For Immediate Release: 7/1/04
Press Contact: Todd Shalom 415.902.5312
San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2004
Thursday August 5 - Saturday August 7, 2004 8 pm
SomArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan Street)
General Tickets & Passes: www.sfemf.org or at the door
$15 General; $12 Student; $40 full festival pass
Festival hotline: 415.861.3257; SomArts 415.552.2131
Further Information: www.sfemf.org
The fifth annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival will take place Thursday, August 5th to Saturday, August 7th, 2004 at SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street.
The 2004 installment of SFEMF will be a three evening affair with an impressive and diverse list of participants. The works presented will span the sonic spectra from ambient to rhythmic and atonal to melodic. The line-up ranges from new and emerging young artists to respected pioneers of the electronic music field working in a variety of modes including: laptop generated sound, processed live acoustic instruments, amplified found objects, projected video, improvisation, and performance art.
This year's festival features laptop improvisor Cenk Ergün, drum programmer/laptop composer Ikue Mori (New York); multi-instrumentalist Keith Fullerton Whitman (Boston); cellist/composer Joan Jeanrenaud, violist/composer Jorge Boehringer; sound artist Krys Bobrowski, instrument builders CMAU, solo improvisor/phonographer Marcos Fernandes (San Diego), multi-media duo Irving + Orser (Portland), electronic music pioneer Ramon Sender, guitarist/composer Christopher Willits, electroacoustic/sound collage artists Wobbly/Perkis.
The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is an artist-run organization founded in 1999 by the SFEMF Steering Committee. 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 2004 Artists
As an artist Jorge Boehringer works in whatever medium presents itself. His choice of materials range from the most basic (like light or sandstones) to exceedingly complex or even ineffable media (such as a sound lattice created through simultaneous broadcast of beacons and feedback) . Since moving to California five years ago, Jorge has produced numerous live musical works for various large and small ensembles of electronic and acoustic instruments and voices, solo works with himself as performer, video pieces, installations involving light, space, and sound, music for dance performances, a series of drawings and paintings, book projects and numerous graphic design objects. He has, in the past, co-curated the annual Music For People and Thingamajigs Festival with Edward Schocker, and currently the Curious F performance series with Eddie Park. Jorge has performed with the SF Sound Ensemble, experimental noise band Tori Anus, the Brown Bunny Ensemble, the Bilge/Radiolaria Collective, and with George Chen in the duo USOUTOFOURUTERUS!. He performs by himself as sevencentralandmountain creating live acoustic and electronic music. His music can be heard free of charge on puzzle.suchfun.net (look under the headings sevencentralandmountain and the ten foot scarf) and on the WGBH website www.artofthestates.org .
Krys Bobrowski, part of the ensemble Vorticella, creates interactive installations and designs day-long performances. Krys often transforms natural and everyday objects such as kelp and bowls into musical instruments.
CMAU, a quartet comprised of Doug Michael, Sudhu Tewari, Kendra Juul, and Mark Bartscher, uses contact microphones to amplify homemade instruments and found objects (dry ice, toy piano, motors, cracked cymbals, springs, etc.) as well as samples and live computer synthesis and processing. CMAU has performed at many music festivals around the West Coast.
Born 1978 in Turkey, Cenk Ergün moved to New York to study composition at the Eastman School of Music, where he began composing for chamber ensembles. ErgünOs chamber music has been performed by various artists including Abbie Conant, Fred Frith, Joan Jeanrenaud, and The Alarm Will Sound Ensemble, at venues such as the SomArts Gallery, Merkin Hall, and the Bang on a Can Marathon, among others. In 1999, Ergün moved to California to further his studies at Mills College, where he became interested in laptop improvisation using samples. As a laptop musician, he has performed with Pauline Oliveros at the Deep Listening Space, and regularly collaborates with Alvin Curran, and choreographer Alyssa Wilmot. ErgYNnOs current project is Product, a collaboration with laptop/installation artist Mark Bartscher and Alyssa Wilmot, due for premiere at the Yerba Buena Choreographers Festival on August 23.
Marcos Fernandes is a percussionist
and improviser living in San Diego. He is a founding member of the Trummerflora
collective, dedicated to creative music in Southern California. Born in Yokohama,
Japan, Marcos Fernandes has long been active in San Diego as performer, producer
and curator. O`Combining edited tapes of found sounds with digital noise, percussion
and slight, angular jazzy moods, Fernandes conjures up a world caught between
the old and the new, the magic and the logic, the organic and the electronic."
Jon Irving is an audio-visual artist working in the fields of "post-digital" music and installation art. Irving's audio work ranges from synthetic ambient soundscapes to imagined architectural audio spaces, digital compositions using field recordings and found sounds as source material to consciously using "errors" in the realization of a sound work. He has performed with the likes of Eso Steel, Joshua Russell, Twine/Phase4, Sawako, and Frank Niehusmann.
Joan Jeanrenaud, known for 20 years as the incomparable cellist of Kronos Quartet, left the quartet in 1999 to pursue new directions as a performance artist. Over the last four years she has embarked on a unique trajectory combining high technology and a stellar array of composers creating new works for her as well as her own debut as a composer and improviser. Jeanrenaud recently premiered the score she composed for INBETWEEN, a one-act, evening-length project with artist Tom Bonauro, in Europe. JoanOs numerous albums can be found on New Albion Records and with the Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch Recordings.
Julie Orser is a multi-media artist who works primarily in photography, film/video and installation. OrserOs past works have explored the elusive and subjective nature of memory, the moments before awaking or dreaming, and metaphoric exchange between opposites. On the whole, her work aims to evoke multiple shifts in the perception of oneOs reality through ephemeral yet familiar images.
Ikue Mori moved to New York from Tokyo in 1977. She then started playing drums and formed the seminal New York No Wave band, DNA, with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. In 1985 Mori started using drum machines in the unlikely world of improvisation. Using standard technology such as a drum machine, she has created her own highly sensitive signature style and has continued to collaborate with musicians of various genres. In 1999, she won the Distinctive Award for Prix Arts Electronics digital music category. In 2000, Ikue started using the laptop computer to expand on her already signature sound, thus broadening her scope of musical expression.
Tim Perkis has been working in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, performing and exhibiting installation works and recording in North America, Europe and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of life-like properties in complex systems of interaction. In addition, he is a well-known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with over 100 artists and groups.
Ramon Sender was born in Madrid, Spain during the General Strike of Red October, 1934. He was evacuated to Calais, France in 1938 and informally absorbed into an American family in 1939. He subsequently studied piano with George Copeland, harmony with Elliott Carter, counterpoint & fugue with Harold Shapero, and composition with Robert Erickson. He received degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Mills College. Sender co-founded The San Francisco Tape Music Center with composers Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros. He also co-founded Morning Star Ranch with Limeliter Lou Gottlieb and volunteered as the first president of The Ahimsa Church at Wheeler's Ranch.
Keith Fullerton Whitman, from Boston, uses Max-MSP for real-time performance based pieces for electric guitar and digital synthesis. Previous works have fused his loves of hyper-programmed rhythms & concr?te sounds, bleeding freakout guitar, beach-boys style sweet harmony, eastern euro-prog, vintage synth burbles, classic-era minimalism, early mainframe computer music, fluxus-lineage borderline nonsense, complete and utter chaos, doomy chamber pop, and quiet melancholy. He is the founder of the Reckankreuzungs Klankewerkzeuge Recordings Limited of Cambridge record label.
Christopher Willits uses guitar and computer software processing with improvisation to generate a unique and compelling mixture of melody and rhythm. Beautiful guitar harmonies are folded into each other using custom-designed software; notes and phrases hook and weave, creating complex patterns of interlocking rhythms, melodies and textures.
Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) has been producing collage-based music under the name Wobbly since 1990. Releases include albums for Tigerbeat6, Phthalo, Alku, & Illegal Art. Recent festival appearances include: Sound Unseen/Plunderphonia in Minneapolis; Ether at Royal Festival Hall in London; Sonar in Barcelona; and CEAIT at CalArts. He is also a member of the musical group Sagan with Blevin Blectum, Jay Lesser and Ryan Junell.
CALENDAR EDITORSO NOTE:
WHAT: The 5th Annual San
Francisco Electronic Music Festival
WHEN: Thursday- Saturday August 5-7, 2004 8 pm
WHERE: SomArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan Street, SF)
TICKETS: $15 General; $12 Student; $40 full festival pass
General Tickets & Passes: www.sfemf.org or at the door
Festival hotline: 415.861.3257; SomArts 415.552.2131
Further Information: www.sfemf.org
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