Escape from America [Total Recall]

ESCAPE FROM AMERICA [Total Recall]
featuring OLIVIA BLOCK, DEFORREST BROWN JR., FORBES GRAHAM, BONNIE JONES, JAN ST. WERNER, and ANDI TOMA with Visuals by MICHAEL AKSTALLER
Saturday, November 14, 2020 at 3pm

Livestream a/v premiere | YouTube
YouTube Link

Escape from America is a collaborative, experimental live stream performance featuring four musicians from the US – Olivia Block (Chicago), DeForrest Brown, Jr., aka Speaker Music (New York City), Forbes Graham (Boston), and Bonnie Jones (Providence) – playing together while apart, integrating the fallibilities of a/v communication into improvised practice. Their individual audio & video streams are mixed live by Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma for a concert/installation at the HKW (Haus der Kultern der Welt) in Berlin and live-streamed out to the world via YouTube & Twitch. Co-presented by the Goethe-Institut and HKW.

About the Artists
OLIVIA BLOCK is a composer and media artist based in Chicago. Her recorded compositions combine field recordings, chamber instruments, and electronic instruments. Block creates multimedia installations and performances utilizing field recordings, found sounds from micro cassette tapes, video, and curated 35mm slides. Block often performs her own solo pieces, utilizing electronically processed amplified objects, found recordings on tapes, and various techniques inside grand pianos.Her studio based compositions are published on Room40, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA, and Sedimental, among other labels.

DEFORREST BROWN, JR is a New York-based theorist, journalist, and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. His most recent writing can be found at Afropunk, Artforum and Hyperallergic. Primary Information will publish his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture in the Winter, 2020-21. His latest release is Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu.

FORBES GRAHAM is a trumpet player, electronic musician, and composer living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the founder of the Rock Flint Artists Retreat, and has appeared at numerous festivals including High Zero, Full Force, and Vision. He most recent solo release is Some of the Ten Days.

BONNIE JONES is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that introduces young female-identified women to technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. Born in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore and Providence on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narrangansett.

JAN ST. WERNER is an artist and electronic music composer based in Berlin. Best known as one half of the electronic duo Mouse on Mars, he has also pursued a solo career creating music under his own name as well as Lithops, Noisemashinetapes and Neuter River. Starting in the mid-1990’s as part of Cologne’s A-Musik collective, St. Werner released a steady stream of records both as a solo artist and with Mouse on Mars. He has collaborated with Oval’s Markus Popp as Microstoria and with Andi Toma and Mark E. Smith as Von Südenfed. He has collaborated with visual artist Rosa Barba on music for her installations and films, since the 1990s. In the early 2000s, he acted as the artistic director for Amsterdam’s Institute for Electronic Music (STEIM). Werner has been a visiting lecturer at the Arts Culture and Technology department of MIT and is currently a professor for Interactive Art and Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, Germany.

ANDI TOMA is best known as one half of the pioneering electronic music duo Mouse on Mars. In addition to his work with MoM, he has produced albums by The Fall, Stereolab, Moondog, Junior Boys, Damon Albarn’s Africa Express, members of Kraftwerk, and many more. Toma has written music for installations and films and is running Paraverse Studios together with Jan St. Werner.