Charmaine Lee / Biliana Voutchkova / Aaron Michael Smith
Charmaine Lee / Biliana Voutchkova / Aaron Michael SmitH
Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 8pm
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Music: 8pm (7:30 doors)
Admission: $15 / $10 for students and Non-Event members suggested
Pay what you can / No one turned away for lack of funds
For information about accessibility call the Goethe-Institut Boston at 617-610-9398 or email susanna@nonevent.org.
Non-Event and the Goethe-Institut Boston are pleased to present a bill featuring solo sets by Charmaine Lee, Biliana Voutchkova and Aaron Michael Smith as well as a duo set by Lee and Voutchkova.
About the Artists
Charmaine Lee (vocals, electronics) is an Australian vocalist based in New York. Using the voice, feedback, and live processing, Lee’s practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation. As a composer, Lee has been commissioned by leading institutions including the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Wet Ink Ensemble. Lee is an Emergent Ventures winner (2024) and was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019) and a Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021). Her long-standing collaborators include Conrad Tao and Ikue Mori. In 2023, she founded a record label & distribution platform, Kou Records, dedicated to pioneering artists in music & sound.
Biliana Voutchkova (violin, voice) is a composer-performer, violinist, interdisciplinary artist, improvisor and curator with highly individual, unconventional artistic language. Through the prism of listening, her early education in classical music and the years of development as contemporary artist-performer, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities, focusing on the interconnection between inner world and sound space. Biliana works internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with many renowned artists/ensembles. She is the founder and curator of the DARA String Festival, faculty at the Academy of Arts Bern, SHAPE+ Platform artist for 2022/2023, and recipient of multiple grants and awards. Her music has been released on the labels Unsounds, Another Timbre, Elsewhere, Relative Pitch Records, Confront Recordings, Inexhaustible Editions and Takuroku.
Aaron Michael Smith (viola, electronics) is a composer, violist and artist currently based in Boston, MA. Aaron is interested in exploring the way that various practices and mediums overlap, reflect and contradict one another. A large part of his practice since 2012 has been making experimental films which have gone on to be featured at numerous international film festivals. In 2023, Aaron did the music for their first feature-length film, Playland, which premiered internationally at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and nationally at the Tribeca Festival. Aaron is a co-curator, along with Jordan Kokot, of field|guide, a collaborative multimedia art book project. Aaron is one third of grein, a transcontinental experimental improv trio, with Jay Rauch and Jonathan Rodriguez, with one release on Dinzu Artefacts. In 2024 Aaron co-founded a music series/experimental curation space called TRANSPORTER with Jessica Hernandez, hosted at Boston Cyberarts Gallery in Jamaica Plain.
Duo: Long time closeness – In 2022, Biliana and Charmaine had a long-distance collaboration which manifested as the album I am going to make an attempt to describe what you mean to me, released on Relative Pitch Records as part of Biliana’s DUOS2022 series. The album was conceived and developed via exchange of images and sound files from a distance. This will be the duo’s debut live performance and presentation of the album’s music, inspired by worlds of dreams, fantasies and parallel realities which merge into reality and one another.
This performance is co-presented by Non-Event and the Goethe-Institut Boston.
