San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
2006 Press Release in PDF Format | 2006 press photos | SFEMF Home
For Immediate Release:
Press Contact: Elisabeth Beaird
P: 415.863.2441,
elisabethbeaird at hotmail.com
THE SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL 2006
San Francisco’s only festival dedicated to electronic music, featuring four nights of
performances by emerging and internationally renowned artists.
San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2006
Thursday, August 10, 2006 through Sunday, August 13, 2006
SomArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan Street, San Francisco)
Doors at 8PM, performance at 8:30 PM
Further Information: www.sfemf.org
(Full calendar listing at bottom of page)
The 2006 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival consists of four evenings of
electrifying performances by internationally recognized artists and musicians in the
electronic music field. This year’s impressive line-up features both respected pioneers
and emerging artists whose work spans the sonic spectra -- from ambient to rhythmic,
from atonal to melodic. As the only San Francisco music festival dedicated solely to
electronic music, the SFEMF brings together the varied practices of artists working with
laptop generated sound, processed live acoustic instruments, amplified found objects,
projected video, improvisation, and performance art.
For this year's festival, SFEMF has invited a wide-ranging field of artists from across
the globe, including the United Kingdom's audiovisual duo Semi-Conductor (in a
late-night performance on Saturday at Recombinant Media Labs); Norwegian duo Alog
(in their first North American performance); Mexico City-based sound artist Manuel
Rocha; Toronto-based James Tenney whose piece will feature a performance by
percussionist William Winant; Montreal-based automaton builder Maxime De La
Rochefoucauld; New York-based voice and computer musician Dafna Naphtali; and Los Angeles-based lowercase music pioneer Steve Roden, who will present a piece based on Nam June Paik's "primitive music" sculpture. SFEMF 2006's local artists include composer/intermedia artist Elise Baldwin, long tube performer Brenda Hutchinson, multimedia artist Barbara Golden, experimental drum machinist Matt Davignon, sonic explorer Joe Colley and electro-acoustic trio shudder.
SFEMF events are offered as parallel programming in conjunction with ZeroOne
San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge and ISEA2006 Symposium, a
gathering of artists and culture-makers from around the world featuring some of the
most innovative, astounding art ever seen or experienced. From August 7-13,
ZeroOne San Jose will offer a variety of one-of-a-kind, many never-before,
only-here experiences. See 01sj.org for further details.
THE ORGANIZATION:
The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is an artist-run organization
founded in 1999 by a committee of eight Bay Area electro-acoustic music and
sound art practitioners. Its mission is to provide a highly visible public forum for
the diverse community of composers and sound artists working with
electronic-based technologies in the Bay Area. Designed as an annual multi-day
event consisting of concerts, installations and discussions, the primary focus is on
independent artists whose innovative aesthetics challenge academic and commercial
standards. The Committee's goals are long-term: to establish the festival as an
annual presence in the Bay Area; to foster a greater sense of community among the
diverse group of Bay Area sound artists; to stimulate the creation of new electronic
sound works; to increase public awareness of new sound-based technologies and
their creative applications; to raise the level of discourse surrounding music and
sound-art; and to raise the national and international profile of the Bay Area as a
center for electronic music and sound art.
SFEMF 2006 Steering Committee/Curators: Mark Bartscher, Krys
Bobrowski, Matt Davignon, Guillermo Galindo, Lance Grabmiller, Jon Leidecker,
Kristin Miltner, Suki O’Kane, Patrick Parnell, Patrice Scanlon, Donald Swearingen,
Pamela Z
Advisory Board: John Bischoff, Steev Hise, Matt Ingalls, Dan Joseph,
Walter Kitundu, Miya Masaoka, Ed Osborn, Sean Rooney, Christopher Salter,
Todd Shalom, Laetitia Sonami, Carl Stone
San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2006 Artists:
Raised on a farm in Idaho, Elise Baldwin now resides in San Francisco, where she recently completed her MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College. When not indulging her interest in pyrokenesis or reading compulsively in the bath, E can be found cooking up aurally hazardous byproducts in her studio or building software instruments for video manipulation. She focuses on solo and collaborative intermedia performance, appearing recently at ARTSfest 2004, E.S.P. Media Lounge, CalArts CEAIT Festival 2003 and the National Queer Arts Festival. She is a 2006 Harvestworks Artist in Residence and recipient of the 2004 Frogs Peak Award for Experimental Music.
Born in 1963 in Mexico City, Manuel Rocha Iturbide studied composition at the Escuela Nacional de Música at UNAM. He finished an MFA in electronic music and composition at Mills College. In Paris, he finished a PHD in computer music at the University of Paris VIII in 1999. He has received prizes and honorable mentions from different international contests like Bourges, Russolo and the Schaeffer Prize. His music has been performed all around the world. He is also a sound artist and his work has been shown at important galleries and museums as ”Artist Space NY 1997”, “Sydney Biennale 1998”, “ARCO 1999”. He currently lives in Mexico City working as a composer and sound artist.
Brenda Hutchinson performs on a “Long Tube Instrument” (literally, a long tube) combined with a gestural interface and a computer. Brenda is a composer and sound artist whose work has been presented at international festivals in New Zealand, Europe, Latin America and Canada. Venues in the United States include performances at Lincoln Center, Merkin Concert Hall and The Kitchen in New York, and "Soundprint" on NPR. Since 2002, Brenda has been on the faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She has been an artist in residence at San Quentin Prison, Headlands Center for the Arts, Harvestworks, the Exploratorium and the Djerassi Foundation.
Barbara Golden, an older gal (but still extremely cute) is a multimedia artist living in the Bay Area and Sutton Quebec. Born in Montreal, the escaped housewife/schoolteacher studied at Mills with Terry Riley, Bob Ashley and Maggi Payne. For the last two decades she's been occupied with politically incorrect raunch (WIGband), Balinese music (Gamelan Sekar Jaya), and radio production/hosting (KPFA). DVDs and videos with Helen Prince, Johanna Poethig and Bill Thibault have been shown in US, Canada, and Europe. Her cookbook/cd/poetry published by Burning Books is in its second edition.
Steve Roden is a Los Angeles based artist whose work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, and sound. in the sound works, source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings are abstracted and activated through humble electronics. The performances are generally quiet and reflective, directing the activity of listening towards the creation of a kind of audio architectural space, or "possible landscape". Since 1994 Roden has performed in arts spaces and in festivals worldwide. In September he will create a sound work for James Turrell's skyspace at the Henry museum in Seattle.
James Tenney was born in 1934 in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado, where he received his early training as a pianist and composer. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A. 1958) and the University of Illinois (M.A. 1961). A performer as well as a composer and theorist, he was co-founder and conductor of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in New York City (1963-70). He has long been active in the field of electronic and computer music, working with Max Mathews and others at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early 1960s to develop programs for computer sound-generation and composition. He is currently Professor of Music at York University in Toronto, where he was named Distinguished Research Professor.
Matt Davignon is an experimental musician living in Oakland, California. Since 1993, the self-taught musician has sought to make instrumental music as personal and unique as possible - focusing largely on textures, arrhythmic patterns and musical imperfections. For the past few years he has been working primarily with a drum machine. Instead of using it as a rhythm device, he plays the pads manually while processing the sounds through an array of effects devices and samplers, improvising music made of biotic tapestries, hums, gurgles and crackles. www.ribosomemusic.com
Joe Colley (b.1972 Ft. Lauderdale) is a self taught artist concerned primarily with the phenomena of sound and its unique ability to activate a consciousness set apart from rational understanding in a way very different from visual or verbal means. This consuming interest has led to extensive experimentation with results occasionally made public through performances, installations, and commercially available recordings. Growing up in California's central valley, Colley has traveled widely making field recordings and researching various cultures with a focus on ritual music and the art of the insane. His performances have been seen as part of numerous international festivals. His recording “Psychic Stress Soundtracks” (Antifrost CD) received an award of distinction at Ars Electronica 2006.
Alog is the brainchild of Espen Sommer Eide and Dag-Are Haugan. One dark and snow-stormy day in the winter of 1997, the band was born in a basement of a Kindergarten in Tromsoe - a city located in the far north of Norway. This day a string of happy coincidences led them to meet up for a session of tablas and guitar, of which they had no idea would evolve into a creative burst of ideas, involving all kinds of found instruments and collected sounds. The set of 4-track recordings of these winter constellations eventually made it onto Alog's debut release on Rune Grammofon, entitled Red ShiftSwing. In 2001 they followed up with the critically acclaimed Duck-Rabbit CD. The record showcases Alog’s unique combination of genres, often described as "listener friendly" electronica meets avant-garde jazz and contemporary composition.
Semiconductor are UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt. They make films out of sound using abstract landscapes and architecture as a means to describe aural and visual interpretations of the world. Finely crafted digital work is combined with analogue processes that tailor the randomness and errors within computer systems as co-conductor. Their music can be described as a contradiction where 'musique concrete' becomes simultaneously hypnotic and violent, minimal and maximal. Live digital performance is one strand of Semiconductor’s output; they also produce surround sound installations and single screen sound films which are exhibited at galleries, festivals and biennials worldwide.
Formed in 2004 for the purpose of playing for a Matt Gonzales for Mayor fundraising event,shudder works with compositions and improvisation to explore and develop a language for acoustic instruments that can exist easily in the realm of electronic music. shudder features Kyle Bruckmann and Phillip Greenlief on wind instruments; Lance Grabmiller performs on laptop/Audiomulch. Electro-acoustic innovation, deep listening-informed group communication and an ear for dynamics and austere details, shudder provides one of more rewarding listening experiences available to San Francisco Bay Area audiences.
Maxime De La Rochefoucauld is a Montreal-based musician who builds orchestras out of automatons. Usually, these are collections of up to 20 percussion and string instruments, placed nearspeaker cones modified into striking mechanisms. By sending inaudibile audio signals to the speakers, he can create surprisingly intricate compositions. He has presented this work in Canada, USA, South Africa and Japan.
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist/improviser-composer from an eclectic background of music-making. A singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using her custom Max/MSP/Jitter programs for sound processing of voice and other instruments that she has been writing since 1992. Besides her composing and improvised projects, she co-leads the digital chamber punk ensemble, What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton, and has collaborated/performed with Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Ras Moshe, Kathleen Supová and Hans Tammen. She teaches and has given workshops at universities in the US (especially New York University) and in Europe.
William Winant "one of the best avant-garde percussionists working today" according to music critic Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal), has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich and Musicians, Jean-Philippe Collard, Frederic Rzewski, Ursula Oppens, Joan LaBarbara, Oingo Boingo, and the Kronos String Quartet. For eight years Mr. Winant was Artist-in-Residence at Mills College with the critically acclaimed Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, and he is principal percussionist with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the John Zorn Chamber Ensemble.
The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
Calendar Listing:
The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
Thursday, August 10, 2006 through Sunday, August 13, 2006
Thursday, August 10:
Elise Baldwin, Manuel Rocha, Brenda Hutchinson
Friday, August 11:
Barbara Golden, Steve Roden, James Tenney (w/William Winant)
*Sound/video installations on view 5:30-8:00 PM
Saturday, August 12:
Matt Davignon, Joe Colley, Alog
*Sound/video installations on view 5:30-8:00 PM
*Saturday, August 12 at 10:30 PM:
Semi-Conductor
Sunday, August 13:
Shudder, Maxime De La Rochefoucauld, Dafna Naphtali
SomArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan Street, San Francisco)
*Events take place at the nearby Recombinant Media Laboratories (at times listed above)
SomArts concerts:Doors 8PM; performance begins at 8:30 PM each night.
Tickets & Passes: $16 General; $12 Student/Discount for all SomArts performances; Semi-Conductor performance at RML $10 General; $8 Student/Discount (combined Saturday ticket $20 General; $16 Student/Discount); Full festival pass: $48 General; $40 Student/Discount, purchases online via Paypal at www.sfemf.org or at the door.
Festival hotline: 415.861.3257; SomArts 415.552.2131; RML location info: 650.255.8947 www.sfemf.org