See Hear Now: Visible Music – DAVID & GISELA GAMPER

Title: 3 nights – 3 themes - 3 nows

See Hear Now is a real-time music and video collaboration that seeks to merge the sonic and the visible, and to transport the performers and audience to a transcendent experience. In their individual work, the artists are fascinated by sounds and images from nature and life. To create his live improvisations, David begins with the acoustic sounds he draws from his piano, small instruments and found objects. When he expands them through live electronic transformations and spatial diffusion they retain the power of natural sound. Gisela, a photographer, has extended her image making into video and projection. Using multiple projectors and mirrors, her layered video imagery collages movements and rhythms she observes in our world. With a system David developed, Gisela performs her imagery with the same immediacy as David performs his music. After a year of working in their studio, they look forward to creating another unique installation in Roulette’s space. Each night’s improvisation focuses on a different theme.

See Hear Now premiered in upstate New York in 1999 and over the following year performed around the eastern US, including the Knitting Factory and Roulette in New York City. In a series of loft installations, the Gampers explored alternative ways of immersing both audience and performers. Performances have included guest artists such as Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Stephen Vitiello, Fritz Hauser, Chris Gamper, Straylight’s Geoff Gersh and Jason Finkelman, the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, Monique Buzzarté and Zanana. RouletteTV produced a performance which was first broadcast in 2003. The duo was featured in Brooklyn College’s Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2003, the 2004 SOUNDPlay festival in Toronto and in Juilliard’s 2005 Beyond the Machine festival in New York City. They released their DVD See Hear Now: Visible Music in 2005. Recent installations and performances include the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Roulette’s Festival of Mixology, Optisonic Tea at Diapason Gallery in NYC. and ISSUE: Project Room’s Sensorium festival in a Brooklyn silo.

David Gamper moves freely among the worlds of music performance, improvisation, and electronic instrument design. These passions merge in the performer controlled sound processing environments he has created for acoustic improvising musicians. He is a member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) since 1990, and has performed frequently as a duo with Oliveros. The recording of their concert at the IJsbreker in Amsterdam has been described as “the pinnacle of the Oliveros-Gamper collaborations, music that through its depth, reveals ever more profound expression.” Gamper’s solo piece Conch was in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s BitStreams exhibition and is on the CD of sound art from that show. He appears on many recordings with Deep Listening Band and others.

Gisela Gamper, prior to her video work with See Hear Now, has been photographing and exhibiting for over 35 years. For See Hear Now she expanded her fascination with textures and collage into the realms of movement and color. The video she creates for live mixing in improvised performance captures the rhythms and colors observed in our world. Gamper exhibited widely and among her grants and numerous awards are two fellowship grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and the Hasselblad Cover Award in 1991. Gamper’s photographs are in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art in Albany, NY and in many private collections.

More information is at www.seehearnow.org

Traditional and Experimental works for the qin (7-string zither).

PART I
1. Wu Ye Ti (Crows Caw in the Night)
Traditional folk love songs of the southern and northern dynasties(420-589).
2. Jiu Kuang (Drunken Man)
Composition by Ruan ji, a famous poet of the western jin dynasty (265-420).

PART II
"What is Singing", a group improvisation based on the music piece 'Shen Ren Chang', one of the
oldest, anonymous, tunes in the literature for the Chinese Zither---Qin.

Ms. Wu, is an award-winning guqin player who began her training at the China Conservatory in 1991 at the age of twelve. (The guqin is a seven-stringed zither with a 3,000 year history in China.) In 1997, when she was eighteen, she was invited to perform with the Taipei Folk Orchestra, the youngest guqin player from China ever to perform in Taiwan. The same year she entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she majored in guqin while studying the cello
and double bass as well, and in 2004 she became the first musician in China to receive a Master’s degree in guqin performance. Ms. Wu’s dual education in both Chinese and Western music has inspired her to seek a new voice for the guqin in contemporary music, and she has performed and recorded with jazz, rock, and classical musicians. In 2005 she performed with China’s foremost rock star, Cui Jian, in his solo concert at the Capital Gymnasium in Beijing, and in 2006 she collaborated with the distinguished composer Liu Sola in the production of a contemporary opera,
The Fantasy of the Red Queen, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Ms. Wu has made several brief performance tours in Asia and Europe but this is her first opportunity to travel to the U.S.

THE LAND OF PLENTY: a collaborative performance effort by performer/video- artist Deke Weaver and performer/composer Chris Peck that will include multiple video projections, dancing sandhill cranes, Greek hurdlers, ordering Chinese food with a headset, a passionate re-enactment of A Discussion of Form, and a meditation on the Great Plains.

Deke Weaver: My award winning original performance work has been presented in Wales, Scotland, Seattle, L.A., Philadelphia, Dallas, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Wyoming, Colorado, New England, California, and throughout the Southwest. In New York my work has been presented at Dixon Place, HERE, PS 122, The Moth, Tonic, Galapagos and other venues. A resident at Yaddo and Ucross, a four- time fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and three-time recipient of NEA regional grants in film/video making my video work has screened and broadcast in film/ video festivals and on public television stations in Russia, Brazil, Australia, Europe and the United States (PBS, Channel 4/U.K., MOMA, The New York Video Festival, The Berlin Video Festival, MOMA/NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; many others). Commissions, fellowships, and grants from the City of San Francisco, the State of New York, the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Illinois and other public and private foundations have supported my work. I teach in the School of Art + Design’s New Media Department at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). www.dekeweaver.com

Chris Peck is a Michigan-born, Brooklyn-based composer investigating the peculiarities of listening and perception through a diverse practice that includes works for large untrained groups, interdisciplinary performance collaborations, and improvisation with the computer. His frequent work with dance has included scores for RoseAnne Spradlin, Eleanor Bauer, John Jasperse, David Dorfman, Jeanine Durning, Ming Yang/Dance Forum Taipei, Abby Yager, and others. Ongoing projects include Listening Music for the Age of Crystal Moon Cone, a series of ambient electroacoustic performances and recordings with Stephen Rush and Jon Moniaci, Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir, directed with choreographer Beth Gill, the Live Sh-- performance series curated with Chase Granoff, live electronic music for The Intensity Police Are Working My Last Gay Nerve with video artist Charles Atlas, Manpack Variant, an electronics duo with Jaime Fennelly, and electric guitar accompaniment for the diary entries of Asubtout's Eleanor Hullihan and Katy Pyle.  Visit intermittentmusic.com for more info.

MARINA ROSENFELD

Composer Marina Rosenfeld is joined by Raz Mesinai (computer) in a presentation of new works for her "phonographic" speaker: a horn-shaped loudspeaker that spins at 33 1/3 r.p.m., sweeping the room with arcs and circles of electronic and acoustic sound. Rosenfeld will premiere several new pieces for voice, turntables, computer processing and trumpet (with special guest Ari Fenton, trumpet). Rosenfeld is a noted composer, improviser and artist whose works have been commissioned in recent years by the Whitney Biennial 2008 and 2002; Creative Time; Tate Modern; The Kitchen; Artists Space; Contemporary Jewish Museum; Electronic Music Foundation and many others. Frequent collaborators include Christian Marclay, DJ Olive, Lee Ranaldo, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and Kaffe Matthews, among many others.

BEN MANLEY

Composer and experimenter Ben Manley explores the natural variability of wind, amplified small vibrations, and resonant objects to generate dynamic musical environments.  Manley has worked extensively in music and audio in New York City and has presented solo performances and installations of light and sound across the country and overseas.  Manley has collaborated with Sean G. Meehan, Connie Crothers, Ursula Scherrer, Jim Staley, Dan Evans Farkas, Jens Brand, Linda Austin, and the Manley Family Trio, and has appeared with Composers Inside Electronics at the Lincoln Center and with Essential Music and the Downtown Ensemble.  He has installed realizations of works by Alvin Lucier, including The Queen of the South and Music on a Long Thin Wire, at Studio Five Beekman, Greenwich House Music School, ISSUE Project Room, Subtropics 18 in Miami, and MFA, Boston.  As a curator, Manley has presented festivals of experimental music at the Jack Tilton Gallery and elsewhere including House Mix: 19 Pianos, 19 Improvisers & 19 Microphones (a collective performance/recording/playback event), Electro-Whammy (w/ Ron Kuivila, Ben Manley, Matt Rogalsky), and say YES! to experimental music (w/ Jens Brand, Dan Evans Farkas, Ben Manley, Phill Niblock).

RICHARD LERMAN

Transducer Series Pieces for 2 DVD's & Computer (2008)
       this piece uses excerpts from my 53 super 8 sound film series
       made while traveling in N/S America, Australia, NZ and Indonesia.

Half Lives-Nuclear Waste 2  (2008)
       amplified tuning forks, laser light, video and public domain film

Travelon Gamelon (1978 - 30th Anniversary NYC Premiere)
       for 3 amplified bicycles and 6 performers

Biography
I have created electronic music and interdisciplinary art since the 1960’s offering performances, installations and screenings in N/S America, Asia, Europe, Australia and NZ.  For 30 years, I have designed and built functional microphones using piezo disks. They pick up sounds too quiet for our ears, extending our hearing.  I use these in my performances/installations and/or to record sound from many sites and locations.

Travelon Gamelon will be performed for the Missoula, Montana Museum of Art this April.  Recent installations include Alga-Aqua, in Vigo, Spain and Sao Pedro do Sul, Portugal and Half Lives-Nuclear Waste in Phoenix.  Recent collaborative work with Mona Higuchi includes Fences/Borders-USA/Mexico, at the Museum of World Culture, Gothenborg, Sweden and Relocation: Alaska, at the Phoenix Public Library.   I recently completed editing Death Valley Cycle, video/audio recordings from each month of the year at this extraordinary location. 

I have received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Arizona and Massachusetts Arts Councils, the NEA and many others. A 2 CD set of earlier music and audio work, including Travelon Gamelon was on EM Records, Osaka, Japan in 2007. 

SEM Ensemble

The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble
Petr Kotik, Conductor
Thomas Buckner, Baritone
Muhal Richard Abrams Mergertone (2007)
Roscoe Mitchell Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City (2002-08) on text by Joseph Jarman
for Baritone and Orchestra
Petr Kotik Asymmetric Landing (2003)

Abrams (b. 1930), Mitchell (b. 1940) and Kotik (b. 1942) are composers and virtuoso performers who have been collaborating since the mid 1990s in creating and performing works for orchestra, often with a voice solo sung by Thomas Buckner. Both, Abrams and Mitchell will be present at the concert.

Mergertone was commissioned by the Ostrava Center for New Music and premiered at the opening concert of the Ostrava Days 2007 festival (www.ocnmh.cz) by the Janacek Philharmonic, Petr Kotik conductor. For the June 17th performance the composer scaled down the score to be performed by chamber orchestra. 

Commissioned by Mutable Music for baritone Thomas Buckner, Petr Kotik and The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City was premiered at the Willow Place Auditorium (Brooklyn/NY) in February 2003 and received its European premiere later that year.

DAVID FIRST w/ Katherine Liberovskaya

David First (electric guitar/laptop) will premiere a new system of delays, tunings, loops and gestures inspired by the 108 movements found in Taoist Tai Chi in dialogue with Katherine Liberovskaya's live visuals obtained through the combination of laptop processing with a real-time closed-circuit image capture and feedback setup using surveillance equipment and reflective items
in motion - recently developed for a self-generating video-audio installation created in Milano (O'artoteca November-December 2007)


Katherine Liberovskaya is a video and media artist based in Montreal, Canada, and New York City. She has been working predominantly in experimental video since the late eighties. Over the years, she has produced many single-channel videos, video installation works and video performances
which have been presented at a wide variety of artistic venues and events around the world. As of recent years her work - in single-channel and installation video as well as performance - mainly revolves around collaborations with new music composers/sound artists, notably Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If,Bwana, Hitoshi Kojo, Zanana, and David Watson. Since 2003 she is active in live video mixing exploring improvisation with numerous live new music/audio artists including: Margarida Garcia, Barry Weisblat, o.blaat, murmer, André Gonçalves, Monique Buzzarté, Anthony Coleman, Giuseppe Ielasi, Renato Rinaldi, Alessandro Bosetti, Audrey Chen, Jason Kahn, Marina Rosenfeld, Anne Wellmer, among others. In addition to her art practice she has concurrently been involved in the programming and organization of diverse media art events, notably with Studio XX in Montreal
(programming coordinator 1996-1998, president 2001-2003), Espace Vidéographe, Montreal and Experimental Intermedia, NY (Screen Compositions 2005, 2006, 2007) as well as the OptoSonic Tea series with Ursula Scherrer at Diapason in NYC.

David First's musical career  is filled with opposites and extremes. As a composer  he is known for his dense, mesmerizing drone structures which he performs sitting trance-like without seeming to move a muscle. At other times, he can be found playing guitar with his recently re-formed psychedelic punk band, Notekillers, where he is a whirling blur of hyperactive energy. First has been called "a fascinating artist with a singular technique" in The New York Times, "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young" in The Village Voice and "the next big thing in guitar gods" in Time Out NY. In 2007 he received a Commissioning Music USA grant from Meet the Composer, Inc. He has also received grants from the Foundation of Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copland Foundation and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. Upcoming projects include a 3-CD retrospective of his drone-works on the XI label and a new Notekillers recording both to be released in early 2008.

BYRON WESTBROOK

CORRIDORS is a multi-channel audio/video environment that uses video projections, amplifiers and speakers strategically placed within a performance space. It was originally developed as a distribution system for improvised guitar feedback and has evolved over the last three years into composed works using varied sound sources through the system, which is also customized for the individual works.  The project emphasizes how redistributed energy of sound and light in space to alter perception.

Audio elements consist of either guitar feedback processed live, pre-recorded instrumental performances and/or found sounds.  These recordings are pre-processed to reduce the sounds to the pure energy of the source material (as opposed to referencing the source). They are then redistributed live through the performance space via the multi-channel system with additional processing to cater to the composition and space.

Following the audio concept, the video elements are sources of light processed to reduce identification of form, object and location, thus highlighting the essential energy and its movement.

Byron Westbrook b. 1977)  is a sound/intermedia artist living in Brooklyn, NY. His audio/video performances as CORRIDORS involve the distribution of processed instrumental and environmental recordings through a multi-channel environment with a focus on energy distilled from sound and light.   He has shared bills with Sawako, Tony Conrad, Stefan Tcherepnin, Lichens, James Blackshaw, Anette Krebs, Soft Circle, and Mountains, among many others. He has presented at venues such as Tonic, Issue Project Room, Experimental Intermedia, Exit Art Gallery. Westbrook has also collaborated with Paris-based composer and former Kitchen curator Rhys Chatham in the drone metal group Essentialist (Table of the Elements), as well as performed in the ensembles of Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca and Jonathan Kane.  In 2007, he was the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artists Commission through Roulette Intermedium and is currently the technical coordinator at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, NYC.  Releases are forthcoming in 2008 for both Corridors and Essentialist, along with a fall tour of the US with Alessandro Bosetti.

http://www.byronwestbrook.com
http://www.myspace.com/corridors

STEPHAN MOORE + DIANA REED SLATTERY: XENOLINGUISTICS

Stephan Moore is a composer, sound artist, and laptop audio improvisor. Diana Reed Slattery is a writer, visual artist, and laptop video improvisor. Their joint improvisational project is
called Xenolinguistics, (i.e. the study of non-human languages) , and has been shown at SIGGRAPH, the Immersive Visions Festival, and most recently at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland.

Stephan Moore is a composer, audio artist, and sound designer in New York City. He has graduated from from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Western Michigan University, and Interlochen Arts Academy. In 2006 and 2007, he co-curated the month-long Points in a Circle festival at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. His creative work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. Recent performances and installation artworks make use of a large multi-channel array of his Hemisphere speakers. He performs regularly with Scott Smallwood in the electronic duo Evidence, and with a variety of musicians, live-video artists, and dancers. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught courses in sound art and electronic music at Maryland Institute College of Art, Peabody Conservatory, Massachusetts College of Art, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Simon's Rock College of Bard. He is currently the Sound Engineer and Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Diana Reed Slattery is a novelist and videographer based in Albany, NY. For the last 10 years, she has been developing a project centered on the exploration of the visual language, Glide, which appears in her sci-fi novel The Maze Game.  This investigation has led to the development of software that animates the glyphs, and allows them to transform into each other, in two and then three dimensions. The three-dimensional Glide software, LiveGlide, allows writing with the Glide forms interactively, in performance.  Glide, according to its myth of origin in the story-world, is a psychedelic language. States of extended perception were used in the conception, design, and implementation of LiveGlide, in practice and in performance, and in learning how to read the writing produced.  Psychedelics provided the means to emerge from the cocoon of natural language into what could be understood as both a pre-linguistic state of direct apperception of the world around and inside us, and as a post-linguistic (post-natural language) realm of evolutionary forms of language, concomitant with a sense of consciousness extended into a novel, if transient, evolutionary state.   Glide has been described, screened and/or performed live at art, technology, and consciousness conferences in Tokyo, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Bilbao, San Jose, Plymouth, Perth, Siggraph (LA) and most recently, at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel.  Fulldome screening and performances have been given at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, the Schenectady Museum, The Plymouth Immersive Vision Center, and the Children's Museum of Science and Technology in Troy.  Flat-screen performances have been given at the Children's Interactive Museum in Middletown, and the Center for Sustainability at Penn State. Slattery has performed at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn with long-time collaborator Stephan Moore.  Slattery is pursuing Ph.D. studies at the University of Plymouth, UK on linguistic phenomena in the psychedelic sphere.  Xenolinguistics-the study of alien languages-is the term she is currently using to describe the whole of these activities, which are described in more detail at http://mazerunner.wordpress.com.