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Audrey Chen and Phil Minton: Voices

What: Cellist + vocalist Audrey Chen and her collaborator Phil Minton explore the depths of the human voice as instrument.
When: Saturday, January 20, 2018, 8pm
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $15 Online $20 Doors
Info: www.roulette.org // (917) 267-0368

Brooklyn, NY – Berlin-based vocalist + cellist Audrey Chen and her collaborator Phil Minton plumb the depths of the most inherent and bodily instrument — the voice — producing improvisations are fearless, fragile, hungry, passionate, riotous, ululating and animalistic, yet ultimately human. Focusing primarily on the interplay between the uttered sounds of the mouth and vocal chords, the duo will express, pronounce, and intensely articulate (in their fashion) the many nuanced shades of their individual and collaborative conditions. Audrey Chen and Phil Minton have been performing as a duo for more than a decade with concerts and tours across Europe, China, Argentina and Brazil. Their duo album, By the Stream, was released by SUBROSA in 2013.

Over the past 15 years, Audrey Chen has focused predominantly on her solo work, joining together the extended and inherent vocabularies of the cello, voice, and analog electronics. In the last few years, she has shifted back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument, delving even more deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. She derives her sound material in continuous process, championing the “in-between” and over looked. Regardless of instrument, her mode of experimentation touches both the abstractly beautiful and the aggressively unsettling, creating a kind of curiously imagined architecture, non-prosaic song or ritual that reaches beyond gravity or language.

Phil Minton comes from Torquay in the UK. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 1960s, then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the latter part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook, and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980s. For most of the past forty years, Minton has been working as a improvising singer in groups, orchestras and situations.  He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner, and John Butcher, and ongoing duos with all the above. Recently, after a long break, he has been involved in several of American composer Bob Ostertag’s projects. Since the eighties, his Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for Anyone Who Wants to Sing, has performed in over twenty countries.