Author: COTFG Assistant

8:00pm on Thursday, July 27th 2023

Peach Blossom Highway
Jess Griggs (Narrator), Jordan Walsh (Percussionist)

Peach Blossom Highway is a fictional pirate radio broadcast that only performs live and does not broadcast. The duo perform both original compositions and repertoire from the spoken word + music repertoire, reinvisioned for duo performance. Future projects include realizations of John Cage’s “The City Wears a Slouch Hat” and Aperghis’ “Retrovailles”, plus a larger original work by the duo based on Griggs’ poetry set “Meditations on Depression’s Recovery”. All works are presented using the Pacific Coast Highway framing device.

This performance will feature an original work by Griggs and Walsh titled “The Parable of Habits”

Jess Griggs is a radio host, producer, writer, and musician based in Austin, Texas. Jess has worked in a variety of music and media institutions in Austin and on the east coast. Currently, they work at KMFA 89.5 as the traffic manager and host of ‘Night Music.’ When they’re not on the airwaves, they write angsty poetry or they make questionable sounds via the trombone. They also have a Mini Australian Shepherd named Libby who is, by all accounts, perfect.

Jordan Walsh is a percussionist, audio engineer, and educator based in Austin, Texas. A proponent of electronics and theater in music, he strives to perform the most absurd music with the most genuine fervor. Jordan frequently commissions and performs new works in both chamber and solo settings, including recent collaborations with composers including Elainie Lillios, Akshaya Avril Tucker, Kitty Xiao, and José Martinez.

Frequently engaged as a solo performer, Jordan has appeared as a guest at the SEAMUS conference, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, and Southwestern University, with upcoming engagements including residencies at Purdue University and Alabama University. Jordan proudly endorses Pearl/Adams Instruments, Sabian Cymbals, Black Swamp Percussion, and Innovative Percussion. When he is not engaged with contemporary classical music, Jordan can be found playing drums with singer-songwriter James Tabata, a smattering of nonsense instruments with Goliath Was Bigfoot, and prepared guitar with Austin’s experimental folk band Middle Sattre.

7:00pm on Thursday, July 27th 2023

This series of performances and presentations happens in 3 parts.

1. Game Music Ensemble: Group improvisation pieces for amplified and acoustic instruments with rotating conductors and a light signal

Players include but are not limited to: Harrison Montgomery, Mickey Delp, Joshua Thomson, Julia Austin, Joelle Wagner, AL Batross, Travis Pope, Nathan Green, Kyle Stocking, Leila Henley, Mars Wright, Tyler Lambeth, Violinda, Corey Worely, Charles Prewitt, HC.

The audience will also be invited to participate based on a limited number of prompts.

2. Chords Against Humanity: Remote Work Expansion Pack 
Rural Whirlpool (Jeannelle Ramirez and Matthew Lyons)

Curated exclusively for NMASS, Chords Against Humanity—Remote Work Expansion Pack (CAHRWEP) centers around the banality of everyday workplace communication.

Chords Against Humanity is a music performance game based on a completely unrelated card game.

CAHRWEP  is an improvisatory game for guitar, voice, and three audience volunteers. A round begins with the judge (singer) drawing a prompt card. The three volunteers have 30 seconds to respond with a card that best (most ridiculously) fills in the blank. Rural Whirlpool whips each exchange into a full blown musical number. After 3-4 turns,  the overall winner will be determined and receive a very special prize.

*Rural Whirlpool renounces responsibility for anyone losing their job due to their participation in this event. 

3. Plane Of Immanence App
Thomas Echols

Presentation by Thomas Echols in preparation for future rehearsals in the fall of 2023. Designed for collaborative electronic improvisation, this app is “best thought of as a kind of simulation of remembering, forgetting, reconstructing, and reimagining the sonic details of lived experience.”

Sunday, July 24th 3:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

Joel Ferst + Sarah King + Zach Smith

Joel Ferst is an Austin-based performer, collaborative artist, educator, and arts administrator. As a performer and collaborator he feels comfortable in all sorts of settings, such as classical, avant-garde, and electronic. His performance interests include the elimination traditional concert setting by using lights, sound, movement, and multimedia to allow for a more immersive experience and connection for the audience. He is currently a masters student at the University of Texas at Austin where he studies saxophone with Dr. Stephen Page. He holds a bachelors degree in saxophone performance from Florida State University, studying with Dr. Geoffrey Deibel. 

Sarah King is an environmental sound field recordist and noise musician from San Antonio. Their work features various foley, architectural spaces and dynamic mechanical systems. Sarah’s work was incorporated in 2020 Wonderfruit festival in Bangkok, Thailand following sound studies of air.  Live, her performances are known for gritty use of found objects and unconventional melodic phrases displaying coldness. 

Zach Smith is a digital media artist and post-industrial / dark techno musician. Heavily using various esoteric sequencers, analogue equiment, and digital computer systensis programming Zach surveys esoteric environs. Their work was incorporated into the 2022 charity album by the rudiment organized by Stansilav Tolkchev and Sergey Chernyshoy. His project Mt.Borracho with Cameron Day has been declared as “inscrutable” by the Wire UK magazine. 

For this first time collaboration at the New Media Art & Sound Summit, the trio will be collaborating to improvise using saxophone, electronics, and field recordings.

Sunday, July 24th 4:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

Improvisational ensemble with:

Jordan Walsh – percussion
Ciyadh Wells – Guitar
Matthew Lyons – Guitar
James Tabata – Bass

Sunday, July 24th 6:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

Pamela Martinez is a Reiki master, educator, multi-instrumentalist and composer who creates music under the moniker Teletextile.  Her “Björk-like” sound (The Boston Globe) moves from vocal layering and “electronic wizardry” (Metronome Magazine) to “dense, stormy guitar, piano, and electronics” (Time Out New York). Martinez has toured extensively in the US, Europe, the UK, and Asia.  As a genre-hopping performer and musician, Martinez has performed violin at Carnegie Hall with a Carnatic Indian music ensemble, sang in San Francisco’s historic Fillmore Theater and takes part in performance art happenings in New York City. Her most recent directing and performing credits include Whisperlodge. The New York Times dubbed Whisperlodge “an unusual mix of theater and therapy” and has been featured in BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, Netflix and more with acclaim. 

Martinez passes on the craft of music to her community by teaching Reiki, violin, voice, piano, guitar, music theory and sound meditation to all ages and levels of students privately and at community education centers most recently as faculty at Brooklyn Music School, sound bath practitioner at Maha Rose Center for Healing (NYC) and Unlimited Thought Life Enrichment Center (SATX).

Saturday, July 23rd 7:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

CLARINETIST, COMPOSER, ELECTRONICS IMPROVISER, POET, RESEARCHER

Armond Dorsey (They/He) is a world-builder and interdisciplinary artist-researcher who synthesizes storytelling across mediums with research to deeply inquire “why not be free?”. Their creative work builds dream-like worlds as rituals for healing, social spaces fostering interconnection, and sites of fugitivity away from global antiBlackness through live performance, installation, and theater. Born and raised in Prince George’s County, MD, Armond amplifies intergenerational memory within his Black communities and the African diaspora at-large by drawing from archives & field recordings of the narratives Black folks have lived and continue living. Deeply listening to these narratives also ground their scholarly practice as an artist-researcher. Armond merges the fields of Black studies, music cognition, sound studies, and public health to develop music interventions and research methods that address racial stress and improve access to care for marginalized communities.

In the performance for NMASS, Armond will be playing a set with poetry, electronics and clarinet.

Sunday, July 24th 7:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

The Texas State Mysterium for New Music is a music ensemble founded in 1990 by Russell Riepe, Professor Emeritus of Music Composition Texas State University.  Currently under the direction of Richard Hall, the group pays homage not only to the performance of celebrated contemporary composers, but to the presentation and promotion of new and often improvisational works in the sound-arts. Public concerts embrace a wide variety of styles and media including dance improvisations and live electro-acoustic pieces utilizing real-time digital sound processing with laptop computers and video projection. The group has performed at festivals/conferences sponsored by the College Music Society, Association for Technology in Music Instruction, the International Society for Improvised Music and the International Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema.  As guests at the Hindemith Foundation, Blonay, Switzerland the Texas Mysterium for New Music Ensemble caught the attention of the European press while touring the continent:

“The power of the music connected with the public. Da capo.”—Ruhpoldinger Gemeindeanzeiger, Ruhpolding, Germany

“Not only does oil bubble up from Texas, but also an astonishing lively music–indeed, a ‘Mysterium.’ –Tiroler Tageszeitung, Innsbruck, Austria

The participants for this set at NMASS 2022 are:
Adam Koch, Thomas Torres, Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix, Richard D. Hall

Jeff Dahlgren has been an active member of the creative community in Austin for 11 years. His visual art collages oil/varnish mediums with digital media. You can find him Monday nights at Volstead offering Free Poems on Demand – a project dedicated to the value of shared creative experience. He often collaborates with experimental musicians and sound artists. The works presented at NMASS this year are about natural decay and blending with its process.  Digitally collaging the paintings means to contrast with an art/life preference for physical objects.

Saturday, July 23rd 4:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

The Whale began in the late 90’s in Austin, TX, as a saxophone/drums duo rooted in experimental jazz with a punk rock aesthetic. Performances soon evolved into a rotating cast of guest musicians ranging from upright bass players to guitarists and saxophonists.

The original idea behind the music was to remove set lists or prepared tunes and play completely improvised music. Since, their music has taken on a more composed approach, as heard on the 2018 debut Sweetheart and upcoming 2022 release Sweetheart 2. Past members and guests of The Whale include Craig Johnson, Adam Jones (Bill Callahan), Andrew Bergmann, Justin Carney, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Farad Ibrahimovic, Dylan Ilseng, and Daniel Durham.

The Whale are avant-garde practitioners who bring a love of all things modern jazz to their live sets of both poignant, composed pieces and roaring improvisations. The duo performed at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in 2018 and 2019 and have been mainstays at the Jazz for the Masses dayparty at the annual SXSW Music Festival since 2011. A resident of San Antonio, TX for over 25 years and originally from McAllen TX, saxophonist and Chef Eddie Vasquez seasons his original and highly energetic playing with the sound of many brilliant artists who came before him, like Eric Dolphy, Cannonball Adderley, and John Zorn. Vasquez also shares a love for punk rock and heavy metal.

Drummer Kory Cook moved to San Antonio, TX in 2010 from Austin, TX via Portland, OR. For over a decade, Cook held down the drum throne in S.A.’s own Sons of Hercules, and he brings that rock-n-roll attitude to the heartfelt, sonic wash of The Whale. Cook has performed with artists ranging from Eugene Chadbourne, Todd Snider, Roky Erickson, and Okkervil River to New Orleans’ own Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Cook is currently Music Director and Chief Announcer at Jazz 91.7 FM KRTU in San Antonio, TX.

Kory met Eddie at a local jam where the saxophonist blew a blistering solo that came to a screeching halt when the bandleader pushed Vasquez out the door for blowing out too many notes. That’s when Cook knew he wanted to make music with Vasquez.

Saturday, July 23rd 2:00pm at Crashbox (2022)

M Sanchez
Artist Name: Mishi Bloom
Instruments/Sounds: Synth, Vocals, and Field Recordings
Current Location: Austin, Texas
Project Name: Sojourner in Three Parts

Sojourner in Three Parts. Field recordings, synth, vocals, noise

Part 1: “The Past” was conceived as travel restrictions were lifted. It explores the familiarity of everyday sounds in five cities around the world. While many of these sounds play on the back burner of our consciousness, going without them for so long creates a new awareness of how loud the world really is. 

Part 2: “The Future” is about the longing we feel to be somewhere else, some time else. Whether it’s solitude one is seeking or a fantasy of a moment with someone else, fictitious worlds exist in future hopes, and if we can’t find them in reality, we search for them in our minds. Sometimes it is beautiful, and other times, it is pure chaos.(Sound Sensitivity Warning for Part 2)

Part 3: “The Present”