Three pillars of the noise and avant-jazz scene collide : Thurston Moore, singer/songwriter/guitarist for Sonic Youth, teams up with free-noise guitarist Bill Nace and avant-jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee for an evening of mind bending cacophony.
While Thurston Moore is primarily known as a guitar player for Sonic Youth, he’s also an astonishingly prolific artist in his own right. From running his own label Ecstatic Peace, to his small press / independent POETRY publishing imprint Flowers & Cream, he remains incredibly busy with a myriad of projects including collaborations with the likes of Lydia Lunch, William Hooker, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Chris Corsano, Nels Cline and many others.
Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician. Appearing on well over 70 recordings, McPhee has collaborated with a long list of composers and improvisers, including Peter Brotzmann, Andrew Cyrille, Pauline Oliveros, and Mats Gustafsson. These days, Joe McPhee plays often in New York City clubs and concert halls, while he continues to blaze a global trajectory of festival appearances, tours, concert premieres, solo and group improvisations, workshops, and seminars, stretching from coast to coast and across several countries in any given calendar year, and leaving his unique brand of ecstatic disturbance everywhere along his path.
Bill Nace is one of the premiere avant-garde guitarists active today. With one of the most personal and unique pallets of sound ever to be culled from an electric guitar, Nace creates a distinct, mind-bending cacophony – focusing his textures with intense precision and control. He works under various guises (x.0.4 with Jake Meginsksy and John Truscinski, a duo with Paul Flaherty, Northampton Wools with Thurston Moore, and Ceylon Mange with Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance) and his own name.
Photo by Peter Gannushkin