For Immediate Release:
Press Contact: Matt Davignon
P: 510-268-8213,
mattdavignon@gmail.com
San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2008
San Francisco's only festival dedicated to electronic music, featuring five nights of performances by emerging and internationally renowned artists.
San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2008
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 through Sunday, September 7, 2008
Project Artaud Theatre, 450 Florida St, San Francisco, CA
Wednesday/Thursday/Friday/Saturday performances start at 8pm
Sunday performance starts at 7pm
Further Information: www.sfemf.org
Full calendar listing at bottom of page.
For web photos, please visit http://www.sfemf.org/PressMaterials2008.html
The 2008 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival consists of five evenings of stimulating performances by internationally recognized artists and musicians in the electronic music field. This year's lineup includes a wide array of electronic music pioneers, modern innovators, and emerging artists, ranging in styles and methods including contemporary chamber music, glitch, industrial sounds, music concrete, sound design, drone music, free improvisation and avant-pop music. The technology represented will range from old school synthesizers to the most modern laptop computer patches, including exploration of interactions between acoustic and electronic instruments. SFEMF 2008 will include several performances of works featuring sfSound Group, one of the Bay Area's premiere 20th century and 21st century contemporary music chamber ensembles.
For this year's festival, SFEMF has invited a diverse group of artists from across the field of electronic music, including electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros in a special collaboration with Tokyo-based electro-acoustic composer Carl Stone, as well as New York minimalist Phill Niblock, modern glitch-pop singer/musician Tujiko Noriko, synthesizer improvisation innovator Richard Teitelbaum, composer/performer and video installation artist Agne Szelag, an opera from CNMAT co-director Edmund Campion, oscilloscope-inspired audio-visual artist Ray Sweeten, electro-acoustic trombonist Monique Buzzarté, LA improviser/filmmaker Hans Fjellestad, electronic experimental pop duo Myrmyr, intense noise artist Sharkiface, Iranian-American post-industrial musician Ata 'Sote' Ebtekar, scientific theory-inspired computer music duo Barpieces, and Rutro and the Logs, a 5-piece ensemble comprised of local improvisation and harsh noise all-stars. Every evening, installations by three sound artists, Jen Boyd, Clay Chaplin, and Alex Potts, will be on exhibition in the lobby and Artaud Café Gallery,
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 2008 Steering Committee/Curators: Elise Baldwin, Matt Davignon, Tom Duff, Christopher Fleeger, Dan Joseph, Kadet Kuhne, Jon Leidecker, Kristin Miltner, Patrick Parnell, Patrice Scanlon and Pamela Z
Advisory Board: Mark Bartscher, John Bischoff, Krys Bobrowski, Lance Grabmiller, Guillermo Gallindo, Steev Hise, Matt Ingalls, Dan Joseph, Walter Kitundu, Miya Masaoka, Suki O'Kane, Ed Osborn, Sean Rooney, Christopher Salter, Todd Shalom, Laetitia Sonami, Carl Stone
San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2008 Artists:
Jen Boyd is a sound artist living in Oakland CA . She spends time recording sounds in her environment and then arranges them into layered soundscapes. In these pieces, some sounds unfold naturally while others are processed.
For the past four years Jen has used contact microphones to explore the textures and timbres in trees. Many of her soundscapes seek to give depth to these delicate sounds. Although her work mostly relies on ‘natural’ sounds she uses a wide variety of sound sources to paint sonic pictures for the listener. In future projects, Jen will continue to explore the depths of natural sound and their presentation as art through live performance and sound installations. She hopes to spark the interests in people of all ages to listen more closely to the environment they live in everyday.
Jen has collaborated with mem1, rs232 and Kadet Kuhne. She is currently working on a piece for TouchRadio (touchradio.org.uk). Jen received her BFA in music technology from CalArts and her MFA in electronic music from Mills College .
Monique Buzzarté, trombonist/composer, is an avid proponent of contemporary music, commissioning and premiering many new works for trombone alone and with electronics in addition to her own compositions. Since 1983 her "New Music from Women: Trombone" project has supported the expansion of the trombone repertoire, and in recognition of her long history of commissioning and premiering new works, Meet the Composer selected Ms. Buzzarté for their "Soloist Champions" program. An author and educator as well as a performer/composer, Ms. Buzzarté has published research on the brass music of woman composers and received artist residencies as a composer and for the development of a unique interactive performance interface for the trombone.
www.buzzarte.org
Edmund J. Campion (Co-Director, CNMAT) was born in Dallas ,Texas in 1957. He received his Doctorate degree in composition at Columbia University and attended the Paris Conservatory where he worked with composer Gérard Grisey. In 1993, he created the piece Losing Touch (Billaudot Editions, Paris) at IRCAM ( L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) he was subsequently commissioned by IRCAM to produce a large scale work for interactive electronics and midi-grand piano (Natural Selection) (ICMC 2002). Other projects include a Radio France Commission l'Autre (The Other), the full-scale ballet Playback (commissioned by IRCAM and the Socitété des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques ) and ME, for Baritone and live electronics, commissioned by the MANCA festival in association with CIRM (Centre National de Création Musicale). Campion is currently Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley where he also serves as Co-Director at CNMAT (The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies).
Thomas Buckner
For over three decades Thomas Buckner championed music of the avant-garde in America and throughout the world as a performer, producer, and promoter. A former student of the legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone, Martial Singher, he was trained in the classical tradition and has continued throughout his distinguished career to broaden the scope of his vocal styles, specializing in a wide range of experimental music. Buckner has collaborated with a host of "new music" composers including Robert Ashley, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Noah Creshevsky, Annea Lockwood, Bun-Ching Lam, David Wessel, Tom Hamilton, Leroy Jenkins, Phill Niblock, Matthias Kaul and many others. He has made solo appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Edinburgh Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Biennale Festival in Venice, presenting a repertoire that includes more than 100 compositions, written for, or dedicated to him.
Clay Chaplin is a composer, improviser, audio engineer, and video artist from Los Angeles. He has worked on many projects throughout the US, Europe, and Japan involving experimental music, interactive systems, video, improvisation, and custom electronics. Clay has given workshops on computer music and digital media for various electronic arts groups in California and has been composer-in-residence at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and at STEIM in Amsterdam. He is currently the Technical Director for the Computer Music and Experimental Media Studios at The California Institute of the Arts and a member of the music school’s composition faculty.
Clay’s latest CD is available on Artifact Recordings.
Ata Ebtekar (aka Sote) is an Iranian-American electronic musician & sound artist. His goal is to create unique and timeless pieces of music that are not yet available anywhere except in his mind. Sote is interested in keeping the tuning of Persian classical scales (Radif) and melodies from old Persian folk songs within a new electronic framework. He has a firm conviction that rules and formulas have to be deconstructed and rethought, he alters some of these modal systems from their original tonality and rhythm (tradition). His music has been published by various companies, such as Warp Records, Sub Rosa, Sonic Arts Network, Dielectric Records, Record Label Records plus others. He has recently returned from several years living in Iran, where he was working on several projects. He was also given the opportunity to collaborate with the Iranian Orchestra for New Music. This project will be published in the summer of 2008.
Hans Fjellestad is a Los Angeles musician and filmmaker, who tours and records extensively both as a solo artist and in collaboration with numerous players on the experimental music scene in over a dozen countries. He is one of the founders of San Diego's Trummerflora Collective. A "mad scientist improviser" (International DJ Magazine) and "master of analogue synthesis" (The Wire), his music has been described as "unbridled sonic freedom... raw, almost shamanic energy that embodies the true essence of unrestricted music" (XLR8R). As filmmaker, Hans directed the feature documentaries Moog (2004) and Frontier Life (2002).
www.hansfjellestad.com
Barpieces (Charles Engstrom & Christopher Fleeger)
"Barpieces" refers to both a set of electronic music compositions and the duo that creates and performs them. The compositions seek to establish revelatory utility in the hurly-burly of ordinary public listening-- in a barroom, for instance. Their methods involve taking cues from gas laws, Lissajous curves, set transformations and Fourier harmonizations of the ambience in performance spaces. The sonics range from simple synthetic waveforms, excited glass, wood and metal to slot machines, washers and other timbral pointers to the everyday world of the early 21st century. In other lives Engstrom is a film-music
composer; Fleeger a filmmaker.
www.acousmatic.com
Myrmyr is the collaboration by Marielle Jakobsons and Agnes Szelag to create an improvisational electro-acoustic music. Myrmyr's music rides on the tension between the slightly cacophonous to flowing folklike melodies, using their many instruments, voices, field recordings, live sampling and programming skills. They are currently recording their debut album "The Amber Sea".
www.myrmyr.net
Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping in Lower Manhattan. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V Vierk, David First, and Glenn Branca. He's even worked with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo on "Guitar two, for four" which is actually for five guitarists. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones, resulting in sound without melody or rhythm. Movement is slow, changes imperceptible, and his music has a way of creeping up on you. Since 1968, Niblock has put on over 1,000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski and Jim O'Rourke.
www.phillniblock.com
Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others' sensibilities it the many facets of sound. Since the 1960's she has influenced American Music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She is the founder of the musical practice Deep Listening(R). Pauline is also one of the founders of the original San Francisco Tape Music Center, and many credit her with being the founder of present day meditative music. All of Oliveros' work emphasizes musicianship, attention strategies, and improvisational skills.
http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline/
Alex Potts is an installation artist, composer, and filmmaker. His work includes large-scale sound and video installations, film and dance scores, and narrative and experimental films. His work has been shown throughout the U.S., in the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands.
Rutro & The Logs is an all-star cast of musicians from the Bay Area's improv and noise scenes: Liz Allbee, trumpet/electronics; Mark Gergis, found objects/electronics; Matt Ingalls, clarinet, violin, computer; Canner MEFE, voice/electronics and Jake Rodriguez, cello/electronics. "Out in the woods the first people are killed by their log house. In the city, pencil pusher office workers are stabbed by their wooden pencils. In the packaging warehouse, 100's of broken down cardboard boxes form cylindrical structures and roll towards the forklift drivers, batting them until they are but liquidy messes. The war has begun: a war of the Cylindricals against the Rutrolians. The Cylindricals are a fierce army of wood pulp and wood, combating their own rebellious children - a strong people - the Rutrolians."
sfSound Group has been presenting innovative and challenging concerts in the San Francisco bay area since 1999. A true 21st century ensemble, the group has an extraordinary roster of Bay Area composer-performers whose virtuosic and "extended" instrumental abilities are equally balanced with their involvement in composition, electronic sound, performance art, computer audio programming, and experimental instrument making. The group's sfSoundSeries presents cutting-edge new works by local and international composers, virtuosic improvisations, theatrical performances, live diffusion of tape music, and avant-garde classics. The group also frequently presents existing work in highly creative "radical transcriptions," blurring the lines between performance, composition, interpretation and improvisation.
www.sfsound.org/group
Sharkiface is Bay Area experimental artist Angela Edwards, co-founder of the veteran "costume noise" & comedy duo Tarantism, a member of the electronic duo Pigs In The Ground and the macabre experimental doo-wop quintet Diatric Puds. Solo performances usually involve dense textures and rich layered tones using various rare electronic intstruments such as the Ciat Lonbarde Tranoe, a heavily modified stereo delay and looping instrument, and the Bug, an electro-acoustic soundboard built by Tom Nunn. www.sharkiface.com
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as "the king of sampling." and "one of the best composers living in (the USA) today." He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between San Francisco and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Media Department at Chukyo University in Japan.
Ray Sweeten, aka Ray, was born of an interest in electronic sound/communication at an early age whilst engaged in audio correspondences with his estranged father in Peru. He cultivated this interest much later at the Oberlin Conservatory along with what would become an ongoing exploration in the systematic mapping of sound to image. His work has been screened and performed at The Kitchen, The Liverpool Biennial, The New York Underground Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Participant Gallery, La General, Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, Mata Foundation, The Stone, Ocularis, Issue project Room, Aurora Picture Show, MoMa PS1, NY Independent Film Festival, and the Conflux Festival. He has taught and given workshops to young people through programs such as Vibe Songmakers, Community Musicworks and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work has received support from Harvestworks/Van Lier, Experimental Television Center, NYSCA, MATA, Fabrica, spa., and mediaThe. Sweeten currently resides in New York City. www.raysweeten.com
Agnes Szelag
Agnes Szelag is a composer, performer, and video/audio installation
artist. Her work explores the cognitive and aesthetic relationship of
sound and visual media in chosen environments. In performance and
composition se creates interactive schemes that ride the line between
composition and improvisation. In all media Agnes is primarily
concerned with transformation. Agnes is a Course Director at
Ex'pression College for Digital Arts. She received her MFA in
Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, and her B.S.
in Radio/TV/Film from Northwestern University. Agnes resides in the
Bay Area, CA. www.aggiflex.com
Richard Teitelbaum
Born in New York City in 1939, Teitelbaum received a BA from Haverford College and a Master of Music degree from Yale University. After two years on a Fulbright to Italy, he brought the first Moog synthesizer to Europe, performing over 200 concerts with it and helping to found the pioneering live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva, with Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran and others in Rome in 1966. Teitelbaum has toured worldwide and received numerous awards. He currently teaches composition and electronic music at Bard College where he is Director of the Electronic Music Studio.
Tujiko Noriko
Born in Osaka, living in Paris, Tujiko crafts lovely avant-garde songs by fusing digital noises with innocently sung vocals. Since 2000, she has released five solo albums (mego, editions mego, tomlab) and some collaborations/mini albums (fatcat, room40, corde, nature bliss etc). making words and most of the tracks by herself. She sings in Japanese though all of her albums are released on European labels. Noriko has carved out a sound world all her own, where lo-bitrate noise collages form a framework for dreamy and melancholic pop ballads. In 2004, she started to make movies and has finished 2 narrative works. Since 2006, she has been busy with her baby. www.tujikonoriko.com
WHAT: The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
WHEN: Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 through Sunday, September 7, 2008
Box office and installations open one hour before concert times.
PROGRAM:
Wednesday, September 3, 8:00 PM
Sharkiface, SF Sound Group, Phil Niblock
Thursday, September 4, 8:00 PM
Ray Sweeten, Edmund Campion with Thomas Buckner, Tujiko Noriko
Friday, September 5, 8:00 PM
Myrmyr, Ata 'Sote' Ebtekar, Richard Teitelbaum
Saturday, September 6, 8:00 PM
Monique Buzzarté, Rutro and the Logs, Agnes Szelag
Sunday, September 7, 7:00 PM
Barpieces, Hans Fjellestad, Pauline Oliveros and Carl Stone
WHERE: Project Artaud Theater (450 Florida Street, San Francisco)
TiCKETS:
Tickets: $17 General; $12 Student/Discount.
Full festival pass: $55 General
Project Artaud Theater Tickets are available through the ODC Dance website
http://www.odctheater.org/v5/pages/music/SFEMF_sept.html
INFO: Festival hotline: 415.861.3257; Project Artaud Theater:
415-626-4370, www.sfemf.org
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