Volume (III) is an improvising quartet featuring electro-acoustic harpist
Shelley Burgon, turntable-ist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and
electro-acoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe.
Harpist Shelley Burgon is a performer and composer currently based in New
York City. She is a member of Stars Like Fleas and the chamber ensemble
Ne(x)tworks. As a soloist Burgon ventures into the world of spatialized
electro-acoustic music by processing her sound and moving it through many
channels. She has performed with a variety of people such as Jennifer Choi,
Fred Frith, Raz Mesinai, Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton and more.
Peruvian avant-turntablist Maria Chavez¹s work is focused on short solo
electro-acoustic sound pieces. Her instrument is a collection of new and
broken needles that she calls ³pencils of sound² and a selection of records,
which provide the palette. Many of her live sound installations have been
focused on the different attributes of the paradox of time and the present
moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary
art. She has traveled extensively, sharing the stage with Pauline Oliveros,
Alan Licht, Phil Niblock, Otomo Yoshihide, just to name a few. Some spaces
that she has performed in include the Contemporary Arts Museum in Bordeaux,
France, Akademie der Kunste in Vienna and Berlin and Sonoteca in Lima, Peru.
She was an artist in residence with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and
the DIA:Beacon Museum and will be a perform at the Whitney Museum this
summer as part of Christian Marclay’s retrospective of works. For her work
she has been awarded the Jerome Foundation¹s Emerging Artist Grant and the
Van Lier Fellowship.
Stephan Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, sound designer and
curator based in Brooklyn and Providence. His creative work currently
manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvised solo performances,
sound installation works, scores and sound designs for collaborative
performance pieces, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Evidence,
his long-standing project with Scott Smallwood, has performed widely and
released several recordings over the past decade. He has created custom
music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught
workshops and numerous college-level courses in composition, programming,
sound art and electronic music. He curates the annual Floating Points
Festival at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he also serves on the Art
Advisory Board. From late 2004 to mid-2010, he performed over 250 concerts
with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, serving as their sound engineer and
music coordinator, and as a touring musician.
Suzanne Thorpe is a composer and performer of electronic music who enjoys
revealing the peripheral consciousness, exposing coexisting perspectives and
concurrent realities via composition, performance and installation. She
performs and composes for acoustic and electronic instruments, extending her
voice with an ever-evolving set-up of analogue and real-time software
components. Her recent compositions are multi-channel works that employ
psycho-acoustic phenomena, aural harmonics and tuned filtering systems, and
have been featured at Issue Project Room (NYC), Diapason (NYC), The Stone
(NYC), Activating the Medium Festival (San Francisco), No Idea Festival
(Austin, TX), Redux Contemporary Art Studios (Charleston, SC), Pyramid
Atlantic Center for the Arts (Silver Spring, MD), and other venues. As an
improviser she has performed with Chris Brown, Annette Krebs, Maggie Nicols,
Bhob Rainey, Pauline Oliveros, Gino Robair, Zeena Parkins, Ulrich Krieger
and Miya Masaoka, among others. Before her solo career, she was a founding
member of the internationally acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she composed,
performed, recorded, produced and toured from 1989 through 1998, earning
numerous critical accolades . She has been awarded support for her work from
Meet the Composer and NYFA, and has a discography of over 20 recordings
released on the Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings and
Tape Drift labels.
