The opening night of Roulette’s Mixology Festival 2020: Psychedelia features two hallucinatory sets by Brooklyn-based hypnotists Long Distance Poison and sonic illusionists Snake Union. The electronic duo Snake Union–Chuck Bettis and David Grant–creates delicate, psychedelic, and fuzzed-out freeform grooves and synchronized sonic dirt with analog synths, digital sound processing, modular wires, and Max patches, joined this night by video sorcerer Katherine Liberovskaya. Audiovisual trance-media duo Long Distance Poison (Nathan Cearley and Erica Bradbury) explore non-subjective musical processes and practices that minimize intention, self, and hylomorphic design.
Curated by festival founder David Weinstein, Roulette’s 29th annual Mixology Festival is organized around the theme of psychedelia. Music and media performances will revisit the virtues of visceral imagination in the form of enlightened vision, sonic illusions, and collective synesthesia. Moving beyond the clichés of drug culture fabrications, the festival seeks to induce sustainable euphoria through a transformative groove. Roulette’s annual festival focuses on new and unusual uses of technology in music and media arts. Programmed by a rotating cast of artists/curators with a collectively unorthodox perspective, the Festival has, since 1991, boldly embraced both the successes and struggles of gadgets in the service of innovation.
Long Distance Poison is the Brooklyn based experimental electronics project of Nathan Cearley and Erica Bradbury. They explore non-subjective musical processes and practices that minimize intention, self and hylomorphic design. LDP has performed at the Ende Tymes Festival, the Basilica Hudson 24-Hour Drone Festival, The Wassaic Project, the MOMA PS1 NY Art Book Fair, the Voice of the Valley Noise Festival, and Pioneer Works. In 2015, they did a residency at Clocktower Galley called Sacred Music After a God, and in 2017 they did a video installation at Printed Matter for their mind control experiment Rheomodes. They have releases on Hausu Mountain, Deep Distance, Oxtail Recordings, Constellation Tatsu, Ecstatic Peace!, Foxy Digitalis, Baked Tapes, VCO Recordings and other strange imprints. Their newest album, Technical Mentality (Hausu Mountain), will be released on January 31st.
Snake Union is Chuck Bettis (Meta-matics, Mossenek) and David Grant (Action Patrol, On A Clear Day). A duo that works in improvisational rhythmic explorations that match analog synths and digital sound processing, modular wires and max patches—by turns psychedelic, delicate, and fuzzed out, the sequenced collides with the freeform as these two soundmakers push into new realms.
Katherine Liberovskaya is an intermedia artist based in New York City and Montreal. Involved in experimental video since the 1980s, she has produced numerous videos, video installations, and performances, as well as works in other media, that have shown around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of moving image with sound/music in a variety of solo video-audio pieces and in many collaborations with composers and sound artists in both ephemeral and fixed forms (single-channel works, installations, projections, performances), notably in improvised live video+sound concert situations where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. Frequent collaborators include Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If, Bwana, Keiko Uenishi, Mia Zabelka, David Watson, Shelley Hirsch, among many others.
