Sunday,
October 13, 2013 @ Aux at Vox Populi
Gallery Aux at
Vox Populi Gallery, 319 N. 11th St.,
3rd Floor, Philadelphia,
PA, $7-10, 8:00pm. (map)
Marcia
Bassett + Barry Weisblat +
Andrew Lafkas (NYC) Jenny
Gräf (Baltimore) Eric
Laska + Tim Leonido (Philly)
Marcia
Bassett is an ambient noise artist.
Although legendary for white-hot guitar and
vocal brutality, Zaimph’s recent recordings
and performances infuse cracked-raga song
structures with dense electronic and
synthesizer drones to create soundscapes where
a lurking apocalypse is eclipsed by
shimmering, meditative beauty. As a co-founder
of Philadelphia’s shambolic psychonauts un and
tectonic drone pioneers Double Leopards,
Bassett is deeply entwined with the American
noise underground, and has mapped regions
still only dimly understood by subsequent
sonic travelers. From 2003-2008, Bassett
joined Matthew Bower in Hototogisu, where her
mastery of cacophonous eardrum shred achieved
monolithic proportions. During the same
period, she explored American underground
psychedelic folk-improv music with Steve Gunn
and Pete Nolan in GHQ, and with Tom Carter in
Zaika.
In addition to her solo project
Zaïmph, Bassett is a frequent
collaborator with a wide spectrum of
musicians including Helen Espvall (Espers),
Samara Lubelski, Margarida Garcia, Jenny
Graf (Metalux), Taylor Richardson (Infinity
Window), and Barry Weisblat.
Barry Weisblat was born in
Brooklyn in 1975 and remains one of the
unsung heroes of deep and investigative
Sound. Thought. Beyond a long-running
commitment to participating in the
underground’s underground of improvisation
and a dynamic sense of musical conversation,
Weisblat has extended his reach and pool of
knowledge beyond rubbing the surface of the
black box of sound to designing and
implementing his own systems. Translating
light into sound, sound into action, action
into thought, and thought into light,
Weisblat’s ceaseless curiosity and
simultaneous obsessive desire to participate
and join in dialogue has pushed his output
farther out than most people can see or
conceive of. Some collaborations include
work with Michael Bernstein, Margarida
Garcia, Andrew Lafkas, Toshio Kajiwara, Matt
Valentine, Theo Angell, Otomo Yoshide,
Mattin, Tim Barnes, Greg Pope, Toshi
Nakamura, Sean Meehan, Dion Workman.
Andrew Lafkas is a musician
living in New York; his primary instrument
is the doublebass. He is currently focused
on developing pieces that encourage group
intuition; this interest was greatly
inspired and influenced by experiences
working in groups led by Milo Fine and by
Bill Dixon. He has performed at venues and
festivals including The Walker Art Center,
The Living Theatre, Experimental Intermedia,
The Vision Festival, and The Seattle
Improvised Music Festival.
jennygrafsheppard.com Jennygraf.bandcamp.com Jenny Gräf is a
Baltimore, MD USA based artist who works with
the social dimension of art and the
consequences of performance in pieces that
invoke an exchange between people. Her pieces
explore perceptual states and social pretexts.
That art must not always be a product of a
particular form of personal agency and instead
become a mutually produced reality, between
people is a fact that is supported by her
work. She has worked with large scale meals in
which the rituals of the restaurant become
integral to a live composing of sound and
action, she has designed projects for a group
of women with Alzheimer’s in which the guitar
serves as voice, and she started the Stone
Carving Oraclestra, which explores
Experimental Archeology and the use of
phonemes to channel “readings” for members of
the audience.
Her
sound work includes solo work (as J. Graf) and
long term collaborations with MV Carbon (in
Metalux). Her compositions blend improvisation
and song structure to explore the boundaries
between moving through sound narratively and
through ruptured moments. In her new solo
record “The Future is a Faded Song” and
previous solo cd “Os” use fragments of the
song, rearranging it temporally to bring forth
the uncanny in the familiar.
Gräf’s
work has been performed and exhibited
throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe in
contexts such as PS 1 in New York, Chicago’s
Museum of Contemporary Art, Mukha Media in
Antwerp, Institut Neue Medien in Frankfurt and
STEIM in Amsterdam. Her music can be found on
Hanson, Load, 5rc, Veglia, Boxmedia,
NoFun Recordings, Utech and Ehse recording
labels. Collaborations include those with
Chris Corsano, Marcia Basset, Chiara Giovando,
Alessandro Bosetti, John Wiese, and MV Carbon
among others.
Acting On
Impulse is a performance for any
environment. White noise is generated
from the computer and switched on and off
for differing lengths of time by a human
variable (ie the performer) whose mean and
variance cannot be tuned as desired.
Eric
Laska (b. 1986) is an artist whose concern
lies in a critical approach to sound. He
edits the website Lateral Addition
(lateraladdition.org).
Timothy
Leonido is a poet and musician living in
Philadelphia. His work can be found at the
St. Claire and Gauss
PDF.