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SFEMF 2003:
east meets left ARTIST BIOS
David Wessel will give a solo performance entitled Singularities. It is a search for peculiar and uncommon points of interest. His instrumentation includes two of Don Buchla's Thunder controllers and reactive software he has written in Max/MSP.
David Wessel directs UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). He has worked in the computer-based electroacoustic music field since the late 60's. His primary focus continues to be live-performance practice where improvisation plays a central role. His musical research interests include: The design of musical instrumentation; Sound analysis-synthesis methods; Musical perception and cognition; Human-computer and human-human interaction in rapid paced real-time contexts; Machine learning and statistical methods for musical modeling and control. Before coming to Berkeley in 1988, he spent 12 years in Paris at IRCAM. He has worked with and performed with a wide variety of composers and improvisors including: Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Vinko Globokar, Jean-Claude Risset, Luc Ferrari, Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, Thomas Buckner, Louis Sclavis, George Lewis, Georg Graewe, Laetitia Sonami, and Joelle Leandre among others.
Hans Grüsel's Krankenkabinet
is an ever expanding/contracting lineup up of Dark Forest characters, set within
a wood-grain diorama. In it's purest, most condensed form, the unit follows
in the wake of the live electronics legacy pioneered by the deceased giant David
Tudor. As the Kabinet unfolds the structure gradually encompasses the various
strains of sound gradually pushing it's boundaries at a Vaudeville variety show
from a time long gone. Costumes and props such as sound emitting mushrooms,
mechanical Motionette dolls, walking trees and dancing rooftops, all mix into
a maniacally composed spectacle of site and sound.
Dan Joseph is a free-lance composer based in Brooklyn, NY. His diverse body of work includes forays into totalism, mimimalism, improvisation, electronica, live electronic music and Near-Eastern folk music. Since 1999, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music. His current projects include composing for his chamber ensemble The Dan Joseph Ensemble, improvisational duos with cellist Loren Dempster and saxophonist John Ingle, and solo performances. A Bay Area resident from 1996 to 2001, he is an original founder of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and appeared on the inaugural SFEMF of 2000.
Mountain Music is a work for hammer dulcimer, electronics and tape accompaniment. All sounds heard are from the hammer dulcimer. The work is inspired by the mountains of California, my home from 1991 to 2001, as well as the Appalachian Mountains of my youth where I first encountered the hammer dulcimer.
Kristin Miltner is a composer, videomaker and sound installation artist from the midwest. She received her BFA in Photography and New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute. She moved to the West Coast to study music with Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran at Mills College in Oakland. She is a member of the Simple Sample laptop duo with Cenk Ergun. She has performed with James Livingston at the bleakhouse series (blevin.lsr1.com/birds) and has played solo shows and projected video at the Parkway Theatre in Oakland, the Hush Hush Club and 26 Mix in San Francisco under the moniker k*m*t*v (Kristin Miltner Tele Vision). She is also a member of the Brown Bunny Ensemble and Bilge-Radiolaria, a group of bay area musicians dedicated to the performance and composition of original experimental music. Mark Bartscher joins her in this performance.
Jim Haynes will perform A Study in Narcolepsy for chord organ, shortwave, rust, and electricity. Currently based in San Francisco Jim Haynes has exhibited at Works / San Jose (San Jose), Eyedrum (Atlanta), The Lab (San Francisco), The Fugitive Art Center (Nashville), Zeitgeist (Nashville), and Southern Exposure (San Francisco). He continues to work with Coelacanth -- an audio/visual ensemble that may be in search of the drone supreme, but often gets distracted by the minutiae of sound itself. Since December 2001, he has been active as the Editorial Director for 23five, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and increased awareness of sound arts within the public arena. Also a noted author, Mr. Haynes has written extensively on sound art, noise culture, minimalism, and general musical experimentation for The Wire, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Sound Projector, and Chunklet.
"I rust things. That statement runs the risk being glib, yet it is an accurate encapsulation of my ongoing activities with decay. In the broadest scope of my work, I apply the vocabulary of decay towards visual presentations through the manipulation of patinas, the chemically oxidizing agents that distress metal in such a way as to give it the appearance of antiquity. I have found that these chemicals -- variable solutions of aluminum chloride, cupric sulfate, and rust in water -- can also act as a vibrant stain when applied to other materials such as cloth, gesso, paper, photographs, and wood. I have even experimented with these chemicals in the realm of sound through the Coelacanth collaboration with Loren Chasse in which we amplified microphones under the duress of corrosion."
Irr. App. (Ext.) M.S. Waldron was born in Toronto at the donkey-end of 1969. Through no fault of his own he was relocated to California in 1980, and has been confused ever since. His audio project, Irr. App. (Ext.), has completed 8 records so far, with the majority of these albums being lost in the debacles of the music industry. However, releases are scheduled sometime in the next millenium from United Dairies and Idea Records. In describing his work, Waldron expostulates without moving his lips, "Most of the initial ideas appear spontaneously, and then are horribly disfigured by constant errors and miscalculations. Ultimately, the material themselves determine the end result. I don't really understand it all that well." Despite Waldron's self-effacing rhetoric, Irr. App. (Xxt.) bridges contemporary recording techniques with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery as manifestations of Freudian fetishism. Thus, through Waldron's sonic innuendoes, puns, and nightmares, he offers a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton might have thought Surrealism would sound.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, a founding member of the Icelandic electronica ensemble Stilluppsteypa currently living in Germany, investigates the absurd at a microcosmic level, mostly within the realm of sound construction. His sparsely populated compositions shift back and forth between the concrete objectivity of controlled electro-acoustic minimalism and a volatile subjectivity manifested as random dollops of sonic detritus streaming through DSP filters. At times, he can be found thoughtfully meditating on an unknown but idiosyncratic sound with a studious attention to detail; but at others, he's numbed by the semiotic disconnections and circular logic he's discovered and quietly goes about dismantling everything around him. It is as if he resigns these moments with a clinical nihilism, "If this one thing doesn't add up, then nothing should."
o.blaat (keiko uenishi)'s "Art of Disappearance" continues. Sound artist, composer and Powerbook musician o.blaat (keiko uenishi) is known for creating interactive audio environments such as beat piece (with Ping-Pong game), audio coat check, cash register piece, coupier, and fillip, all of which were the result of her ceaseless pursuit of ways to erase the performer's presence and ultimately alter the listening situation altogether. After performing with a unique hand-made electronic sound system, the 'tapboard.effector.soundsystem' for two years, Uenishi has been exploring the Powerbook's mobility and its least distracting state of being. Her first compositional effort with the Powerbook was commissioned and presented by Galarie Wieland (Berlin), Germany, as a part of its exhibition, 'Songs of Love and Hate (side A)'.
She has toured extensively in Europe: Rhiz (Vienna) & Phonotaktik Festival in Austria; NBI, Bastard, Staatsbank (all in Berlin); A-Musik (Köln), U60311(Frankfürt) in Germany; festival EMO-SON (Bourges), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), Zoobizarre (Bordeaux), La Machine á Coudre (Marseille) in France; STEIM (Amsterdam), WORM (Rotterdam) in Netherlands; RAS gallery (Barcelona) in Spain; in Australia; and the What Is Music? Festival in Melbourne and Sydney. She has collaborated with numerous artists including Ikue Mori, DJ Olive, Marina Rosenfeld, Lloop, Miguel Frasconi, Timeblind, Eyvind Kang, Sachiko M, Tetsuji Akiyama, Aki Onda, Toshio Kajiwara, Zeena Parkins, Christine Bard, Kaffe Matthews, Georg Zeitblom, Ralph Steinbruchel, Günter Müller, Norbert Morslang, Anthony Coleman, Kurt Ralske, Lukasz Lysakowski, and Eric Redlinger.
bran(...)pos will give a "bukkake clown" performance for synthesizers, mouth, and face. bran(...)pos is an ongoing solo musical theater performance and recording project from San Francisco balancing a fine line between harsh noise, 20th/21st Century experimental exploration, bukkake, heavy psychedelia, comedy, and modern electronic music. Light operatic tinkering with this sound since 1993, but as an extension of performance that has been involved since the late 70s, performance in theater, radio, TV, and film since childhood and most consider the Pos to be a further extension of a single continuum that began with roles in countless industrial and educational films as well as appearances on an ABC Movie of the Week and the short-lived All in the Family spin-off, Gloria. Many of these small films have been since forgotten and most have never even been seen by the Pos so he welcomes any leads anyone may have regarding these. Note that a professional name at the time was Jacob Donner, so scan your late 70s/early 80s educational/industrial/student films for one Jacob Donner and contact the Bran (...) Pos. Music CDs are released on the Chitah! Chitah! Soundcrack label including the most recent June 2003 double CD release Prick/Nose:Twat/Face.
Disc's work is a balance between hypnotic 4/4 techno minimalism paced at exactly 133.33 bpm; raw and processed sounds of scarred, stuttering, skippings CDs; and utterly free digital noise and structured, rhythmic composition. Disc is a collaborative project between J Lesser (aka LSR), Kid 606, and Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt of Matmos. Between these three camps, the members of Disc have previously released music on labels like Mille Plateaux, Matador, Vinyl Communications, Fat Cat, Diskono, Ipecac, 555, Touch and Go/Quarterstick, Lucky Kitchen, Kultbox, V/VM Test Recordings, Lissy's, etc. Disc has previously released three albums, and a collaboration with K. K. Null on the Vinyl Communications label. About Disc's first record 2xcd, the noted music critic Richard Meltzer wrote: "the greatest work of electronic sound manipulation since Steve Reich's tape experiments."
Kitundu is a composer, visual artist, DJ, and instrument builder based in San Francisco. Constructing elemental turntables that rely on wood, water, fire and earthquakes for their power and pitch, Kitundu uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop compositions-installations-instruments that blur the boundaries between media. He has created a family of Phonoharps: beautifully crafted multi-stringed instruments made from phonographs. He strives to reconnect the technology of new music to fundamental principles drawn from the natural world. In addition, he composes for dance, theater and film; teaches workshops, and continues to explore and expand his capacities as a visual and sonic artist. Kitundu was raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
"Phonoharps are multi stringed turntables. When the strings are struck or plucked, the vibrations are ferried into the body of the instrument and the stylus picks them up from the surface of the record, amplifying them. I've built a family of Phonoharps of differing sizes and styles. One resembles a koto, one in the shape of a circular pyramid, one with 27 strings, a portable tribute to Basquiat." -Kitundu
Elise Kermani, composer and multimedia artist, has created sound design for dance and theater groups across New York and the United States since the mid 1980s. Her work has been heard in venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, Roulette, The Kitchen, Knitting Factory, The Texas Gallery, DiverseWorks Artspace, Cleveland Public Theater, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Madame Walker Theater in Indianapolis, Southern Theater in Minneapolis and several venues in Eastern Europe. Her music has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Reader. Kermani is dedicated to the promotion and recognition of women's music and is the producer of the dice Project, a compact disc collection of contemporary women composers released on her own label, Ishtar Records. In September 2002 she curated the website dice3, an international community of women in electronic music http://ishtar.cdemusic.org/dice3.html.
Ms. Kemani will perform 4 mixed-media works using video, sampling and processing sound files on her G4 laptop in a post-minimalistic style.
Sean Rooney is a Bay Area-based artist who works in a variety of media including live audio and video performance, installation and web art. His music combines noise, microtonal drone, plunderphonia, hacked hardware circuit-twisting, digital ambience, field recordings and advanced homebrew dsp software into a whole which is by turns frenetic, textural, chill, and imagistic. He's performed with a wide array of musicians including Mark Trayle, Kenneth Atchley, George Lewis, Wadada Leo Smith, Jon Raskin (of Rova Saxophone Quartet), Pamela Z, Wobbly, Thomas DiMuzio and Boris Hauf.
In addition to his solo work, Rooney is 1/2 of The Knobs (www.theknobs.com), a cross-country noise/video collaboration with musician and designer Yoshi Sodeoka, for which he has developed a software-based system for audio/video performances and installations called "Casket". Past collaborations include Crispus, the all-electronic improvisation collective he co-founded. He has performed and/or presented work at venues including The Museum of Jurassic Technology LA, The Whitney Museum NYC, OFFF '03 in Barcelona (with c404). Sean is currently the curator of Detritus Night, an experimental electronic music series at The Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco. He is former artistic co-host of The LivingRoom and is currently on the steering committee of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival.
Rooney will be performing two recent works, Slots and Pile Driver. Both pieces are performed using custom software written in SuperCollider, an audio processing environment for Mac.
SPL (Slusser, Patterson, Looney). "The SPL project got its start when I was invited by David Slusser to play at a concert involving found films and ambient antiphonal musical groupings. Both of us had great fun in the concert and decided to get together again when we could. Shortly afterwards I was invited to be a part of the Under the Radar series at 26Mix. I decided to ask Slusser to play a duet with me, and he suggested we add Len Paterson, a longtime collaborator, to make a trio. We did our first gig on November 5th 2002 at 26Mix, and it was apparent that we had a good rapport with each other from the first moment. Listening to the recording of our set confirmed my hunch, and we made plans to record an album in February of 2003. After two days (one day for Len and Dave to set up and work out logistics, the next day to record and break down) we emerged with an excellent document of our collaboration.
"We all have a great love of experimental electronic music, improvisation, and the ability to create a narrative through the succession and transition of one sound world to another - what Slusser likes to call mixology. There is also an element of ancient to the future happening as my setup is entirely a laptop computer running Max/MSP and a keyboard controller, whereas Dave's and Lens tend to sprawl around the stage requiring more hardware, setup time and configuration. Nevertheless, when we play, the analog veterans and the digital newcomer merge into a seamless whole, which is all you can ask from any ensemble." -Scott Looney
Stephen Vitiello will give a solo performance in which live sounds are generated via modulated feedback and light sources. Using a small photocell, light frequencies are amplified as audio signal and further processed via outboard analog and digital processors.
Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist from New York. CD releases include Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records) and a number of collaborative projects, including Humming Bird Feeder (Lucky Kitchen) with Tetsu Inoue and Andrew Deutsch, and Scanner/Vitiello (Audiosphere/Sub Rosa) with the British musician Scanner. Exhibitions of sound installations include the 2002 Whitney Biennial and group exhibitions at The Foundation Cartier, Paris: Ce qui arrive, curated by Paul Virilio; and Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest.
The new San Francisco Tape Music Center is dedicated to presenting performances of fixed-media (aka "tape") works diffused through a surround-sound speaker environment. Attempting to transcend common notions of music and its materials, the nSFTMC has presented a number of successful tape music festivals in the past few years, with nothing to see but plenty to hear! Visit http://sfsound.org/tape.html for more information about tape music and the nSFTMC.