Category: Uncategorized

Atlas Maior creates original music that combines elements of Progressive Jazz, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and Indian music traditions. Their set in NMASS2019 is based off concepts they employed when making their 2014 album, Palindrome, exploring different methods of improvisation and cosmologies of sound. Many of these exercises utilized themes of symmetries in sound through different instrumental arrangements. The players will be Joshua Thomson (alto saxophone, flutes), Jonathan Horne (guitar), Josh Peters (oud), Gary Calhoun James (bass), and Aaron Parks (drums).

JAWWAAD is a trumpeter, composer, producer, educator, and hip hop artist. He is a founding member of the group, Shape of Broad Minds, whose critically acclaimed album, “Craft of the Lost Ark,” brought him international attention. The album featured MF Doom.  JAWWAAD has long been committed to being engaged and socially active, and infuses politics, history, and literature into his music. These things turn his work into an exploration of culture and humanity. JAWWAAD has performed with jazz, free jazz and improvisors, as well as hip hop artists, from around the world.  His appetite for all things music is apparent. As co-founder and producer of the band, The Young Mothers, he merges modern jazz, improvisation, hip hop, indie rock and caterwauling afro-grooves.

A trombone player, composer, improviser, and educator, David Dove has given performances and workshops across North America and internationally. As Founding Director of Nameless Sound (a non-profit organization in Houston, Texas), he curates/presents a concert series of international contemporary creative music, and has developed an approach, philosophy and practice of creative music education based on creativity and improvisation.

Jawwaad and Dave’s set at the 2019 COTFG New Media Art & Sound Summit is co-sponsored by Sonic Transmissions Festival.

Eschewing the collection of traditional titles that describe single elements of her body of work, Elizabeth refers to herself as a “New Renaissance Artist” that embraces a constant stream of change and rebirth in practice, which expands into a variety of media, chiefly an exploration of how sonic and spatial worlds can be manipulated to personify a variety of philosophies and principles both tangible as well as intangible.

Elizabeth has received recognition from press as well as scholars, for her conceptual compositions and commitment to inclusive programming. In addition to studies of her work, Elizabeth has been awarded several fellowships, grants, and residencies, in addition to sponsorships from Schoenhut Piano Company and Source Audio LLC. As an experimental filmmaker, her work has been shown at festivals including Women of the Lens (United Kingdom), and the African Smartphone International Film Festival (Nigeria). As a solo recording artist, Elizabeth is represented by Aerocade Music, her first solo album on the California-based label Quadrivium released worldwide in May 2018 to rave reviews. She is founder of the Florida International Toy Piano Festival, The New Music Conflagration, Inc., author of three books, and the subject of a number of scholarly articles, thesis papers, and other academic research. In March 2018, Elizabeth retired from nonprofit arts administration to focus on her international solo career, though she remains committed to the community through workshops and public speaking engagements. 

Quadrivium B-Side in performance takes the form of structured electronic improvisation unfolding as a programmatic journey of the flux between the modern post-ontological world where a secondary self and dual reality exists by means of a persistent silent web presence, and the world of antiquity where we had only one being that was largely defined by our experiences in on the physical plane of reality.

For a portion of Elizabeth A. Baker‘s performance during NMASS 2019 she will be joined by Austin based performers Samuel Friedland, Iris Sidikman, Laura Brackney and Sonya Gonzales. A visual component to the set will be provided by Bahareh Khoshooee.

This is a new project between pianist/keyboardist Thollem McDonas and flutist Seetha Shivaswamy. These two prolific musicians have created structured improvisations specifically for this performance that draws on their respective individual histories, studies and influences. Both are prodigious musicians who have ventured far from their classical training into a lifetime of extremely diverse musical experiences. This will be a concert with many surprises and challenges, through a complex and exciting array of twists and turns, as the duo dives deep into their Omni-Idiomatic worlds.

Seetha Shivaswamy, flutist, performs as a soloist and chamber musician in concerts throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. She has been a featured performer at South by Southwest Music Festival, Fusebox Festival, SAARANG at IIT Madras, and Austin Chamber Music Festival. Her flute playing can be heard on many movie soundtracks, PBS documentaries, TV commercials, and video games. Seetha holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor’s Degree from Ball State University, where she studied classical flute performance. She has a certificate in contemporary flute technique and improvisation from her studies in Europe with the Dutch Flute Virtuoso Wil Offermans.

Thollem McDonas is a perpetually traveling pianist, keyboardist, composer, improviser, singer-songwriter, activist, author and teacher. He is well known internationally as an acoustic piano player in the free jazz and post-classical worlds, as the lead vocalist for the Italian agit-punk band Tsigoti and as an electronic keyboardist through a multitude of projects. Since 2005, he has played over 1,500 concerts throughout N. America and Europe and has released over 60 albums on 21 different vanguard labels to international critical acclaim. A brief cross section of his many recent collaborators include William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, Nels Cline, Rob Mazurek and Carmina Escobar. He is the founding director of Estamos Ensemble, a Mexican-American cross border ensemble for musical exchange as well as a published author about art, politics and his travels in The Anthology of Essays On Deep Listening, Full Moon Magazine (Prague) and First American Art Magazine.

Nigerian-American experimental artist/producer/sonic weaver/filmmaker Elijah Jamal will be visiting us from Chicago! incongruous display of mercurial beats, improvisational live sampling, and avant-garde audio visuals. chicago tethered òrìsà of fuschia & somewhere. to be continued.

T Putnam Hill

T Putnam Hill is a writer, editor, guitarist and electroacoustic musician currently based in Austin, Texas. In recordings and performance, Hill produces impromptu audio collages of various sound materials—from live guitar to field recordings to feedback loops—to create auditory environments that drift between stasis and disorder, from harmonic to discordant, and from the organic to synthetic.

Hill is an active member of Phonography Austin, a sound arts organization dedicated to the exploration of phonography and acoustic ecology, and founder of Loma Editions, a nascent multimedia label focused on electroacoustic music and experimental literature.

Sean O’Neill

Sean O’Neill works with sound, light, and electronic media. He explores both the visible light spectrum and the audible frequency range to examine the ways in which perception shapes the dynamics of spatiality. His work often incorporates elements of field  recordings, environmental/urban impressions, found materials, and embedded electronics. 

NMASS 2019 project description:

For NMASS 2019, Hill and O’Neill present an outdoor, spatialized sound collage of field recordings, site-specific environmental sounds, radio, and other repurposed electronic media. Set beneath the Airport Blvd. overpass just beyond the eastern edge of the Ground Floor Theatre parking lot, the loosely composed, partially improvised performance employs digital processing, physical activation of resonant objects, and feedback networks to engage the audience in a real-time world-building experience in which discrete sonic elements gradually pieced together form an uncanny unreality, an illusory soundscape that drifts between familiarity, musical composition, and collapse. The sound piece is accompanied by digital video art by Grainger Weston.

Donny Who Loved Bowling began in Chicago in the late 1990s. Joe Griffin and Christopher Petkus met on an independent movie set, became friends, and started making music together for fun. That partnership has lasted through 20 years and six full-length albums.

Christopher’s move to Austin in 2000 meant finding a way to collaborate over the internet—after their first album, “Tree Fort,” was released in 2002 the pair recored a set of cover songs (entitled “Butcher Covers”) to get the feel of trading files and making music in two different places. 2010’s “Screeching And Exploding” solidified their working methods with a set of original material. Cataclysmic life events informed 2013’s “Headstone,” and the pair rebounded for 2015’s heavily abstract, dream-informed, and ridiculously long-titled “The Approaching Flock Of Birds Is A Metaphor For The Onset Of Madness.” 2016’s “Avignon” adds musique concrete and jazz influences to the mix.

For this first-ever live performance, Joe and Christopher will be augmented by Scott Charvet, Cynthia Goosby, Andrew Trent, and Paul Connolly

JA$$IE lives and works in the District of Columbia. Originally, from Laredo, Texas, a border city to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico—the wave of the Rio Grande, a bank for migratory birds, and the duality of two cultures/economies/languages has been a major wealth of inspiration that informs her music, drawings and research as she continually finds new ways to draw and remix samples and textures inspired from the brown mud of the river.

JA$$IE’s artistic practice in grounded in light & sound and the ways it articulates space. By applying a conceptual and theoretical framework her practice crosses wires, disciplines and borders to extend, fold, and push drawing, sculpture and music—questions of composition, physicality of form, and the ephemeral and immaterial as material to generate work that draws attention to what lies at the edge of perceptibility— placing the work and audience at the bank and in a new relationship.

She problematizes the industry of music with respect to various forms of recording: sampling, notation, code, mixing, performance, genre, improvisation/chance as a system, and she measures this information, takes it out of context in which they are normally seen and/or heard, and reshapes and represents them anew.

Her work oscillates between states of representation and fragmentation, acoustic and electronic, object and process and takes the form of site-specific, interactive installations, drawings, collage, photography, video, music, performance, research, writing and works for internet and paper.

She earned a Master in Audio Technology from American University in 2018 with a concentration in Computer Music, a Master in Studio Art with a focus on Interdisciplinary Drawing and Critical Theory in 2011 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Bachelor
of Fine Arts in Studio Painting from Texas State University. JA$$IE won second place in the 2018 Guthman New Musical Instrument Design Competition, with her instrument gramFX— making her the first woman to compete and win Georgia Tech’s prestigious award. Jassie’s exhibited her work in the 2016 Pure Data Conference at Stevens Institute for Technology in NJ and at the Reinstitute at Guest Spot in Baltimore. She has performed at ShapeShifter Lab in Gowanus, NY and Wave Farm in Acra, NY. JA$$IE was an artist in residence at Signal Culture in Owego, NY and her poems are archived in Ditch, a International magazine for contemporary
poetry.

Jassie will be utilizing GramFX in her performance. GramFX is an augmented gramophone that utilizes an open air gesture control scheme for control over processing of acoustic and electronic sound. I’m interested in old and new recording/playback technologies and making something new.

GramFX consists of a gramophone, a leap motion camera, 78 rpm records, a steel needle and a patch made from scratch in Pd Vanilla. Using one to many mapping strategies, effects parameters are mapped to Palm position and both raw independent coordinates and relative coordinate data. Three fingers map FX parameters, which activate effects and techniques that are borrowed/inspired by “Dj’s” from various time periods, such as: Hindemith, Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, DJ Kool Herec, Grand Master Flash, Daphne Oram, and Suzanne Ciani. Additional synthesis is generated based on real-time audio analysis of the acoustic gramophone output.

In all, GramFX is capable of granular synthesis, pitch shifting, variable playback speeds, and phase-vocoded streams of stretched audio. It can be played by physically locking the needle in a groove and by activating the DRFX chain with hand gesture controls and zones.

A.R. Abbauen is the solo project of Austin, Texas artist Michael Cockrell. Under this moniker, Cockrell utilizes four track cassette players and effects to create plunderphonics focused compositions. Built of pitch-warped repetition and thoughtfully layered melodies, each piece results in the disclosure of a space, or environment. Fixed loops come in and out of play in various forms, coalesce and eventually suspend the listener within a room of aural objects awaiting examination. Other undertakings of Michael’s include being an active member of Industrial Post-Punk group, Deep Cross, operating the limited run cassette label Somatic and releasing material under the name Jezzebeam. Visual accompaniment for A.R. Abbauen’s 2019 NMASS performance will be executed by Victor Enriquez(Drip//Cuts).

In 2017, diplomats from the United States in Cuba experienced an attack with a sonic weapon described by one as “an invisible wall cutting straight through his room.” Immediate effects ¹ included pain and disorientation. Longer­term effects included mild brain injury, with symptoms including cognitive impairment and memory issues.

The immediate reaction from the science community was inconclusive; the effects didn’t match what we know about sonic weapons . At this point most researchers believe that the weapon ² was most likely microwave radiation modulated by ultrasonic sound . ³

Since early 2018, we have been experimenting with reproducing this sonic effect at an intensity that is low enough to avoid the short­term or long­term effects, and merely lets you appreciate the brilliant weirdness of ultrasonic sound.

For the 2019 New Media Art and Sound Summit we would like to present the results of our experiments as a safe sound and light installation, in which the audience is able to voluntarily confront an attack on the senses.

About Thomas Bey William Bailey

Thomas Bey William Bailey is a psycho­acoustic sound artist, researcher and writer on saturation culture. Working with a number of different communications media, TBWB’s body of work investigates and interrogates notions of utopia, anthropocentrism, and “the extreme”; refusing to reject any unpopular cultural manifestation as invalid until its more nuanced aspects have been brought to light.

A restlessly ‘transitional’ and uncategorizable artist, TBWB has performed, recorded, and taught in several distinct global regions, sharing with others the joys of chaos and of the valuation of creative process over end product.

About Alex Keller

Alex Keller is an audio artist, sound designer, curator and teacher based in Austin, Texas. His work is in the media of performance, installation, and recorded release, and reflects his interests in architecture, language, abstraction and music.

He is an active audio production professional, has taught classes in media production at the Art Institute of Austin, Shoreline College, and the Art Institute of Seattle, and has won awards for his creative work from the Austin Chronicle, the City of Seattle, Puget Sound Transit, and Jack Straw Productions.

Alex received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and an MLA from St. Edward’s University in 2005. He is a founding member of Phonography Austin and the Mimeomeme collective.

1 _{https://apnews.com/697536f065e6470eaa5ccfc35061e7ce}
2 _{https://apnews.com/697536f065e6470eaa5ccfc35061e7ce}
3 _{https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic­attack­cuba­microwave.html}