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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.



http://ericlaska.com/
 
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.