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Urs Leimgruber (saxophones), born in Lucerne, Switzerland, is a key member of the European scene of contemporary improvised music. He specializes in solo concerts and performs regularly with the Urs Leimgruber/Jacques Demierre/Barre Phillips Trio and with Quartet Noir (with Marilyn Crispell, Joëlle Léandre, Fritz Hauser) in Europe, Canada, USA, Japan, and Cuba.  During the 1970s, he was the co-founder of the Electric jazz and free-music group, OM.

On Thursday, June 11th at 8:30pm, Leimgruber teams up with local trumpeter Peter Evans and cellist Okkung Lee for an evening of free improvised music.

Roulette: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?

Urs Leimgruber: I am a musician practising instant-composing as a performer, here and now!

R: Are there any people you see as instrumental in your development as an artist (influences, heroes, colleagues…)?
UL: The musicians I am playing with in regular or ad-hoc groups — for example Barre Phillips and many others….

R: Chocolate or Vanilla?
UL: Chocolate with Vanilla and Cream!

R: How did you get into music?
UL: I remember when I was a kid about three years old, my mother playing the piano while I was dancing.

R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?
UL: At the end of the sixties, I was 17 when I was  working in a rhythm and blues band. We played one piece completely free. During this musical experience I had a vision of how to experiment in sound and music. Afterward I listened to John Coltrane records, and that was a shock from one day to the other. What a universe of sound and spirituality. His music taught me to go my own way and find my personal musical language.

R: What genre of music (pre-defined or newly defined) would you fit your work into?
UL: improvised music

R: What is it that you want people to hear/think about/be tuned into in your work?
UL: Its all about listening, participation, responsibility, emotion, sensitivity and tension. Specialists hear of course also the musical context in terms of  form, structure and technique. But the main thing is all about the sound message itself.

R: What do you, as a composer/performer of music, listen for in other people’s work- what moves you? What tickles your brain?
UL: Any kind of sound, between singing birds in complete silence and a traffic-jam in Manhattan.

Aaron Siegel writes experimental music that lies at the intersection of abstraction and intuition. His work ranges from solo compositions and chamber music to improvised ensembles and collaborative theater pieces. The Aaron Siegel Ensemble will be premiering two movements of a work for percussion and pianos entitled, “Preparing the Past.” Drawing on tangled narratives of memory and anticipation, “Preparing the Past,” juxtaposes the moment of observation with the trail of its reflections. Also on the program will be selections from Siegel’s “Book of Notions,” for piano and vibraphone.

On Friday, May 29th at 8:30pm, Aaron will be joined by Emily Manzo, Anna Dagmar, Joe Bergen, Mike McCurdy, Chris Graham, and Al Cerulo.

Roulette: What is it that you want people to hear/think about/be tuned into in your work?

Aaron Siegel: I think a lot about counterpoint as a concept in my work.  Not in a narrow music way, but in the sense that no gesture of mine is isolated.  Every new movement exists in relationship to a background, another gesture or even a feeling.  I think the same is true for the experience of listening to music at a concert.  When I perform a piece of music in concert, I expect that it exists in relationship to the room it is being played in, the mood of the audience, the thoughts in each listeners mind.  I would like to think that people who listen to my work are okay with the constant activity in their minds–that they let their thoughts drift towards and away from the music itself.  If my music allows for this kind of counterpoint to occur then, as far as I am concerned, it is working.

R: What do you, as a composer/performer of music, listen for in other people’s work- what moves you? What tickles your brain?

AS: More than anything else, I am interested in work that reveals a personal relationship to the beautiful.  This may be a slightly old-fashioned point of view, but it seems most resonant with me.  Whether I am listening to a concert, reading a book or experiencing a piece of visual art, I need to register some attention to beauty.  This, of course, leaves much room for qualification.  What does my sense of the beautiful have to do with a piece of art created by someone else, and is my sensibility consistent in any way from work to work?  These are good questions, and ones that I don’t know the answer to.  I find some work that describes or demonstrates terrible things to be quite beautiful, and I also find some work that is consonant and pristine to be uninteresting.  Ultimately, I want to be able to enter into a work, and given time to connect with it.  And it doesn’t hurt to leave a lot of questions and mystery in the place of certitude.  Nothing turns me off more than art that, like an eager child waving her hand in class, knows all of the answers.

R: Describe, if you can, the cloud of ideas that you’re making work under these days – in terms of music, current events, new technologies, personal.

AS: I often have the experience of missing the present time as it is happening.  I am certain that others have this feeling, too.  I think as we become more able to document every image and sound of our lives, the less likely we are to experience our lives in the present tense.  I am not certain that this is a terrible thing.  It’s much too complicated for me to say.  And it’s also not necessarily something associated with the current developments in technology (though they certainly are huge).  Basic photographs (which pre-date digital technology by at least a century) seem just as potent of a way to focus on how one will experience the present from the vantage point of the future—namely, as the past.  The central piece for my concert at Roulette is called Preparing the Past.  I was inspired in part by the novelist W.G. Sebald’s novel, “Austerlitz,” which, along with a wonderfully imaginative text, includes nostalgic and mysterious photos that bring a second (or third or fourth) dimension to the narrative experience.  With Preparing the Past, I am interested in exploring the narrative that emerges as a moment is recorded, scrutinized and ultimately reimagined.

Born in New York City, Matthew Ostrowski has been active since the early 1980s, working in improvised music, music theater, electroacoustic composition, and audio installations.

On Thursday, May 21st at 8:30pm, Ostrowski will perform a new multichannel work, “Patterns of Changing Light”, in which he will try to come to terms with various poles of electronic music: texture and gesture, sampling and synthesis, acousmatics and diegesis. In addition, he will play some old chestnuts, and special guests are definitely possible.
Roulette: Do you consider yourself more of a composer or a performer?

Matthew Ostrowski: I don’t know how relevant a distinction that is anymore.  For music now the boundaries between musical praxis and composition are pretty hard to make, regardless of genre.  If I’m developing musical algorithms which I’m controlling in real time, where does one begin and the other end?  Is writing code composition?  If I’m mixing premade audio onstage, is that really performing? Is someone who uses a sequencer and samples to make show tunes composing, or performing in non-real time?  The model of document and interpretation has been largely superseded, by jazz composition on one end (did Monk write Brilliant Corners through the same process that Schoenberg wrote Moses and Aaron?), and by technology (which blurs the entire idea of description versus action) on the other.  Bach’s contemporaries thought of him primarily as an improvisor — we think of him as a composer because paper was the only available recording technology.  Which was he, really?  Which is Barry Manilow, for that matter?  I think composer/performer is a social distinction rather than a functioning artistic one:  In the era of bourgeois art, the main difference was that the composer dined at the patron’s table, and the performers were eating in the kitchen with the servants.  By that standard, I’m a performer.

R: How did you get into music?

MO: I had always had eclectic tastes in music, but never thought of it as a vocation until I took a class in electronic music at the New School with Lefferts Brown when I was 16, basically to avoid getting a summer job.  I had a casual interest in music prior to that, but nothing serious — percussion in the high school band, not much more.  I became completely fascinated by analog synthesis and its intricate interrelations between processes, and it just ate my brain.  At the same time I was exposed to even more music — from Webern to DNA, and although I tried to fight it, it wound up taking over.

R:  What is music?

MO: If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be trying to make any.

R: What is it that you want people to hear/think about/be tuned into in your work?

MO: I would say that my primary interest is in trying to create experiences, to realize an environment in which things happen, and the thing I want to make happen is to bring the listener to a state of awareness about the act of being aware, if that makes any sense.  We are constantly assembling vast amounts of sensory information into a more or less united reality in our own minds every second we are awake, and we don’t even notice.  Amazing, if you think about it.  We aren’t really confronted with solid objects, logical ideas, or consistent feelings — we’re assembling them.  What I am interested in doing is creating a situation in which the listener can become aware of that activity — which they are already incessantly engaged in — and bringing it to the forefront.  I use a great deal of very diverse information which changes very quickly, with asymmetrical structures, and I want my audience to work a bit to assemble something meaningful from it — I believe it is the act of doing that work, and being aware of it, in which aesthetic experience happens.

R: What do you, as a composer/performer of music, listen for in other people’s work- what moves you? What tickles your brain?

MO: I don’t listen as a composer, I listen as an audience.  I like good time management, on whatever scale — Feldman or Zorn, as long as it’s well crafted.  Music is really mostly about manipulating time, and when I feel its movement strongly, I’m happy. I also like having my attention directed in an unexpected way — I like hearing the small details done well.   That said, I also have a lot of respect for an elegant hit on the head with a hammer.

R: What was the last music you listened to?

MO: Today? Harry Smith’s American folk music compilation.

R: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.

MO: The new piece I’m working on right now is a bit of a new direction for me — I’ve always been a gesture person rather than a texture person, but I’ve worked up some techniques by which I feel I can make textural work that has enough complexity in it to hold my interest, and ‘Patterns of Changing Light’ is really a first go at some of those ideas.  It’s kind of a reaction to my own aesthetic habits:  I’m thinking more in terms of articulating masses in time and space, complex but with a unity of some sort, and scaling that idea up and down in time — using these masses and their juxtapositions on several different compositional levels.  Plus I’ll probably play an old piece, and throw in an improv for fun.

Brooklyn-based vocalist/percussionist/composer Mikey IQ Jones’ kitchen-sink collusionist aesthetics center around the real-time manipulation and structuring of raw vocal, idiophonic, membranophonic, and domestic materials into thickets of rhythm and harmony via an assortment of samplers. In English:  On Wednesdsay, May 20th at 8:30pm, he’ll be singing, banging on an assortment of drums, percussion, and household junk, sampling (and sometimes looping) the elements live, and in essence performing new pieces which are to be released sometime in late 2009. There will also be costumes and props, because it’s Mixology time, and that’s just the way he rolls.

Mikey IQ Jones performs alone and with Brown Wing Overdrive, whose most recent album “ESP Organism” was released by Tzadik in late 2008.

Roulette: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?

IQ: Most definitely a performer. I don’t compose in any sort of preconceived “proper” notion, or by a common concept of composition. Though I certainly organize the sounds and concepts (especially when in songform), nothing is traditionally scored, per se — though at present I am working on the development of some sort of scoring system so that I can actually notate the means of construction should anyone ever want to attempt to reproduce the pieces & songs without my collaboration.

There is also a heavy performance art aesthetic which runs deep into the music I make, be it in solo or collaborative form. Much of what I do is centered around the manipulation of bodily sounds and rhythms as well as the sounds and rhythms of drums and household objects, and the means in which I produce said sounds and rhythms opens many doors for theatricality and performance. I’d like to believe that it also makes watching me perform much more enjoyable. If I’m going to leave my home and pay money to see someone, I’d like to walk away thinking and feeling that the performer set out to push themselves and/or the audience into a different frame of mind than they were in before they left.

R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?

IQ: UK improviser and pianist Steve Beresford gave me the initial inspiration to improvise, and to accept and appreciate my own personal carnivorous culture diet. Seeing his name all over many records that I owned and loved – in collaboration with people like the Slits, John Zorn, Adrian Sherwood, and Frank Chickens (to name but a small few) – combined with a collusionist aesthetic that embraced eclecticism rather than compartmentalization and a Marxian (think Harpo, not Karl) sense of perversity, gave me the confidence to step forward, takerisks, and embrace improvisation as a tool for developing creative output. Hearing Beresford’s 1980 LP “The Bath of Surprise” as a teenager was a watershed moment that changed me forever — I never
made music the same way ever again. That, combined with a somewhat hermetic childhood which left me at the mercy of my own imagination to keep myself company, provided the foundations which I’m now building upon.

R: What is it that you want people to hear/think about/be tuned into in your work?

IQ: People are free to think and feel whatever they please about my music, but I’d hope to at least provoke a strong enough reaction, be it good OR bad, that will perhaps go on to inspire and/or influence them to take initiative and create or be proactive on some personal level.

R: What do you, as a composer/performer of music, listen for in other people’s work- what moves you? What tickles your brain?

IQ: Many of my favorite artists, performers, and composers create soundworlds which I completely inhabit during the record’s duration — they take me to an entirely new environment or at least drastically alter my surrounding environment as I listen to the work. I’m always hypnotized by rhythms, whether it’s from a record of Brazilian sambas or from the dryers at my local launderette. My brain gets tickled by the thought of combining those samba rhythms with those of the clothes dryer — and that’s essentially what I set out to do in my own work.

R: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.

IQ: At Roulette, I’ll be performing a set of songs and improvisations based around what will be my next record, “How I Learned to Love the Drum”. During the performance, I’ll be creating rhythms, harmonies, and melodies using the sounds of my body and voice, as well as the sounds and rhythms of a set of percussion and household objects, all of which hold some sort of personal connection to me. The performance is entirely solo, save for a bit of audience participation, and based around my use of live sampling technology and the direct connection I have developed between it and my own body. My solo work has revolved around my desire to confront the adversities I’ve faced on a physical, emotional, and logistical level as a result of my diabetes, and to essentially push myself into a heightened sense of self-awareness. When I perform, it’s 100%, and I push myself in a solo setting to my absolute mental, physical, and emotional limits… sometimes even beyond that. Because the performance is taking place during the Mixology Festival, I’ll be heightening the performance side of things even further with a more elaborate use of costumes, masks, and even some props. I’ve been known to perform in masks in the past, but this will be even more elaborate. It’s also two days after my 27th birthday, so I can’t think of a more enjoyable (and self-indulgent!) way to celebrate!

R: Who are your major influences (musicians, art, literature, culture, etc)?

IQ: Influences are funny in that, from a musical perspective at least, they don’t necessarily show themselves in the final results. There are plenty of people and things which have influenced me in knowing what I DON’T want to achieve. I also find myself being influenced by everything from Yoruba tongue-twisters to the empanadas I ate for dinner two nights ago. I’m also constantly inspired and fascinated by the sounds and contexts resulting in spending most of my life living in New York City. With that being said, there are plenty of influential seeds which have sprouted visible and audible references in what I do — from the early efforts to create song-oriented compositions from musique concrète-inspired production means by the likes of the Art of Noise and Yello, the dense and intense sonic landscapes of Public Enemy and their Bomb Squad production team, straight through to current sampling pioneers like Matthew Herbert, who shared my distaste for preset sound technologies and embraced the natural, flawed sound characteristics of everyday objects placed into rhythmic contexts to create new timbres and pulses… these people have all taken cues, be it intentional or not, from composers like Cage who sought out to recontextualize the sonic palette and strip away definitions of what could be used and construed as music. That, combined with my love of complex songwriters like Serge Gainsbourg (probably my biggest hero on many different levels for many different reasons), who embraced intense wordplay through use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and brilliant metaphor, an importance on rhythm, as well as the desire for constant recontextualization, played an enormous role in the development of my own personal creative vision.

R: Chocolate or Vanilla?

IQ: Chocolate, no question about it. Vanilla has terrible, terrible underlying connotations. Chocolate’s very much like music in a sense — you’ve got different varieties (milk, dark, semisweet, bitter, even white), and those varieties have differing textures and flavors which, when mixed and integrated with other flavors (fruits, coffees, even vanilla) create new flavors and textures therein. Can you tell I’m a chocoholic? It’s dangerous, considering I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for 18 years.

R: What was the last music you listened to?

IQ: Today’s soundtrack:

Bod Guibert “Les Pyromanes et Sicot Presentent” (1970′s Afro-French zouk music, lovely & infectious. The rhythms are wonderful here.)

Nite Jewel “Good Evening” (Brilliant LA-based one-woman artpop project centered around synthesizers, drum machines, and tape edits. Great, hazy, dreamy vocals, too. One of my favorite new artists, and my favorite “pop” album of the past year.)

Joyce “Visions of Dawn” (A spellbinding 1976 collaboration between the Brazilian singer Joyce, bassist Mauricio Maestro, and master percussionist Nana Vasconcelos — perhaps the best thing she ever recorded!)

Alain Bashung “Play Blessures” (A 1982 collaboration between two of my songwriting heroes – Bashung and Serge Gainsbourg. This is one of those few records that comes with me to the desert island. Bashung’s passing in March deeply saddened me in a way few performers’ deaths usually do — he was brilliant until the very end; his last album “Bleu Petrole” features guitar and dobro work by downtown fave Marc Ribot and is also highly recommended.)

V/A “Bulawayo Jazz: Southern Rhodesia & Zimbabwe 1950-52″ (Hugh Tracey recordings of criminally underheard jazz & dance bands led by August Musarurwa in the early 1950′s; this collection sits alongside the few available collections of South African kwela & jive music as an important document of jazz’s development outside of the USA. Absolutely amazing!)