music digitally, assembling sine tones into complex sound fabrics of deep sub-bass and rhythmic clicks and crackles. He creates abstract animations to support his abstract music —transforming the rhythm of the music into a graphic equivalent, which he controls in real time.
Links: http://www.raster-noton.de
Non-Event concerts are supported in part by a grant from the LEF foundation.
Non-Event and the List Visual Art Center Present
JO with live soundtrack by Keiji Haino, Directed by Cameron Jamie (Boston Premiere)
Bartos Theater at MIT
20 Ames Street, Building E15, Atrium level
Cambridge, Massachusetts
617-253-4680
9pm/$12
About the artists:
KEIJI HAINO’s work has included rock, free improvisation, noise, singing, songwriting, solo percussion, psychedelic, minimalism and drone styles, and covers. Performing since the 1970s, he is known for intensely cathartic sound explorations. Much of his work bears an insular singularity, but his varied output eschews a signature style. Haino cites a broad range of influences, including troubadour music, Marlene Dietrich, Iannis Xenakis, Syd Barrett, and Charlie Parker. He has had a long love affair with early blues music, particularly the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and is heavily inspired by the
Japanese musical concept of “Ma,” the silent spaces in music.
Backyard teenage wrestlers, spook houses, eating contests, and a winter visitation by mythical beasts are just some of the fringe rituals CAMERON JAMIE explores through his art. Working across materials and media, he frequently collaborates with street-portrait artists and celebrity impersonators as well as musicians such as the Melvins and Keiji Haino. The resulting work conflates investigative strategies, autobiography, mythologies, vernacular traditions, and urban folklore to examine contemporary life, our fascination with the outlandish, and our need for escapism—what one critic has identified as “backyard anthropology” or what the artist calls “social theater.” For his fourth film, JO, Cameron Jamie unfolds a three-part investigation of the precarious line that separates nationalism, patriotism, and bigotry.
Tickets are available at the LVAC Gallery and Twisted Village (12b Eliot
Street, Harvard Square) or by calling 617.253.9477.
This performance is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Cameron Jamie on view through July 8 at the LVAC and is funded in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event and the Boston Center for the Arts Present
SIGNAL QUINTET (Tomas Korber, Norbert Möslang, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, and Christian Weber)
with EKG
Mills Gallery at the BCA
539 Tremont Street
Boston (South End)
8pm
A podcast featuring music by the artists is available for download at:
Non-Event Podcasts
About the Artists:
The SIGNAL QUINTET brings together five of Switzerland’s finest improvisers. Under the leadership of innovative American-born percussionist and composer, Jason Kahn, the quintet includes guitarist and electronic musician, Tomas Korber, cracked everyday electronics master Norbert Möslang, percussionist and electronic musician Günter Müller, and innovative contrabassist Christian Weber.
EKG is the duo of Kyle Bruckmann and Ernst Karel. Their music is situated between acoustic and electronic, improvised and premeditated, disruptive and meditative; it crackles and hums with precariously restrained potential energy. Combining traditional and extended wind techniques with anachronistic (non-digital) electronic processing, they carefully sculpt a bizarre yet organic soundworld of shifting tones, sudden and creeping textures, elusive suggestions of possible melody, and microscopic noise. For this performance, EKG will present a realization of Morton Feldman’s 1976 composition, Oboe and Orchestra, for oboe and analog electronics.
Non-Event, InventMusic, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts present
A Concert of Innovative Electro-Instrumental Performance from STEIM and Beyond
LAETITIA SONAMI
JOEL RYAN
with INVENTMUSIC
Killian Hall at MIT
Rm. 14W-111, MIT Hayden Library Bldg
160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
9pm/$10
A podcast featuring music by the artists is available here:
Laetitia Sonami/Joel Ryan Podcast
About the artists:
LAETITIA SONAMI was born in France and settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the emerging field of electronic music. Her work combines text, music and “found sound” from the world, in compositions which have been descibed as “performance novels”. She is creating and utilizing some of the most sophisticated technologies in order to create an intimate, spontaneous art form which transcends technology.
Since 1991 she has developed and adapted new gestural controllers to musical performance and composed works with these materials. Her unique instrument, the lady’s glove, is made out of black lycra and is embedded with sensors which track the slightest motion of each finger, the hand, and the arm. The performance thus becomes a small dance where the movements shape the music. She lives in Oakland, California and is currently guest lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Milton Avery Summer program at Bard college.
JOEL RYAN studied Physics and Music in California during the 60s and 70s. With the birth of personal computing, he began carve out a place for live digital signal processing in Electronic Music. At the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music he met David Behrman, the first composer with a micro in his luggage, and at Stanford University Andy Moorer, a mathematician with a knack for signal processing who was creating the basic tools of digital audio. These and many others in the emerging culture of Silicon Valley helped propel him into a new kind of electronic music, one that was live.
Due to early exposure to concerts by John Coltrane and John Cage and encounters with musical characters as diverse as Harry Partch, Ravi Shankar and Pauline Oliveros, he was convinced that what electronic music badly needed was a performance practice. “As much as technology is the raw material, the stage is still more essential.” This was not the practice at IRCAM where he spent a year in the mid 80’s so a desertion to Amsterdam at the invitation of George Lewis and STEIM’s Michel Waisvisz proved irresistible. At STEIM performance was the focus and Ryan has remained there writing music, software and designing instruments as well as teaching at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. He performs his music with a wide range of acoustic players including Joelle Leandre, F.M. Uitti, Sainkho Namtchylak and Mazen Kerbaj. He collaborates extensively with William Forsythe (Ballet Frankfurt) and Evan Parker. Recordings are on Leo, Psi and ECM.
Based at MIT, INVENTMUSIC is a collaborative group of musician-technologists who share a love of creating new musical instruments and experiences. Founded by Ben Vigoda and Dave Merrill at the MIT Media Lab in 2003, this collection of Boston-area musicians and inventors regularly meet to build, discuss, rehearse, and perform with their newly-created devices. InventMusic has worked with and learned from John Zorn and Tan Dun, and has performed at Boston ArtRages and SIGGRAPH 2006.
This concert presented in conjunction with the Boston CyberArts Festival and is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event and the Boston Center for the Arts Present
THE VOLTAGE SPOOKS (Keith Rowe, Rick Reed, and Michael Haleta)
Mills Gallery at the BCA
539 Tremont Street
Boston (South End)
8pm
A podcast featuring music by each of the artists is available here:
Voltage Spooks Podcast
The VOLTAGE SPOOKS is a newly formed, all-star trio of improv luminary, Keith Rowe, Texas-based sound artist, Rick Reed, and electro acoustic composer, Michael Haleta.
MICHAEL HALETA is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, New Jersey.
A classically trained cellist turn electro acoustic composer, he is interested in individual sounds and bits rather than complete things. In addition to his solo work, he is also one half with his wife, Dawn Bendick, of the audio/visual duo, Backbreakerneckbrace. He also plays in the Baltimore band WZT Hearts.
RICK REED is an entirely self-taught composer/visual artist who has been working in the Austin music underground for the past 25 years. Using old battered electronic devices like sine wave generators, short wave radios and a vintage EMS analogue synthesizer, Reed has performed solo and with various electronic/noise groups including Frequency Curtain, Abrasion Ensemble, FTC and many others.
One of the key figures in the European improvisational music community, KEITH ROWE is an English free improvisation guitarist. Rowe was a founding member of the groundbreaking improv group AMM in the 1960s and the large improvisational ensemble, M.I.M.E.O., in the late 1990s. He trained as a visual artist and Rowe’s paintings, which are in a style reminiscent of Pop Art, have been featured on many of his album covers.
Non-Event presents
CHARLES CURTIS playing Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak (2005)
with Nate Wooley
and Bhob Rainey, Dave Gross, James Coleman, and Vic Rawlings
Third Life Studio
33 Union Square
Somerville, MA
8pm, $10
About the Musicians
CHARLES CURTIS studied at Juilliard under Harvey Shapiro and Leonard Rose. Since the early eighties he has pursued a dual path, working in the worlds of experimental rock and sound art while continuing as a highly respected performer of the traditional cello repertoire. In 1983 he was a founding member of the ground-breaking poetry-rock group King Missile, and he appeared in the downtown New York rock scene with groups such as You Suck, Dogbowl, Borbetomagus and Bongwater, on record and in live shows. In 1985 he was awarded the Gregor Piatigorsky Prize of the New York Cello Society, and was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University. In 1987 he began a long and fruitful relationship with La Monte Young, becoming director of the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble and giving premieres of Young’s work throughout the world. He also established an ongoing practice of experimentation with sound, electronics and improvisation, originally with composer/performer Michael J. Schumacher as Dual, and later leading his own groups combining experimental rock with spoken texts and sine wave environments. From 1989 until 2000 he was first solo cellist of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra of Hamburg, and he has appeared as soloist with major conductors and orchestras worldwide. Currently, Curtis is Professor of Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California, San Diego.
NATE WOOLEY (b. 1974) grew up in Clatskanie, Oregon, a Finnish-American fishing and timber town. He has spent most of his musical life whole-heartedly embracing the space between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. Nate’s trumpet playing is considered an organic mixture of the lower-case, new music, free jazz, and noise improvisation traditions. In the context of trumpet improvisation, he has worked diligently to keep one musical foot firmly planted outside of the recognized lineage. Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as with his trio Blue Collar with Steve Swell and Tatsuya Nakatani. He has also performed with Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Butcher, Alessandro Bosetti, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Joe Morris, Cor Fuhler, Achim Kauffman, Steve Beresford, and other improvisation luminaries.
About ELIANE RADIGUE’s Naldjorlak (2005)
for solo cello
65 minutes
Created in close collaboration with Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak is the first entirely acoustic composition by a composer who has pioneered pure electronic sound for over thirty years. Delicate in its dynamic range, the work explores highly diffuse bowed textures that defy perceptual focus; the hidden, untamed ur-sonority of the cello is revealed as a deeply unstable and complex source. The Tibetan title refers to the motion of all life toward unity; in a seamlessly interwoven three-part structure, the audible shape mirrors the geography of the cello.
The New York Times describes Eliane Radigue’s music as “a steady stream of sonic activity taking place right at the edge of one’s perception”. Qualities of intense concentration, focus, and selflessness inform the spirituality of all of Radigue’s work.
This concert is presented in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event presents
an evening of local experimental music
featuring
ASHER
FORBES GRAHAM
BRENDAN MURRAY
BHOB RAINEY & JASON LESCALLEET
sQuareone studio
49 Melcher Street, 2nd Floor
Fort Point Channel, Boston
$8 / 8:00 pm / BYOB
Listen to a podcast featuring music by each of the artists at the
Boston Local Music Showcase II Podcast
About the artists:
ASHER THAL-NIR is a composer and sound artist. His work is composed using recordings of acoustic and electronic instruments, location recordings and found recordings which are manipulated in various ways. His work has been published online by 12k/term, Conv, Laboratoire Moderne, and Homophoni, and on CDr by Conv and Leerraum, as well as upcoming cdr and dvd-r releases on Conv, Mystery Sea, and Leerraum.
FORBES GRAHAM has appeared on over 30 recordings, ranging in style from contemporary classical, metal, and jazz. His compositions are extremely mathematical, highly contrapuntal, vivacious, and invigorating, drawing from the cross-cultural experiences he has lived. His solo trumpet performances explore micro-climates created from deconstructing the trumpet and the utilization of extended techniques. He has performed or recorded with a diverse group of musicians, including Roger Turner, Kayo Dot, The Flying Luttenbachers, Rakalam Moses, Daughters, Jim Hobbs, Erase Errata, Thoughtstreams, and Raqib Hassan. He is currently a member of the Interdimensional Science Research Orchestra and the Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Ensemble. He can also be found sitting in with the Fully Celebrated Orchestra from time to time. Festival appearances include High Zero, Full Force (curated by John Zorn), and The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music festival.
Working with analog and digital instruments since 1998, BRENDAN MURRAY is concerned with making long form dense compositions of pure sound. Drones remain at the core of his work, with connections between the visceral and the elegant an aesthetic priority. He has released 3 full-length cds of his work, as well as small cdr editions, and has played live throughout a good portion of the United States with plans to play in Europe in 2007. Current activities include a new song-based band with live instruments, a film score for a documentary on the Roma population of Macedonia, collaborative recordings with US sound artist Seth Nehil (as Sillage), a duet recording with Swiss guitarist Tomas Korber, a large scale audiovisual work with New York based multimedia artist Richard Garet and a new trio called Ouest with turntablist Jay Sullivan and longtime co-conspirator Howard Stelzer.
BHOB RAINEY’s music has become a model in the world of experimental sound. He is the founder of both nmperign (with trumpeter Greg Kelley) and the BSC, which he also directs. Collaborations with musicians such as Ralf Wehowsky, Le Quan Ninh, Günter Müller, and Lionel Marchetti, dancers Nicole Bindler and Yukiko Nakamura, and filmmakers Loren Boyer, Harvey Benschoter, and William Pisarri highlight Rainey’s broad experience and outline a complex body of work that continues to expand and surprise. His music occupies a charged space between synthetic and organic sound, bringing forth improbable sensual and narrative experiences through virtuosic extended techniques, homemade synths and sound processors, found recordings, and a kind of living silence that is apt to wreak havoc with the perception of time.
JASON LESCALLEET’s sound world occupies a space between noise, contemporary composition, and minimal electronics. Using decidedly primitive tactics and equipment (e.g. antiquated reel-to-reel recorders, damaged tape, etc.), his work focuses on extreme frequencies and microscopic audio detail. He has released recordings on Cut, RRR, Brombron, and Intransitive and has collaborated with Joe Colley, John Hudak, Greg Kelley, Ron Lessard (as Due Process), and nmperign.
Non-Event concerts are supported in part by a grant from the LEF foundation.
Non-Event is proud to present:
RHYS CHATHAM performing his legendary 1977 piece “Guitar Trio” in celebration of the 30th Anniversary of this notorious, punk-era classic!
Rhys Chatham’s Guitar-Trio All-Stars (featuring David Daniell, Chris Brokaw, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Winston Bramman, and members of Devil Music with visuals by Robert Longo)
with special guests:
NEPTUNE
DAVID DANIELL
Great Scott
1222 Commonwealth Avenue
Allston, MA
617.566.9014
9pm/18+/$10
Written in 1977, “Guitar Trio” is Rhys Chatham’s signature composition, and with good reason. The word “seminal” was invented to describe it. With a single, repeated chord, Chatham permanently
altered the DNA of rock by splicing the gritty, overtone-drenched minimalism of John Cale and Tony Conrad with the elemental fury of the Ramones. The amalgamation was inspired. It energized the downtown New York scene throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and made Chatham a founding father of the notorious No Wave movement. The influence of “Guitar Trio” spread even farther as former students and ensemble members carried its shimmering swagger into the rock mainstream. When Sonic Youth are inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (in, yes, Cleveland — and you know it’s gonna happen), listen for some G3. It’s there.
In 2007 Chatham returns (he expatriated to Paris in 1987) to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “Guitar Trio” by performing it on tour throughout the US and Canada. And we don’t mean it’s on the set list;
it is the set list. These will be no ordinary concerts, and the ensemble — pumped up to a formidable six guitars at most shows — will be no ordinary ensemble. Chatham will lead a band of all-stars
in each city. The Boston show will feature David Daniell, Chris Brokaw, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Winston Bramman and members of the Devil Music Ensemble. The concerts will also feature the original projections created for the piece in 1977 by famed visual artist and feature-film director Robert Longo.
Non-Event programs are supported in part through a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event Presents an Evening of Local Experimental Music
featuring
RED HORSE
MARC MCNULTY
ERNST KAREL
DEREK HOFFEND & JONATHAN CHEN
sQuareone studio
49 Melcher Street, 2nd Floor
Fort Point Channel, Boston
$8 / 8:00 pm / BYOB
Download and listen to a Podcast featuring music by all of the artists here.
About the artists:
RED HORSE is local musician STEVE PYNE, who routes feedback loops and electronics through a custom-modified, vintage organ to create uniquely wonderous sounds. A guitarist by training, but a mad inventor at heart, Steve played backup for Boyz II Men and jazz standards at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, before discovering the joys of cracked electronics at a show by Vic Rawlings — he hasn’t looked back since. For this show, Red Horse has multiplied, as Steve is joined by multi-instrumentalist ELI KESZLER, whose music balances gorgeous, droning harmonics and intense, fast, free rhythms.
MARC MCNULTY has been creating experimental electronic music and sound art since 1989. Inspired by everything from mid-century musique concrète to eighties industrial music, Marc mixes organic and synthetic elements using self-designed software tools and a variety of analog and digital sound sources to create his music. Marc recently moved to the Boston area. His work has been released on a variety of labels, including Plate Lunch, Phonography, and Locus Sonus.
ERNST KAREL has been performing and recording electroacoustic music in a wide range of collaborative settings since the early 1990s, including a long-running partnership with Kyle Bruckmann as EKG. Recently relocated to Boston from Chicago, via a year in Berlin, he works with modular analog electronics, recordings, etc. His work has been released on labels such as Locust, Sedimental, and Formed.
Another recent transplant from Chicago, DEREK HOFFEND creates sound-sculpture installations and performs live audio-works involving composed and improvised pieces for computer, hand-made circuits, and modified electronic and acoustic instruments. His installations examine intersections between sound, object, body, and environment, combining electronic, acoustic, recorded, and self-generative audio processes with found and constructed objects and spaces. Violinist and composer JONATHAN CHEN’s work includes installation, composition, improvisation, and video. Currently based in Germany, Chen has worked with numerous artists, including Olivia Block, Nic Collins, David Grubbs, and Alvin Lucier. A recording of his duets with bassist Tatsu Aoki will be released on the AIR label in 2007.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
Non-Event and Intransitive Recordings Present:
PETER WRIGHT & ANTONY MILTON
with Geoff Mullen
and Area C
sQuareone studio
49 Melcher Street, 2nd Floor
Fort Point Channel, Boston
$5 / 8:00 pm / BYOB
Download a Non-Event Podcast featuring music by all four artists here.
About the artists:
New Zealand’s Peter Wright has invested a significant chunk of the last 20 years investigating ways of deconstructing the guitar, from avant-pop and semi-industrial grooves in the 1990s with the kRkRkRk label in his home town of Christchurch, to experimental soundscaping, semi-acoustic drones, and miniature sound poems. Wright’s instrumental musings have a lyrical, poetic quality, like a half-formed memory flickering out a distant signal from damaged synapses. In his rare live appearances Wright utilises a combination of field recordings and found sound along with an open tuned 12 string electric guitar to improvise his way down a hidden path into an aural world inhabited by both familiar and distinctly alien spirits. The primitive musical forms that result seem deeply personal and intimate, as if you stumbled upon a private ceremony, and yet in spite feeling you are an intruder, you cannot pull away. He has released recordings on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Pseudoarcana, Last Visible Dog, and Digitalis.
New Zealander Antony Milton has been making records, exhibiting sound installations and performing live under various nom de plumes (A.M, The Nether Dawn, Paintings of Windows, Mrtyu etc) since the early 1990s. In his work, Milton investigates the ways in which place and presence function within the representational realm of recorded sound. With releases on underground labels such as Last Visible Dog, Jewelled Antler, and Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Milton’s work is situated at some weird junction between electroacoustic composition, folk music, and the more psychedelic end of the noise spectrum. Using predominantly analog sources (tape loops, field recordings, amplified resonant objects, voice and guitar) Milton’s performances have a high degree of intimacy and commonly range from the gestural and nuanced through to the visceral and ecstatic.
This concert is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
COSMOS (Ami Yoshida & Sachiko M)
with SEAN MEEHAN
The Mills Gallery
at The Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont Street, Boston (South End)
617-426-8835
Cosmos
Cosmos has no concept.
Cosmos has no discussion.
Cosmos accepts all sounds. Then it ignores them.
COSMOS is the duo of Sachiko M (sinewaves, contact microphone on objects) and Ami Yoshida (voice). It was formed in 1998 in an extremely natural fashion. The only thing set down at the beginning was the name Cosmos, provided by Ami. Although the unit has given only one or three concerts a year since its formation, it has, through its unique feeling of space and its overwhelming presence, gained an enthusiastic following which continues to grow.
SEAN MEEHAN became musically active in the late 80’s at the amica bunker series for improvised music which was then housed at ABC No Rio in New York City. Current performances find Meehan playing only the snare drum in a manner that sheds conventional usage and reconstructs the conception and function of the instrument. Concert activities, both at home and away, are generally divided between playing in conventional settings for experimental music and in seeking out unique locations that are often in the unobserved and unconsidered corners of the city.
Non-Event programs are supported in part through a grant from the LEF Foundation.
RHYS CHATHAM’S ESSENTIALIST
with Heathen Shame
MassArt (North Hall, Rm 181)
621 Huntington Ave, Boston
617.879.7000
9:00pm, $8 (students)/ $10 (general public)
To hear music by both artists, check out the new Non-Event Podcast.
Non-Event and EventWorks are proud to present the first Boston appearance in several decades by legendary maverick composer Rhys Chatham. Chatham is one of the most versatile and significant figures in all of modern music, and if you don’t know the name, you’ve heard the reverberations of his influence in bands from Sonic Youth to SunO))).
In 1975 classically-trained prodigy Rhys Chatham had an epiphany at a concert by the Ramones. His mission: to alter the DNA of rock by splicing the overtone-drenched minimalism of John Cale and Tony Conrad with the elemental fury of punk. The amalgamation was inspired, and it energized the downtown New York scene throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, making Chatham a founding father of the notorious No Wave movement. Chatham’s influence spread even further as former students and ensemble members, including Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth, injected his raucous, ecstatic sound into the rock mainstream. In 1982, he even took to the road with Fab Five Freddy, marking hip-hop’s first excursion into the heartland. Now, in 2006, Rhys Chatham has started a heavy metal band.
PAN SONIC
with Keith Fullerton Whitman (Hrvatski)
and Jason Lescalleet
Great Scott
1222 Commonwealth Avenue
Allston, MA
617.566.9014
$10.00 / 18+
To hear music by all three acts, check out the new Non-Event Podcast.
Non-Event is proud to present the first Boston appearance in many years by legendary electronica outfit Pan Sonic — the duo of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen - who are making a rare and brief US tour this September.
“There is no theory for PAN SONIC. We have no plan. We just make the music.” — Mika Vainio
Finnish minimalist techno group Pan sonic are among the most active and well-known artists from that country’s tiny experimental techno underground, and the first to reach acclaim at an international level. Pursuing the jagged edges of minimal techno and hardcore, the group have earned an enduring association with industrial and noise music through their incorporation of antiseptic production techniques and power-tool electronics, landing them in 1995 on the English Mute label’s experimental subsidiary Blast First! (most of their catalog to date has since appeared there). The affinity lay more at the surface, however, as Pan sonic are better understood as a collision between Jeff Mills and Mike Ink; dance-based electronic music with a maximum of impact, realized through a minimum of extraneous detail. Known for junking together studio equipment from spare parts and ancient analog debris, Pan sonic’s search for the untried in techno is their compositional M.O., placing them closer to the music’s Detroit roots than is often understood.
Non-Event programs are supported in part through a grant from the LEF Foundation.
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