Non-Event Support for Social Change – Online Fundraiser for City Life/Vida Urbana
ONLINE FUNDRAISER FOR CITY LIFE/VIDA URBANA
Non-Event Support for Social Change
Featuring performances & pieces by ASHA TAMIRISA, BILL T MILLER, LORD & JUNE, and WALTER WRIGHT
Friday, October 30, 2020 at 8pm
a/v premiere | YouTube
YouTube Link
The Support Series is an monthly series of online fundraisers to raise money for and awareness of local social & racial justice organizations. This month, we're encouraging people to donate to City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots community organization committed to fighting for racial, social and economic justice and gender equality by building working class power. They promote individual empowerment, develop community leaders and build collective power to effect systemic change and transform society.
We urge you to learn more about City Life/Vida Urbana... and donate, if you can and help stop the displacement of low-income people of color in Boston.
This is the sixth in a series of online concerts to raise money for social change. Each event will raise money for a different organization working for social and racial justice in Boston and beyond.
About the artists
ASHA TAMIRISA works with sound, video, film, and researches media histories. Along with many colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and art practice. She now works with the organization TECHNE. Asha has taught courses at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Girls Rock! Rhode Island, and Street Level Youth Media in Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Bates College.
BILL T MILLER, a chameleon of sonic exploration, is a multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, recording engineer, producer, filmmaker, photographer, artist, instrument builder and cat lover. From toy piano at two years old (in 1958) to starting a “band” with tennis racket guitar and trash can drums in the 60s to becoming a professional recording engineer / producer / live sound tech after graduating from College for the Recording Arts in San Francisco in 1976, his paths are always unfolding and looping. At recording college he took synthesizer courses with ARP 2600 and Emu synths and then worked (as live sound and recording engineer) in California until 1980. Eventually ending up in Boston working as a freelance recording engineer and live sound engineer and then starting his own Headroom Recording Studios. While much of his “professional career” was devoted to recording and photographing OTHER artists, he was always working on his own weirdo music bands in the shadows. Some of these adventures include Out of Band Experience (OBE) (with media barrage sampling and field recordings), Kings Of Feedback (bass, guitar, samples), Drum Army (percussion), Kings Of Slack (SubGenius Doktor), Zonkulator (mutated test equipment), and Orgy Of Noise (circuit bent toys, electro acoustic instruments, synthesizers) with over 20 full album releases on his own DIY labels (Immortal, ExtraTerrestrial, Burn This.) All available as FREE MP3s since 1997.
MAX LORD and SARA JUNE have been making performances together since 2006. Upon their first meeting, the pair quickly formed a shared understanding of the natural compatibility of their respective backgrounds (electronic noise and butoh dance). Their first work, Fern Study, was performed on a lawn at a garden party three months after they met. As Lord and June, they have presented improvisational duets, site-sensitive durational performance works, and historically informed visual-sound installations, often in unique locations. Together, they curated ZEROPLAN a popular salon that presented spontaneous collaborations of electronic sound improvisors with avant-garde movement performers in their loft in Downtown Crossing from 2007 until 2011. In 2009, they were invited to join the Mobius Artists Group which brought them into closer contact with the experimental performance community in Boston. Most recently, Lord and June were commissioned by the Boston University Art Galleries to create a work, Peacock, for performance alongside the internationally acclaimed Hiroshima Panels by Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki.
WALTER WRIGHT is an interdisciplinary artist, his practice includes computer programming, electro-acoustic music, and video performance. His focus is on "improvisation as a way of being present in the world.” He plays in numerous groups including Egregoros, ELKA BONG, and ensemble inédit?!. In the early 1970s, Walter was one of the first video animators. He showed his work at the first computer art conference at the Kitchen (NYC, 1973). In 1973-76, as artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center, he pioneered video performance touring public access centers, colleges, and galleries with the Paik/Abe video synthesizer. He is a co-founder of 119 Gallery in Lowell, which started as a digital art gallery on the World Wide Web and became a vital center for improvisation for New England-based and visiting musicians as well as the original home of the community-based XFest festival.
