Rucyl (New York City) – vocals, synthesizer, electronics
9:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17
Rucyl Mills is a sound artist, singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and multi-media artist current based in New York. Born and raised in Philadelphia, her work concerns process as performance, time-based analog effects systems, and sonic representations of physics, emotions, identity, and time. Rucyl’s live performances build on improvisational deployments of MIDI controllers, loopers, effects, processors, and her voice–producing what she has dubbed “avant-R&B.”
Rucyl began recording music with the Philadelphia underground rap group The Goats in the early 90s, releasing two albums on Ruffhouse Records and touring with the Bad Brains and Fishbone. She later co-founded the Afrofuturist audio-visual cooperative Saturn Never Sleeps with producer and DJ King Britt. Inspired by the media and music of Sun Ra, Saturn Never Sleeps encompassed concert curation, workshops, and podcasts in addition to several international tours and full-length albums.
After SNS disbanded in 2011, Rucyl continued with collaborative performances highlighting persons of color and women in experimental electronic music using the moniker Woman + Machine, in addition to releasing music under her own name. Her most recent work is the Sound Prism, a solar-powered sonic performance and installation that explores sound as a physical representation of the transmutation of organic energy. A Solar Prism installation was featured at the Organizo Interactivo in Tenjo, Columbia, in July 2016.
Click here to listen to Rucyl’s most recent album, Caveat.
C. Spencer Yeh (Brooklyn) – Electronics
8:00 pm Friday, 7/14/17
C. Spencer Yeh is a Taiwan-born, Brooklyn-based vocalist, violinist, and electronicist recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, and composer. After taking a degree in film from Northwestern University, Yeh relocated to Cincinnati and began performing and recording in 1993 with his long-running project, Burning Star Core. In the 2000s, Yeh and Burning Star Core were fixtures of the international noise and free music communities; records like Papercuts Theater and Challenger document Yeh’s intensive exploration of the possibilities of his overdriven violin.
Under his own name, Yeh has extended his techniques to vocal improvisation (most recently on Solo Voice I-X), as well as video and photographic work.
Yeh’s work has recently appeared as part of “Modern Mondays” at the Museum of Modern Art, “Tony Conrad Tribute” at Atelier Nord/Ultima Festival in Oslo, “Great Tricks From Your Future” at D-CAF in Cairo Egypt, and LAMPO at the Renaissance Society in Chicago; in 2015, he was artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room.
Yeh also volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. He is also a contributing editor to Triple Canopy and BOMB magazine, as well as contributing to The Third Rail and Personal Best.
Yeh has toured extensively across North America, Europe, and Asia. He has performed and recorded with Lasse Marhaug, Okkyung Lee, John Wiese, Tony Conrad, and Jandek, among many others. He is also a member of The New Monuments alongside Don Dietrich and Ben Hall, as well as trios with Chris Corsano and Paul Flaherty and Nate Wooley and Ryan Sawyer, respectively.
Yeh’s NMASS solo performance comprises one of the initial performances of material drawn from Yeh’s recordings of the RCA Mark II synthesizer, the first programmable synthesizer ever built. Although the synthesizer has not been used by a musician since 1997, Yeh made a series of recordings on the Mark II at the Columbia Computer Music Center, which were then processed through a combination of playback media (including CDJs, cassette players, and computer software) and rendered as performable content A recording of Yeh’s work with the Mark II is forthcoming on Primary Information.
Click here to hear Yeh’s music on UbuWeb.
A/B Duo (Rochester, NY / Campbell, CA)
9:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17 ( Rockin night time set )
2:00 pm Sunday, 7/16/17 (“New Music” set)
Chris Jones (percussion) + Meerenai Shim (flute)
Since forming in 2013, the bi-coastal, multi-genre A/B Duo has cultivated a notable body of boundary-blurring chamber music. Comprised of percussionist Chris Jones and flutist Meerenai Shim, the Duo’s repertoire blends influences from inside and outside the academy, bringing math rock and video game soundtracks into conversation with contemporary composition. To this end, A/B Duo has commissioned several works from contemporary American composers, including Drew Baker, Andrea Rose, Ivan Trevino, and Matthew Joseph Payne, whose piece Echoloquacious may be the first chamber piece to inspire its own video game.
A/B Duo’s performances span the contemporary concert spectrum, from Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music to San Francisco’s Center for New Music and Atlanta’s venerable avant-garde outpost the Goat Farm. The Duo will perform twice at NMASS: first on Saturday night and again on Sunday morning, which will reflect their more raucous and more refined sides, respectively.
Click here to listen to select tracks from the A/B Duo album Variety Show.
Dr. Amy Cimini: Introduction and Discussion of The Music of Maryanne Amacher
12:00 pm-3:00 pm, Friday 7/14/17
As part of COTFG’s mission to raise the visibility of overlooked artists and thinkers, NMASS welcomes Dr. Amy Cimini for a set of discussions and listening sessions centered on the 20th-century composer, theorist, and installation artist Maryanne Amacher.
Maryanne Amacher (pronounced “Am‐ah‐shhé”) (1938 – 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of this nascent genre. Often considered to be a part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.
In the late 1960s, while a Creative Associate at the University of Buffalo, Amacher pioneered what she called “long distance music,” or telematic, site-related works that would later crystallize into her renowned City Links series. During her time as a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (1972-1976), she began developing her “ear tone” music with the help of Marvin Minsky’s Triadex Muse, a synthesizer and compositional tool utilizing principles of artificial intelligence.
Amacher’s “ear tone” music emerged from creative use of combination and difference tones, along with otoacoustic emissions (known, in shorthand, as OAEs), or sounds produced spontaneously within the cochlea. Amacher followed developments and debates in otological research on OAEs and other psychoacoustic phenomena closely. Such independent scholarship was an important stimulus to her career-long research into “ways of hearing” and the creative potentialities of how the ear itself processes sounds both of itself and in situ.
After meeting John Cage through Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois in 1968, she went on to collaborate with Cage in the mid-1970s on Lecture on the Weather, and composed Close Up, an accompaniment to Cage’s Empty Words (1979). Remainder was commissioned for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company piece Torse, as well as the Charles Atlas film of the same name. In the late 1970s and early 1980s she developed presentational models for how her subsequent work should be “staged”: Music for Sound-Joined Rooms and Mini Sound Series.
She spent the 1980s also working on the materials for a multi-part drama originally imagined for TV and radio simulcast called Intelligent Life. While never fully realized, Intelligent Life reveals much of her thinking on music and the advancement of potentialities for future listeners, transcending the social and physiological limitations of music as we know it.
Amy Cimini is Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her research engages 20th century philosophy and political thought with an emphasis on theories of the body and the ethics of experimental practice. She has published work drawn from this research in Contemporary Music Review, GAMUT, boundary 2, 20th Century Music, and a number of edited volumes. She is currently completing a monograph on Maryanne Amacher titled Wild Sound.
As a violist, Cimini participated in the world premier of Anthony Braxton’s opera Trillium J and her improvising duo, Archituethis Walks on Land, recently released their third record on the Carrier imprint.
Click here to listen to “Living sound,” a Maryanne Amacher piece from the “Sound-Joined Rooms” series.
Sarah Belle Reid (Los Angeles) – Trumpet + Audio Processing Software
6:00 pm Friday, 7/14/17
Sarah Belle Reid is a Canadian trumpeter and composer active in the fields of electroacoustic trumpet performance, music technology, and improvisation. Currently based in LA (where she teaches music theory and technology at the California Institute of the Arts), Reid’s work investigates the Dada notion of infrathin–the smallest discernible difference between two things–through an ever-evolving integration of acoustic and electronic interfaces.
Reid’s past performances include collaborations with Wadada Leo Smith, Charlie Hayden, and the Liberation Music Orchestra. She has also appeared at the NorCal Noise Fest and Hammer Museum as a member of Burnt Dot, the multimedia improvisation ensemble she maintains with modular synthesist Ryan Gaston.
Together with Gaston and Drs. Ajay Kapur and Colin Honigman, Reid has developed the Minimally Invasive Gesture Sensing Interface (“MIGSI”), an open-source, wireless software/hardware combination which allows trumpeters to translate a range of physical and sonic stimuli into audio and visual performance elements. Reid will use MIGSI for her solo performance at NMASS, augmenting the possibilities of her horn for the unique environment presented by Springdale Station.
Click here to listen to Sarah Belle Reid’s SoundCloud.
The Mineral Kingdom aka Matthew Joseph Payne (Oakland, CA) – Vibraphone/Vocals/Game Boy/Electronics
10:00 pm Saturday, July 15th
Matthew Joseph Payne is an Oakland-based composer and multi-instrumentalist working in the fertile intersection of chipmusic, folk and pop tunes, and classical composition. Blending the timbres of TI-83s and handheld gaming systems with banjos, vibraphones, and an array of electronics and handbuilt instruments, Payne has cultivated a body of work characterized by virtuosity and whimsey in equal measure.
Payne has worked as a performer, arranger and/or composer with Pomplamoose and Jonathan Mann, Bay Areas bands The Family Crest, Radiation City, and The Glowing Stars, and a number of San Francisco dance and theater companies. He has been commissioned as a composer by The International Low Brass Trio, flutist Meerenai Shim, and Shim’s flute/percussion duo (and fellow NMASS performers) A/B Duo.
For his NMASS performance on Sunday, July 16th, Payne will perform a set of songs arranged for vibraphone, electronics, Game Boy, and vocals with accompaniment of Meerenai Shim (flute), Chris Jones (vibraphone), Douglas Laustsen (trombone), Henna Chou (cello)
Click here to listen to hear music by Matthew Joseph Payne.
End Of The World Orchestra (Austin)
2:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17
Matt Butler (guitar) + Blaigne Ayuma Sixon (saxophone) + Wayne Myers (trombone) + Javier Stuppard (trombone) + Steve Butts (trumpet, flugal horn) + Ari Burns – (trumpet, flugal horn) Derek Phelps (trumpet) + Michael Day (bass) + Eoghan McCloskey (drums), Sterling Steffen (tenor saxophone), Lee Redfield (alto / tenor saxophone), Joseph Woullard (baritone saxophone, flute), Dillon Buhl (trombone)
Guitarist/composer Matt Butler cut his teeth learning 80s guitar rock in the Northeast Florida backwater ‘burg of Jacksonville, where 70s R&B, country and the occasional classical masters in his parents’ record collection seeped in sub rosa. By 17, Butler had begun playing live and composing music for jazz quartets, string quintets, solo piano, and several small and large ensembles. In 2007, he founded the End Of The World Orchestra, his longest-running and best-loved endeavor. Since relocating to Austin in 2011, he has worked with a wide array of the city’s improvising musicians to test the possibilities of this large-scale, hard-charging avant-ensemble.
The End Of The World Orchestra is variable in its membership–previous iterations have included four, ten, and more members–and its influences, which take in Bjork, Zorn, Rachmaninoff and Weather Report. Whatever the iteration, the group is characterized by mutant-funk-band orchestration (multiple saxophones, trumpets, and trombones always augment a guitar-bass-drums axis) and marked by Butler’s commitment to an interactive, improvisation-driven reading of his compositions. Taken together, the Orchestra delivers a intoxicating set of rhythmically, complex, harmonically dense pieces that will blow your mind and move your ass.
Terraformation (Tucson, AZ / Austin, TX)
3:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17
Benjamin DeGain (drums/vibraphone) + Mohadev (guitar/bass) + Eric McFarlin (bass) + Braedon Avants (drums)
Birthed and brought up in the American Southwest, the prog/post-rock quartet Terraformation plays instrumental music inspired by desert landscapes and deep space. Multi-instrumentalist Benjamin DeGain and guitarist/bassist Mohadev formed the band in Tucson, Arizona in 2008 as a recording project (they recorded the first Terraformation album, Darkness Among Stars, in a single month), an arrangement that continued after Mohadev relocated to Austin in 2009. Over the course of three subsequent releases, Terraformation has developed a discography that takes in shimmering, vibraphone-lead pastorals and robust art-rock with equal dexterity.
Now augmented by the rhythm section of Eric McFarlin (The Baffles) on bass and Braedon Avants (Skymomma, The Undreamt) on drums, Terraformation will play their first live show in nine years at NMASS, presenting a set that marries live improvisation with DeGain’s and Mohadev’s long experience with remote collaboration.
You can hear Terraformation’s music here.
Slant Ensemble (Austin)
5:00 pm Sunday, 7/16/17
Alan Retamozo (guitar) + Richard Mikel (bass) + Daniel Dufour (drums) + Matt Armbruster (cello) + Blake Turner (viola) + Gil Del Bosque (saxophones) + Christabel Lin (violin)
Motion Series – Alan Retamozo
Using standard jazz and classical chamber groups (quartet and string trio) Motion Series explores the merging of fully notated forms, lead sheet realization, and both “inside” and “free” improvisation. It features various soloists throughout as well as ensemble interplay and improvisational elements in small groups.
Parts of Motion Series explore the triple diminished compositional approach – a twelve-tone process for composition/improvisation created by Yusef Lateef and further explored by contemporary composer/percussionist Adam Rudolph. This work is also influenced by Retamozo’s interest in the way rhythm and melody can create a temporary sense of momentum, shape, and respiration and how these can represent cycles of decay and renewal.
Collectively, the players have performance credits including the Austin Opera, Austin Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Adam Rudolph & GO Organic Orchestra, Tetractys, Austin New Music Co-op, Randy Brecker, Andre Hayward, and Maria Schneider.
Colin Andrew Sheffield & James Eck Rippie (Austin)
7:00 pm, Friday 7/14/17
Colin Andrew Sheffield (samples, processing) + James Eck Rippie (turntables, samples, processing)
For the past 16 years, Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie have maintained their improvising duo in the service of subconscious composition. Sourcing the majority of their material from commercial recordings, Sheffield and Rippie pursue their work in dialogue and within a given meditation; as they bring concrete sounds in and out of focus using strategies drawn from plunderphonics and conceptual sound art, the duo detourns once-familiar aural events into something else entirely.
Sheffield & Rippie’s debut LP, Variations (released on Sheffield’s own Elevator Bath record label) was recorded “live” with no additional production. Each of the album’s pieces utilizes sounds from a single acoustic instrument as its sole source material. These sources are manipulated and shattered in multiple ways inside the performance. The duo expanded these concepts on their recent double LP, Essential Anatomies, in addition to a greater focus on the chaos and control within longer narrative work, and the duo’s very personal investigation into their juxtaposition.
Click here to listen to Essential Anatomies on Elevator Bath’s Bandcamp page.
Sarah Ann/Carl Smith (Austin)
5:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17
Sarah Ann (keyboard) + Carl Smith (saxophone)
Austin free music veterans Sarah Ann and Carl Smith will meet in their first-ever duet at NMASS this year. Sarah Ann is a keyboardist and improvising composer who has performed with several local indie rock and free improv ensembles, including Mongoose Austin and Pharas. Smith is a saxophonist and painter who has been a mainstay of Austin’s free jazz scene for two decades, both in his group e.c.f.a. and other ensembles, including the Jonathan F. Horne Quintet and the Ingebrigt Haker Flaten Austin Septet. Most recently, he has performed “Sound Pics,” which combines Smith’s painting with live musical performance.
The duo will perform several of Sarah Ann’s compositions, which mix composed material with guided and open improvisation sections in order to emphasize compositional form.
Click here to listen to music from e.c.f.a.
Click here to an excerpt from Sarah Ann’s trio performance at the Austin Animal Shelter.
The Dialtones vs. Nightblooms (Austin)
6:00 pm Sunday, 7/16/17
Composer and guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo draws from a wide range of inspirations in her work, from field recordings to phenomenology, and creates environments that illuminate and shadow boundaries between perspectives, media, and audience and performer. Gurgiolo has directed or co-directed four inter-media interactive installations, and is currently working on her fifth, Silent City Part II. She has completed four corresponding albums with her project The Dialtones: The Dialtones, The Quality Or Condition, Calculated Carelessness, and Silent City.
Gurgiolo has worked with bands like Okkervil River (2008-2015) and The Octopus Project (2015 – present) but The Dialtones is her long-standing side project in a new rockin’ configuration including Karla Manzur (Alejandro Escovedo), Lindsay Green (Elizabeth McQueen), Raquel Bell (Raquel Bell), and Sam Chown (Zorch).
Nightblooms is the atmospheric and atmosphere-inspired solo project of Karla Manzur (Dana Falconberry, Alejandro Escovedo), featuring the stunning textural guitar of Lauren Gurgiolo (Octopus Project, Okkervil River, The Dialtones). Nightblooms’ lush and ethereal vocals feature lyrics heavily influenced by classical themes of time and space, truth and beauty, gravity and light.
Having played in each others’ projects for years, Lauren Gurgiolo and Karla Manzur have merged the shared frequencies of The Dialtones and Nightblooms for NMASS 2017.
Click here to listen to The Quality Or Condition on The Dialtones’ Bandcamp page.
Click here to listen to several singles from Nightblooms on their Bandcamp page.
Mongoose (Austin)
9:00 pm Friday, 7/14/17
Dillon Buhl + Greg Cooksey + Kevin Foltinek + Content Love Knowles + Lisa Mims + Christopher Petkus (conductor) + Rebecca Ramirez + Jennifer Taylor + Dave DeMaris + Philip Moody + Sarah Norris + Jakob Marsala + Em Rodley
Mongoose is an improvisational music group based in Austin, Texas. Taking its cues from the rules of John Zorn’s Cobra, Mongoose delivers a heady brew of improvised music, movement, and spoken texts that the Austin American-Statesman has described as “strangely compelling.” Mongoose has enjoyed a long involvement with COTFG (the group gave its first performance at the Salvage Vanguard Theater in October 2009) and have been a staple of NMASS’ programming since the festival’s inception.
Art Acevedo (Austin)
8:00 pm, Sunday 7/15/17
Captain Beerfart (vocals) + Detective Louis Cannon (Saxophone) + Officer Dave (bass) + The Sarge (drums)
Art Acevedo is a no-wave/free funk/noise-punk/et al quartet featuring members of Coma In Algiers, The Gospel Truth, Xetas, and ensembles in the Austin underground. Named in backhanded tribute to Austin’s former chief of police, Art Acevedo’s entirely-improvised performances (like their namesake, they never practice) translate contemporary tensions–between citizens and police, economic reality and creative aspiration, personal life and political noise–with total intuition. Art Acevedo’s debut album, Flow My Tears, is forthcoming on Super Secret Records.
Click here to hear past performances by Art Acevedo.
Triangulum (Dallas)
7:00 pm Sunday, 7/16/17
Sean French (guitar) + M. Cody McPhail (synthesizer) + T.J. Prendergast (percussion) + Chad Walls (synthesizers)
In the spirit of visionaries like Brian Eno and Harmonia, Dallas kosmische quartet Triangulum continue to mine the 70s highest traditions of sonic exploration, treating sound as transcendent geography.
With arrangements that cast instruments as orbiting planets, colliding and collapsing seamlessly into one another like waves lapping at the shoreline, Triangulum’s music is not for listening, but immersion.
Whether it’s the band’s reverence for meditating in instrumental refrains based on little more than a handful of notes, or employing vocalists who color their music in shades of stark neo-western noir recalling Michael Gira (Clint Niosi on “Kill the Moon”), or Sade singing through a broken telephone in a David Lynch movie (Lily Taylor on “Thaw”),Triangulum’s slow-motion reveries mesmerize mesmerize listeners by poetic drifting and ceaseless evolution.
Click here to listen to music from Triangulum’s self-titled record.
Zentrum (Austin)
1:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17
Arturo Eduardo Torres (guitar), Andrew Gerfers (drums), Justin Sherburn (keyboards), John Branch (bass)
Zentrum is an occasional collaboration between three Austin music veterans which seeks the center point between its members’ backgrounds in dub reggae, contemporary composition, and Southwestern-style post-rock. Comprised of drummer Andrew Gerfers (Friends of Dean Martinez), keyboardist Justin Sherburn (Montopolis Music), and guitarist Arturo Eduardo Torres (Echo Base Soundsystem, Lowline Caller), the group has convened regularly since the early 2000s to meld their respective sonic backgrounds into a cinematic, near-hallucinogenic whole.
Aux Aux (Austin / sound) with Jennifer Maravillas (NYC / art)
1:00 pm Sunday, 7/16/17
A collaboration of the geographically minded.
Aux Aux (music) is the entity of dynamic spiritual growth an experimentation lead by environmental scientist Henna Chou. Since establishing residence in Texas in 2003, she has been active as a musician in a wide variety of situations.
Jennifer Maravillas is a visual artist and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA in Communication Art and Design at the University of Louisville, 2006 and an MS in Mass Communication at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2008. Her work and studies focus on land: how we build our societies as repositories of information and culture for future inhabitants; how our relationship to land shapes us as individuals and communities. Jennifer uses a wide range of media such as watercolor, found objects, textile dyeing, and block printing to create her portraits of cities, land, and cultures. She is working on a long term (lifetime) project in which she is walking every block in New York City collecting paper and trash to place on a map of each borough. Outside of work, Jennifer enjoys bicycling, ballet, kickboxing, urban fire escape gardening, and cuddling with her cat, Arrow.
For this set at NMASS2017 Aux Aux collaborators are: Henna Chou (composition, electronics, melodica), Cami Alys(vocals), w/Laura Dykes(bass), Amy Cimini (viola), Randall Holt (cello), Joshua Thomson (saxophone), Aaron Parks(drums), Benjamin Degain(vibraphone)
Space Angel Hug (Austin) – Keyboard, processing
5:00 PM Friday, 7/14/17
Born in 1988 and raised in Houston, Texas, Space Angel Hug (formerly known as Leif Steenson) graduated from UT-Austin with a Bachelors in Radio-Television-Film in 2011 and has remained in Austin ever since. A diehard music dweeb, Space purchased an electronic piano and began posting music under the name Mouth Sore online in 2012. Starting in 2014, Space studied music theory, music technology and piano performance full time at Austin Community College, concluding with a live performance of a woodwind quintet composition about baby ducks in winter 2016. In April 2017, Mouth Sore gave its first public performance; shortly thereafer, Hug began performing under its own interdimensional-sentient-energy-blob-given name.
From the beginning, Space’s music has maintained a fascination with free improvisation, juggling live audio looping, keyboard theatrics, sample mangling, patch cable entanglement, and general hullabaloo in an attempt to discover unique musical forms and inclinations for the present day.
Click here to listen to the first Space Angel Hug album.
PetCatMan (Austin)
4:00 pm Saturday, 7/15/17
Ricardo Acevedo (synths, keyboards, devices) + Jakob Marsala (bass) + Christopher Petkus (guitars, devices)
Best described as a punk-rock Weather Report, the prog/noise/jazz/improv quartet PetCatMan has been brought Austin their particular brand of heavy art sounds since 2015. For their NMASS performance, PetCatMan is pleased to be performing with a quartet of improvisational dancers including Kelly Hasandras, Olivia O’Hare, Jennifer Taylor, and Randi Leigh Turkin.
Click here to listen to the album Fur Vol. 3 on the PetCatMan Bandcamp page.
OMMMG (Austin)
8:00 pm, Saturday 7/15/17
Springdale Station Courtyard
Tina Forbis, and Austin artists Raquel Bell, Rebecca Ramirez, Amanda Jones, Marisa Pool, and Lisa Cameron.
OMMMG is an site-specific, all-cymbals improvisational percussion ensemble led by Austin percussionist Lisa Cameron. Developed as a continuation of Cameron’s 2013 NMASS installation Canopy of Sound, OMMMG investigates the resonant frequencies and energetic aspects of sustained cymbal tones.
Grageriart (Austin, TX)
9:00 pm, Sunday 7/16/17
Lana Lesley (synthesizer, voice) + Peter Stopschinksi (synthesizer, voice)
Grageriart is, in essence, a virtuosic music and voiceover shopping fantasy. Utilizing affirming dings, glitchy underscore, a wide variety of human and other voices, and audio logos, Lana Lesley and Peter Stopschinksi wrap everything you love about commercials and experimental music into a single surreal package.
Lana Lesley is a founding member and the co-producing artistic director of the Austin ensemble-based theater collective Rude Mechs.
Peter Stopschinski has composed music and lyrics for a number of acclaimed plays, musicals, and films; he also provided string arrangements for Grupo Fantasma’s Grammy Award winning album El Existential. His own operas and musicals have been performed across the country at venues including the Arena Stage (DC), Playwrights Horizons (NYC), and Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theater (LA).
In recent years, Stopschinski has lead adventurous ensembles in the COTFG series, including Catalogue of Spiders, Wank Tribe, and Massacre of Spring. He is also a longtime member of the experimental rock band Brown Whornet.
Click here to listen to 50 albums of music from Stopschinski.
Alex Keller + Sean O’Neill (Austin)
9:00 pm Friday, 7/14/17
Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill have collaborated in performance and installation pieces since 2015. Using field recordings, vintage telephone test equipment, magnetic oscillators, light and space, their work has addressed the agents and artifacts of change in the urban and acoustic realms.
In 2017, they will release an LP called Kruos on the Elevator Bath label, and a CD called LCLX on the Mimeomeme label.
Alex Keller is an audio artist, sound designer, curator and teacher based in Austin, Texas. His engagement with performance, installation, and recording is an outgrowth of his interest in architecture, language, abstraction and music. One of his distinctive features as a creator is his ability to show the act of research as having an aesthetic value in and of itself.
Sean O’Neill is a multi-media artist, who explores both the visible light spectrum and the audible frequency range to determine who they influence our lived environments, and vice versa; he has a stated interest in how perception shapes the dynamics of spatiality.