PHILLY SOUND FORUM PRESENTS
ERIC LASKA
+ BONNIE JONES
+ REED EVAN ROSENBERG
+ BRYAN EUBANKS
Jones, Rosenberg, and Eubanks will join Laska in performing two pieces from his Vigilance Improvisations series.
Vigilance Improvisations is a series of structured frameworks for improvising electronic musicians. The archetypical design consists of two musicians, one working with computer and the other with non-computer electronics, improvising together while following unique visual scores. Each score corresponds to material changes related to the opposing musician's instrumental sound source. The musicians are instructed to watch a designated meter vigilantly over the course of an improvisation all the while remaining conscious of the possible visual correlations that may or may not be provoked by a chance correspondence between a reading of the meter and the score. The scores are hosted in a folder online and the visual content therein is entirely sourced from the Internet. No recommendations are made concerning sound.
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Eric Laska is a New York based artist working in the realms of sound and digital media. He is co-founder of the rar record label with Reed Rosenberg as well as a mainstay of the internet collective Double Happiness.
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken).
Reed Evan Rosenberg is an American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sound. Programming systems-based digital instruments, his work encompasses the areas of improvised electronic music, extreme computer music, and installation art. Recent projects include an in-depth study of chaotic synthesis using Boris Chirikov's Standard Map, systems that hack and trouble auto-tune/phase vocoding, and a multi oscillator system using Boids - an algorithm which simulates the flocking patterns of birds.
Bryan Eubanks is a musician focused on collaborative improvisation, solo musical projects, and sound installations. He is primarily active within the traditions of experimental and live electronic music. He works with an instrument of his own design that incorporates open-circuits, samplers, radio transmission, feedback, and other electronics, and an electro-acoustic system that pairs the soprano saxophone with live feedback, tape loops, and digital synthesis.
COLLABORATION IS SOCIAL: Continuing AUX's Art Writing event series, London based KIOSK collective presents the latest installment of their project Rhythms of Time Sharing (RoTS). RoTS explores the current shift in contemporary art practice towards participatory and performative work. Live performances at AUX meet nocturnal performances streamed live across the Alantic from KIOSK's South East London studio via Skype, Twitter, UStream, and SMS, utilizing the shifts and cohesions of different spaces and time zones to question participation as a utopian artistic pursuit.
Free and open to all. Thursday, 26 January, 7.30pm.
KIOSK COLLECTIVE
NIGHTWATCH
BONNIE JONES
HELEN KAPLINKSY
JOAO ENUXTO AND ERICA LOVE
THE COLLECT
MATT KALASKY
To view and participate in the #nightwatch2012 Twitter performance, follow the hashtag and check back to the AUX blog where we will be publishing the score.
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Please join us Saturday at 8PM for GUNN-TRUSCINSKI DUO, WEYES BLOOD, AND DANIEL BACHMAN--bringing a blend of American Primitivism, haunting folk balladry and noise to AUX Performance Space.
($6 General admission)
Comprised of guitarist Steve Gunn and drummer John Truscinski, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo builds songs from minimal gestures, using long-form improvisation to braid together front-porch Appalachia, noise, and raga traditions a la the once Philadelphia-based finger-picker Jack Rose. In a similar vein, Daniel Bachman, a recent Philadelphia transplant who formerly performed under the moniker Sacred Harp, offers his own dirge-like melodies influenced by American Primitivist pioneers John Fahey and Robert Basho. Standing out among the three acts, Weyes Blood contributes a different take on American neo-folk with cold and haunting lyrical ballads that plod alongside howling organs and cascading cymbals.
Winter-appropriate refreshments will be served.
MIRO DANCE THEATRE PRESENTS
THE MASHUP SERIES WITH
CAROLINE LATHAN-STIEFEL
+ VAN STIEFEL
+ MIRO DANCE THEATRE
The Mash-Up Series is an experiment combining live music and dance – prepared fresh and served raw. Each experiment has Miro in the studio with a rock band and an artist, and on the fourth day we emerge to share the results for a brave audience who will experience a never-to-be-repeated performance. Please join us for an evening of the unexpected, unadulterated and completely unusual.
FESTIVAL ETERNAL TOUR AND ENSEMBLE VIDE PRESENT
DESERTING LAS VEGAS
An experimental piece for six performers with music, text, and dance.
(Free and open to the public)
Deserting Las Vegas is part of the Eternal Tour 2011, a nomadic festival featuring performances by an international collective of dancers, musicians, singers, visual artists, and philosophers. From December 2 through 23, they will journey West across the US to Las Vegas in a series of live events, with each performer acting as an interpreter in an ever-evolving creative process. Freely inspired by Bertold Brecht's "Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahogonny," the piece stages characters in search of meaning, torn between their contradictory desires to think, entertain themselves, and make money. The desert is a geographical anchor and intellectual metaphor for our contemporary condition.
Join us for Art Writing, the first in a series of performance and screening events organized by artist and critic Becky Hunter exploring art as writing, writing as art, and writing about art.
An evening of screenings, performances, and texts provides space to explore, discuss, and nurture this new, interdisciplinary field of practice, commentary and research.
In her Lawn Poem lecture, multimedia artist Stephanie Barber proposes a new, spatial and organic method of appreciating literature: “To know a poem one must live with it. One must dig their toes into its very L’s and O’s. One must watch their children and city constituents grow and raise children of their own on it.” Barber has had numerous solo screenings of her film and video work including shows at MoMA and Anthology Film Archives, NYC.
At 8:10pm Philadelphia time, Tamarin Norwood presents My House and Other Inventions a synchronized domestic spectacle, live and unobserved from her home in Oxford, England. A recorded commentary anticipates and prescribes her actions, addressing ambiguities over who's watching whom, how time unfolds through space, and how presence emerges in absence. The piece develops from her recent performance events at Tate Britain (2010, 2011) and forthcoming interventions at Modern Art Oxford (2012) exploring choreography, simultaneity and representation.
Beth Lewis records memories of her paternal grandmother, hand-translating this typed and printed English text into her grandmother’s native Welsh. Acknowledging the different places in which the work is made and received, the piece touches on Lewis’ feelings about Welshness, living in her grandmother’s house, and being an artist. On her personal subject, she says, “The writing that I enjoy most often counters loneliness through simply sharing experience.”
A full list of contributors remain to be announced, but the event will include work by David Berridge, Matt Kalasky, Renée Newell Russo, and others from the Philadelphia area and internationally.
The Disposable Film Festival comes to AUX, hosted by Vox Populi’s very own Christopher P. McManus (of Hair and Diamonds fame).
The Disposable Film Festival is an annual competition and portable festival that supports and celebrates the democratization of cinema made possible by new, inexpensive video technology, offering a legitimate forum in which the work of zero-budget and non-traditional filmmakers is taken seriously and exhibited in theaters around the United States and internationally.
For more information on the festival visit the DFF website here.
MOLES NOT MOLAR PRESENTS
JESSE SELDESS (Poet, Berlin)
KATE ZAMBRENO (Fiction writer, Durham, NC)
IRIT REINHEIMER (Filmmaker, Philadelphia)
Join us for a screening of Aelita: Queen of Mars curated by Egina Manachova. The second in a monthly film series called PlayTime.
Aelita: Queen of Mars was the first science fiction film made in the Soviet Union. This silent black and white film was directed by Yakov Protazanov in 1924. Aelita's elaborate and cutting edge Constructivist set and costume design is said to have inspired Fritz Lange's, Metropolis. The producers of this film were dreaming big considering the money spent on producing and publicizing this visual wonder; and given that in 1924 the brand new Soviet State had barely survived a brutal civil war and was on the tail end of horrific famine. However, international audiences were hungry for this Bolshevik parable and to this day Aelita: Queen of Mars remains a classic of early cinema.
Egina Manachova is a film curator and writer based in Philadelphia. Manachova's specialized interests include early Soviet Cinema and Wiemar Cinema and in particular the relationship between aesthetics and politics. She is presently exploring this relationship as it applies to object based avant-garde theater through a collaboration with the Baltimore based theater collective Annex Theater, where she is developing an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Salome.
Join us for the opening reception of WHEAT PASTE YOUR HEART OUT - a temporary, site-sensitive exhibition curated by Linnea Vegh and Dietrich Meyer.
The installation will be open to the public Saturday, November 12 - Thursday, November 17 from 12 - 6pm each day.
For more information visit the project website here.
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE PHILADELPHIA PRESENTS
SONIC ARTS UNION: DAVE SMOLEN AND MINCEMEAT OR TENSPEED
(Free and open to all)
Local musician Dave Smolen and longtime Philadelphian (recently relocated to Providence, RI) Davey Harms (aka Mincemeat or Tenspeed) premiere new works for live electronics, inspired by the work of the Sonic Arts Union. Linchpins of the Philadelphia noise and electronic music communities, Smolen and Harms both use simple guitar pedals and other electronic devices, wired in feedback loops, to create propulsive rhythmic textures. They augment their regular work with material inspired by the work of Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma and Alvin Lucier.
This performance is part of a larger Sonic Arts Union Retrospective presented by International House Philadelphia with the support of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project.
MIRO DANCE THEATRE PRESENTS
THE MASHUP SERIES WITH
MIKE ROBINSON(ROBAI)
+ FRITZ HORTSMAN
+ TODD KEYSER
+ MIRO DANCE THEATRE
The Mash-Up Series is an experiment combining live music and dance – prepared fresh and served raw. Each experiment has Miro in the studio with a rock band and an artist, and on the fourth day we emerge to share the results for a brave audience who will experience a never-to-be-repeated performance. Please join us for an evening of the unexpected, unadulterated and completely unusual.
NO FACE PERFORMANCE GROUP PRESENTS
THE BEAUTIFUL REFRIGERATOR IS EMPTY
$8 general admission
The Beautiful Refrigerator is Empty is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the transformative pressures of adolescence. Teena Geist is a perfectly normal fourteen-year-old girl: she has a best friend, Jessica; she has a crush, Tod; she dreams of going to the prom with that boy and being his prom queen. Except Tod is Jessica’s boyfriend. And Jessica has been missing for three days.
Two additional performers provide live improvised music and design manipulation onstage, occasionally interacting with Teena more directly. Because Teena’s text and performance are never quite fixed, she and her supporting cast scale dizzying emotional heights in fits of improvisatory synergy. Sometimes supportive of Teena’s tone, sometimes resistant to it, the musicians/designers/performers keep the performance in a constant state of play.
Running time: approximately 60 minutes, including intermission
No Face Performance Group was founded in 2007 by a group of performers looking to develop an actor-driven creation process. After four years, the company has created five original theatrical works, all using a devising process rooted in intellectual curiosity and rigorous physical research. The company’s work is best characterized by an excitement for smashing together seemingly ill-matched genres, performance styles, texts, and ideologies into one performance.
// PLEASE NOTE THE 7PM START TIME //
MOLES NOT MOLAR PRESENTS
JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI (Brooklyn)
BONNIE JONES (Baltimore)
CAROLINA MAUGERI + TRISTAN DAHN (Philadelphia)
(This event is free and open to the public)
JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI is the author of gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling 2010) and Advice for Lovers (forthcoming spring 2012, City Lights. Julian lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press and plays with the country band Juan & the Pines.
BONNIE JONES is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised by dairy farmers in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken). She is interested in how people perceive, “read” and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment. Bonnie has presented her work in the US, Europe, and Asia and collaborates frequently with writers and musicians including Ric Royer, Carla Harryman, Andy Hayleck, Joe Foster, Andrea Neumann, Liz Tonne and Chris Cogburn. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Join us this coming Monday, October 10, at 7:30PM for a screening of Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie curated by Egina Manachova.
Scatological dinner parties in bizarre bohemian trenches, a candy shop that operates aboard an aquatic likeness of Karl Marx, and a beauty pageant with a gynecological finish, Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie is a feverish, fantastical nightmare of crude indulgences. Although largely unknown even among cinephiles, Makavejev’s oeuvre is a violently provocative, sexually lewd and visually stunning collection of politically charged auteur cinema. Known as "a master of historical irony", Makavejev crafted Sweet Movie in 1974 with a double-edged blade aimed at cutting apart capitalist bourgeoisie notions of individualism as well as communist ideals of collectivism. This exemplar of international radical seventies cinema is neither for the faint of heart nor humor.
This is the first in a series of monthly screenings curated by Egina Manachova. The screening will follow a short introduction to the film and Makavejev's work. Runtime 98 minutes.
MOLES NOT MOLAR PRESENTS
SUE LANDERS
MAUREEN THORSON
ADRIENNE SKYE ROBERTS
(This event is free and open to the public)
Sue Landers is the author of 248 mgs, a panic picnic and Covers, both from O Books. Her new chapbook, "15: A Poetic Engagement with the Chicago Manual of Style" is forthcoming from Propolis Press. She grew up in Germantown and now lives in Brooklyn.
Maureen Thorson is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of the chapbooks Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor, Mayport, and Novelty Act. Maureen is the publisher and editor of Big Game Books, a small press dedicated to emerging poets. She is also the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and the founder of NaPoWriMo, an annual project in which poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.
Adrienne Skye Roberts is a writer, curator and educator committed to engaging queer, anti-racist politics through the arts. Her work focuses broadly on issues of identity and place; specifically this includes the role of the artist in shifting urban landscapes, the relationship between public art and urban politics, the visuality of race, mobility and the myth of the American frontier. Her writing is published on SF MOMA’s Open Space, Art Practical, Plastic Antinomy: Visual Arts in San Francisco and Oakland and Make/Shift: Feminisms in Motion. She teaches in the sculpture department at UC Santa Cruz and organizes with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
PHILLY SOUND FORUM PRESENTS
JOHN BISCHOFF AND MARK TRAYLE
+ CHARLES COHEN / JOE LENTINI
($7-10)
John Bischoff is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his ground-breaking work in computer network bands. Bischoff's music is built from intrinsic features of the electronic medium: high definition noise components, tonal edges, imperfections, transitions, digital shading, and non-linear motion. Through empirical play and investigation he builds pieces that can be described as sonic sculptures, shaped in real-time and present for the duration of a performance. Recently, he has fashioned pieces that combine electronically-triggered bells with synthetic computer sounds. In such works bells are distributed around the performance space in a pattern distinct from the speaker locations. His idea is to disperse the sense of "source" in electronic music—to release the music from being trapped in the speaker enclosure—while highlighting the beauty of speaker-transmitted sound at the same time.
Mark Trayle works in a variety of media including live electronic music, installations, improvisation, and compositions for chamber ensembles. Performances and exhibitions include Ars Electronica, t-u-b-e (Munich), DEAF (Rotterdam), Resistance Fluctuations (LA), net_condition (ZKM Karlsruhe), Sea and Spacce (LA), Pro Musica Nova, Format5 (Berlin), Inventionen (Berlin), and Resonant Forms (LA). His music has been performed by Champs D'Action, Ensemble Zwischentoene, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, and Ensemble Mosaik. Recent collaborators include Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Kahn, David Behrman, Andrea Neumann & Sabine Ercklentz, Toshimaru Nakamura, Wadada Leo Smith, and The Hub.
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CHARLES COHEN
JOE LENTINI
This performance is presented by Philadelphia Sound Forum.
BOWERBIRD PRESENTS
JOHN BUTCHER / THOMAS LEHN
+ DAVE SMOLEN / hair_loss
($10)
Masters of sonic dimension: Analog synth legend Thomas Lehn (Germany) joins spatial saxophone guru John Butcher (UK) in a rare Philadelphia performance, while Philadelphia’s live hardware pulse (de)constructors, Dave Smolen / hair_loss, fresh off their self titled split LP, open the night.
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John Butcher was born in Brighton, England and has lived in London since the late 1970s. His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. He has toured and broadcast in Europe, Japan, Australia and North America, and was featured, playing solo, in the BBC TV programme Date with an Artist.
Compositions include pieces for Chris Burn’s Ensemble, reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori, the Austrian group Polwechsel, the Australian ensemble Elision, the American Rova Saxophone Quartet, and “somethingtobesaid” for the John Butcher Group.
Originally a physicist, he published his Ph.D, “Spin effects in the production and weak decay of heavy Quarks”, in 1982 and promptly left academia for music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians, mostly involved with improvisation - including Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Gerry Hemingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, Radu Malfatti, John Edwards, Toshimaru Nakamura, Eddie Prevost, Paul Lovens, Christian Marclay, John Russell, Andy Moor, Phil Minton and Steve Beresford.
Thomas Lehn was born in Fröndenberg, Germany in 1958. He studied recording engineering and piano at the Music Academy of Detmold, classical piano at the Music Academy of Cologne, and jazz piano with Frank Wunsch and Francis Coppieters. In the 1980s he took part on courses of Studio for pianistic interpretation held by Prof. Jürgen Uhde. Since that time he has been active as a performer of both contemporary music and classical piano repertoire.
For the past twenty years, his major and widely known work has been performing and producing live-electronic music. Rooted in the experience of a wide spectrum of musical fields and based on his background as a pianist, he has developed an individual ‘language’ of electronic music.
The electronic equipment he uses consists of analogue synthesizers from the late 1960s, particularly the EMS Synthi A. The specific character of this modular instrument allows him to spontaneously act and react in close contact with the various structural degrees of the musical process.
This performance is presented by Bowerbird.
BREATHMINT PRESENTS SUDDEN INFANT
Sudden Infant
+ FUN
+ Nagle & Kudler duo
+ Savage Relatives
Joke Lanz is one of the most prolific and profound artists working in the border zones where performance and body art meet Improvisation and Noise. In his Sudden Infant guise, Lanz creates a unique blend of physical sound poetry and epileptic noise bursts, using contact microphones, loops, tapes etc. The result is an extreme form of musique concrète that juxtaposes spasmodic gibbering with a battery of disorienting electronics.
ANDREA PENSADO AND ADRIANA DE LOS SANTOS
Andrea Pensado is an Argentinean sound artist, performer, composer and teacher.
She has been working with digital media and performing using live interactive musical systems since 1995. After studying piano, composing, choir conducting and music education (in Argentina and Poland), she gradually turned into different sound realms. The abrasive digital noise of these days is far away from her earlier acoustic pieces. Harsh dense layers of sounds, often interwoven with her voice, combine hybrid synthesis and sampling techniques to create a highly personal sound language, which reflects an intuitive, emotional and paradoxically also logical approach to music making. She currently lives in the USA.
Adriana de los Santos will perform using toba violins with electronics (the tobas are an ethnic group from the north of Argentina). She will also use home made motors especially built to process acoustic instruments, mostly the piano, and a table with different types of home objects. She says: "The reality of our countries makes it very difficult to work with new technologies. This fact has a direct influence in my aesthetic choices both working alone or in groups. The idea is to produce music which represents our socioeconomic reality and its impact in our culture. This is just one more way of the activism I am involved with not only in music but in all movements which defend the rights of musicians and artists in Argentina and the rest of Latin America."
Philly Sound Forum presents
CHANDAN NARAYAN AND JESSE KUDLER
Chandan Narayan plays the autoharp and swaramandal. His initial approach to the instrument was guided by complete naivety. Over the years he has refined his non-idiomatic techniques in the hopes of fooling the listener (and himself) with the autoharp as source of acoustic anomalies. He performs and records with the Canadian power trio The Party (with Jeffrey Allport and Joda Clement) as well as a regular duo collaboration with Jesse Kudler. He has shared the stage and living room performing and recording alongside the likes of Kenny Roux, Tomas Korber, Jeffrey Allpost, Joda Clement, Tomascz Krakowiak, Pau Torres, Gunter Muller, Lee Hutzulak, Christine Sehnaoui, Angharad Davies, Chris Cogburn, Jonathan Sielaff, and Gust Burns among others. Chandan owns and operates the Simple Geometry label. He formerly played in the Philadelphia quintet Benito Cereno.
Jesse Kudler creates concrete music on the computer, composes low-tech multi-channel sound works, and improvises on cheap consumer devices: a no-name electric guitar, hand-held cassette recorders, radios and transmitters, various small junk, and pedals/electronics. In his various travels, Kudler has performed with Matt Bauder, Kyle Bruckmann, Chris Cogburn, James Coleman, Tim Feeney, Brent Gutzeit, Bonnie Jones, Jason Kahn, Mazen Kerbaj, Toshimaru Nakamura, Pauline Oliveros, Bhob Rainey, Vic Rawlings, Christine Sehnaoui, Mike Shiflet, Jason Soliday, Howard Stelzer, Christian Weber, Matt Weston, Jack Wright, Jason Zeh, and many others. He performed as part of the 2010 No Idea Festival, the 2008 Dartmouth Festival of New Musics, and the 2007 Phoneme Festival. Kudler lives in Philadelphia and is the co-founder and co-Director (with Ian Fraser) of the Philadelphia Sound Forum.
Moles Not Molar Reading & Performance Series presents
DEBORAH MORKUN (Poet)
SAM ALLINGHAM (Fiction Writer)
LISA MARIE PATZER (Multi-media Artist)
Deborah Morkun is the author of Projection Machine (2010) & The Ida Pingala (forthcoming). She curates The Jubilant Thicket Literary Series at The Walking Fish Theatre.
Sam Allingham is a fiction writer living in the western bluffs of Philadelphia. His fiction has appeared in a handful of deeply respectable magazines, including One Story, AnOther Magazine, and Epoch. He runs a reading series called ManMoth out of Cha-cha’razzi, a studio and events space in South Philadelphia.
Lisa Marie Patzer is a multi-media artist engaged in a performative process that is highly influenced by the use of the body as a metaphor for personal, cultural and conceptual issues. Inspired by the performance art movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, her early work was comprised of durational pieces that explored contemporary myths, deconstructing their meaning for the individual. In 2001, Lisa Marie began to fuse her performative approach with digital video. She became interested in how the mediation of culture, through the use of technological devices, influenced the phenomenological experiences of subjectivity. She began to use the video screen as a malleable membrane, constantly negotiating the flexible space between the viewer and the video/digital body. Lisa Marie's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including venues such as the The Lab, San Francisco, The Ice Box Project Space, Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia.
YOLT
+RICARDO LAGOMASINO AND DAVID FISHKIN
+TBA
YOLT can David Grollman and Weston Minissali is Nathaniel Morgan. Because sisterhood is music, sound far far long far New York City. How can, are we prepared snare drum, $$$$$$$ alto saxophone and synthesizer. Oh polotics. Thank you. Born in , 1965, David is driving right now.
Ricardo Lagomasino and David Fishkin play drums and amplified saxophone respectively. The duo is well-known around their native Philadelphia, PA as going longer, deeper and louder than all others in the area. Hardcore sax and heavy beatings will leave you needing a smoke when it's all over.
