The Glass Percussion Project

Elaine Miles (glass installation artist) and Eugene Ughetti (solo percussion)

About the Glass Percussion Project:

Amongst an innovative labryinth of glass instruments a live percussion performance will unfold around themes of air, wind, thunder, water, and divine melody. The Glass Percussion Project is a collaborative initiative between Glass Artist Elaine Miles and percussionist and composer Eugene Ughetti. Elaine Miles has hand blown a very large collection of glass that is resonant and both harmonically complex and pure. The event will feature glass percussion instruments of over 200 gongs, 250 bowls, 40 udu drums, various wind-chimes, bars and a collection of suspended sheets and shards. For more visit www.speakpercussion.com.

Doug Henderson

Giving up the Ghost (2004)

A layering of recordings of 200 cups of coffee made in a dyingespresso machine which finally exploded after leaving this testimony. Ihad set up a microphone and recorder when it first started its strange shrieking, thinking that it had not long to live. For the next 100 days (2 cups a day) I kept pressing the record button every morning to accumulate this Kaffeegeist. I am most interested in morphogenesis, the moment of transformation, where in one instant I recognize the sources of these sounds, and in the next instant they become somethingnew to all this world.

The Nature of the 102nd Thing (of 10,000) (2001)
The 103rd Thing (of 10,000) (2004)
The 104th Thing (of 10,000) (2006 - Premiere)
The Nature of the 105th Thing (of 10,000) (2006 - Premiere)
The 106th Thing (of 10,000) (2006 - Premiere)

The conception for this series began in the summer of 2001 at the Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) in Paris, where Xenakis’ exploration of the concept of the "unimaginable" sparked the idea for creating a fully spatialized work in which the fundamental
compositional trajectories and imperatives would be directed by the construction of shapes and vectors in space. The nature of the sound composition would develop from the dictates of a kind of sonic holography, and the temporal progression would follow a physical model akin to the construction of a house. I extended my use of multiplications of sound sources to expose unheard images and textures, and each of these pieces employs dozens and sometimes hundreds of layered recordings. It is a music made to be seen in the mind's eye, and felt in the ear. 104, 105 and 106 have been constructed with the support of Harvestworks' Artist in Residence Program.

Douglas Henderson has been composing, performing and making installations in New York City and internationally for more than 20 years with a variety of collaborators: Jude Tallichet, Guy Yarden, Zeena Parkins, David Henderson and Kristin Lucas, to mention a few. He is currently focused on sound installations, both sound-producing objects and multi-channel immersive sound sculptures. He has shown in galleries from New York (including vertexList, Art in General, G.A.S. and the Whitney Museum) to Muu Gallery in Helsinki, to Seoul, South Korea (SICMF). He has composed electroacoustic music for dozens of dance works by choreographers such as Jeremy Nelson, Mia Lawrence, Jennifer Monson, Wildadance Copenhagen and Phoenix Dance Theatre UK, and has toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe performing original work. He holds a Ph.D. in music composition from Princeton University, and shares in 2 gold records and a Mercury Prize for his mixing and mastering work. He recently chaired the Sonic Arts Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, received a 2005 Rockefeller Foundation MAP Award, a 2006 Harvestworks A.i.R. and a 2007 DAAD residency in Berlin. For more information, visit www.DouglasHenderson.org.

Aki Onda, Alan Licht and Michael Snow trio

Starting as a professional jazz pianist in the 50s, Canadian Michael Snow has since achieved fame as a visual artist, creating the iconic "Walking Woman" image in the 60s as well as the genre-defining structural film Wavelength. He has continued to pursue music as a free improvisor, after arguably mid-wifing the form in the sessions for the soundtrack to his 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control with Albert Ayler and others. Snow has performed with Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, Derek Bailey and Tony Conrad as well as being a founding member of the CCMC (Snow, Paul Dutton and John Oswald) and playing frequent solo concerts. His photography, videos, films, paintings, and sculpture continue to be exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide.

Since he established himself as a producer in Audio Sports with Eye Yamatsuka and Nobukazu Takemura, Japanese composer Aki Onda has released a string of exquisite solo albums featuring contributions from musicians as diverse as Blixa Bargeld and Linda Sharrock. These include 2003's Cassette Memories series and the highly acclaimed albums Ancient & Modern and Bon Voyage! on which Onda performs with multiple cassette recorders and electronics, using sounds he has field-recorded himself as a diary. Most recently, he started an audio-visual project, Cinemage, images for cinema or homage for cinema, which is consisted of slide projections of still photograhs and improvised music.

Guitarist and improvisor Alan Licht has performed with legends of underground rock (Arthur Lee, Tom Verlaine, Royal Trux, Arto Lindsay, Jandek) as well as some of the foremost jazz and experimental musicians (Rashied Ali, Peter Brotzmann, Keith Rowe, Christian Marclay, Ken Vandermark, Phill Niblock). He currently co-leads Text of Light with Lee Ranaldo, in which they and other musicians improvise concerts as classic experimental films screen behind them. A long-time fan of Michael Snow's, he interviewed him in the late 90s and subsequently performed with him at festivals in Canada and Chicago. He has been performing duos with Aki Onda for the past five years, and was reminded of Snow's filmmaking when he heard Onda's album Bon Voyage!

Thus, a trio was formed which achieves the all-too-rare alchemy of strong separate identities and shared aesthetics into a holistic unit. It made its debut at Tonic in New York in December 2005.

Tonight they will perform two sets of not-totally-indeterminate improvisations, utlilizing synthesizer, shortwave radio, cassettes, electronics, guitar, piano, guitar and bass amplifiers, glissandos, dynamics, hiss, electrical interference, feedback, feedback loops, and tools.

Morton Subotnick with Vicki Ray

Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work which brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon [1966-7], was commissioned by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time anoriginal large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium - a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system
constituted a present-day form of chamber music.

He is also pioneering works to offer musical creative tools to young children. He is the author of a series of CDROMS for children, a children’s website [www.creatingmusic.com] and developing a program for classroom and after school programs that will soon become available
internationally.

He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.

The concert will be a presentation of works in progress. Pianist Vicki Ray will be joining Morton Subotnick to perform “The Other Piano”, a new work for piano and surround sound electronics. “The Other Piano” will receive its formal premiere in Los Angeles on May 1. He will perform a solo laptop excerpt from the latest carnation of “Until Spring Revisited”. And, will share with the audience the newest, in progress interactive work for children.

Pianist Vicki Ray performs widely as a soloist and collaborative artist. She is a member of the award winning California E.A.R. Unit and Xtet . As a founding member of PianoSpheres , an acclaimed solo piano series dedicated to exploring the less familiar realms of the piano repertoire, her playing has been hailed by the Los Angeles Times for "displaying that kind of musical thoroughness and technical panache that puts a composer's thoughts directly before the listener." A long-time champion of new music Ms. Ray has had works written for by composers John Adams, Paul Dresher, Stephen Hartke, Kamran Ince, Shaun Naidoo and many others. In 1989 she was the first place winner in the National Association of Composers USA competition for performers of contemporary music. Ms.Ray has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series, with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the German ensemble Compania and the Blue Rider Ensemble of Toronto with whom she made the first Canadian recording of Pierrot Lunaire .  

Ray has played on various national and international festivals including the Salzburg Festival, the Berlin 750 Jahre Festival and the Ojai Festival where she premiered a new concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle. Her solo recording from the left edge , a collection of works written for her by composers living in California can be found on the CRI label. As a pianist who excels in a wide range of styles Ms.Ray's numerous recordings cover everything from the semi-improvised structures of Wadada Leo Smith to the twisted groove base of John Adam's Road Movies , from the elegant serialism of Mel Powell to the austere beauty of Morton Feldmans' Crippled Symmetries . Ms. Ray has been a member of the piano faculty at the California Institute of the Arts since 1991.  

An Evening to Benefit Roulette

Shelley Hirsch - singing to film soundtracks by the late great Bernard Herrmann

Zoe Beloff - presenting her film "Charming Augustine"

All tickets $15

Shelley Hirsch is "an unorthodox, extraordinary fusion of vocalist, composer, and performance artist " (Anne LeBaron) whose work encompasses story telling pieces, staged performances, compositions, improvisations, collaborations, installations, and radioplays, which have been presented on 5 continents...

Hirsch has performed hundreds of concerts of improvised music with great musicians including Anthony Coleman, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Toshio Kajiwara, Hans Reichel, Min Xiao Fen, Tony Buck, David Simons, Johannes, Connie and Matthias Bauer, Paul Lovens, David Watson, Marina Rosenfeld, Jim Staley, DJ Olive, Denman Maroney, Joey Baron, Mark Dresser, Ned Rothenberg, Marc Ribot, Cyro Baptista, Butch Morris, Elliot Sharp, Uchihashi Kasuhisa, Joe Williamson, etc, etc.

She can be heard on dozens of CDs including her just released CDs "The Far In, Far Out Worlds of Shelley Hirsch" (Tzadik) and "Duets" with gutarist Uchihashi Kasuhisa (Innocence Records), and on her solo CD "States" (Tellus); her storytelling CD "O Little Town of East New York" (Tzadik); "Haiku Lingo" (No Mans Land) last two co-composed with longtime collaborator keyboardist David Weinstein- and the LP "Singing" (Apollo).

Zoe Beloff works with a variety of cinematic imagery: film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media and installation. Her projects are philosophical toys, objects to think with. More and more she finds herself fascinated by phantoms, by images that, "are not there". Her work investigates the space where technology intersects with unconscious desire. Zoe’s work has been exhibited internationally. Venues include: The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Rotterdam Film festival, Pacific Film Archives and the Pompidou Center. www.zoebeloff.com < http://www.zoebeloff.com >

Charming Augustine
Stereoscopic 16mm B/W Film Sound 40 minutes.
Cast: Tea Alagic, Greg Mehrten, Josh Stark, Steven Rattazi, Kevin Maher, Eileen White, Eliza Fernbach 
Original music:  Miguel Frasconi
Charming Augustine was inspired by series of photographs and texts on hysteria published in the 1880’s under the title of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. It is an experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient, Augustine. The film explores connections between attempts to document her mental states and the prehistory of narrative film. To conjure up a time just prior to the invention of cinema I shot the film in a stereoscopic format to suggest a different direction that cinema might have taken had it been invented in the 1880’s. Ultimately what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral, what if…a moment in time when the moving image was on the brink of existence in a form not yet standardized.

Chiara Giovando

voice, violin, electronics

Chiara Giovando was born in northern New Mexico in 1976. She moved to Baltimore in 2002 in order to participate in a community of musicians and artists involved in transgressive consciousness. Her musical psyche is an amalgamation of intuition and critical thought. This can be a tumultuous union, at times leading to rash judgementalism, at other times to the detailed expression of sensed truths. She uses empathic prejudice in order to communicate her music. She has toured to several cities in America as well as performing in Berlin, Hong Kong, Tai Wan, and Rome. Her career has been jarred by abrupt periods of self imposed isolation, but this has left chiara with an indispensable quality of passage.

Jessica Rylan

Jessica Rylan is a sound artist and electronic musician who lives and works in the Boston area. She builds unique synthesizers for installations and live performance. Her designs are influenced by plants, and the historically outmoded. Her music incorporates the intuition of folk music with the techniques of the avant-garde.

Rylan has performed across the United States, Eastern Canada, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. Highlights included Moscow, Oslo, Lisbon, Antwerp, London, Chicago, L.A., and New York City.

Rylan has presented sound installations at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the Boston Center for the Arts, and the Berwick Research Institute. She received an MFA from Bard College and has been awarded grants from the Penny McCall Foundation and the LEF Foundation. Her recordings are available on Ultra Eczema and RRRecords. She is currently a Research Affiliate at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

For tonight's show, Rylan will be singing, dancing, playing home-made synthesizers and performing some compositions from her forthcoming CD, "Interior Designs," which will be released on Important Records this March.

John King

The mesmerizing pianist Jenny Lin will be performing selections from John King's "Rubai'yat" series of solo piano and electronics pieces. These compositions are based on the "rubai", an 11th century Arabic poetic form. The live electronics allow for improvisation and randomization of the material played by the pianist. Also on hand will be a string ensemble lead by King, performing new works involving composition, improvisation and a pair of dice.

JOHN KING, composer and guitarist, has had his music presented in many major festivals, including the tba/Time-Based Arts Festival (Portland, OR); Fronteras Festival (London); Next Wave Festival (NY); Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival (Hamburg); Intermedium 1 Festival (Berlin); Creative Time's "Music in the Anchorage" (NY); Warsaw Autumn and Bang On A Can (NY).    Mr. King's experimental opera, "La Belle Captive", based on texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet, was premiered in Buenos Aires at the Centro Experimental de Teatro Colon in April 2003, receiving further performances in London and NYC.

He has had many working bands over the years, including ELECTRIC WORLD (with Abe Speller and Jean Chaine), VIBROVERB (with Nioka Workman and Michael Wimberly), and KING KORTETTE (Jonathan Kane, Nicki Parrott and Christopher McIntyre), all blues/funk/jazz based. He plays lead guitar with the avant-blues group Deep Blue Sea, led by French avant-noise guitarist Jean-Francois Pauvros and art rock drummer extraordinaire Jonathan Kane; and also performed with : William Parker's "Little Huey Creative Orchestra", Butch Morris' "Conduction #115 E-Mission"; Guy Klucevsek's "Ain't Nothin' But A Polka" band; and Rhys Chatham's 6-guitar band.

His commissions and collaborations include those for the Kronos Quartet; Red {an orchestra}, Ethel; the Albany Symphony/"Dogs of Desire", Bang On A Can All-Stars; Mannheim Ballet; the Royal Danish Ballet; New York City Ballet/Diamond Project, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballets de Monte Carlo; SüdWestRundfunk (Baden-Baden), Pennsylvania Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.   He has written music for the Clussgarten Theater in Ludwigsburg, Germany (Shakespeare's   "Tempest", Goethe's "Faust" and Hesse's "Steppenwolf") as well as Target Margin, in NYC and the Children's Theater Company, in Mpls., MN.

He has received grants from the NEA/Music in Motion, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Meet The Composer/Readers Digest Dance Commissioning Program, Minnesota Composers Forum, the Fund for US Artists at International Festivals, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Mr. King curated the music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's EVENTS at the Joyce Theater and at The Barbican Center in London.   He was Music Curator at The Kitchen from 1999-2003 and is currently a co-director of the Music Committee at MCDC.

His radioplay "TORN/zerrisen" was commissioned by SüdWestRundfunk radio, Baden-Baden, Germany.   His music can also be heard on HBO promoting the series "Deadwood".

Jim Staley with Zeena Parkins and Jennifer Monson

Jim Staley, trombonist and composer, has resided in a lower Manhattan since 1978. His work has been primarily working with improvisation, crossing genres freely between post-modern classical music and avant-garde jazz. He has worked for many years with other highly experienced improvisers, both dancers and musicians, including Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Simone Forti, Ikue Mori, Davey Williams, Shelley Hirsch, Phoebe Legere, John Zorn and many others. Staley’s recording projects include Blind Pursuits with Phoebe Legere and Borah Bergman; Mumbo Jumbo-different trio  combinations with Wayne Horvitz, Elliott Sharp, Shelley Hirsch, Samm Bennett, Ikue Mori, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith and John Zorn; Jim Staley's Don Giovanni, with Mori, Davey Williams, Zeena Parkins and Tenko, plus several more.
Staley has recorded with Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp's ensemble Carbon, and for John Zorn on several records including, Spillane, The Big Gundown, Cobra, The Little Lieutenant of the Living God (Weill/Zorn) and several others.  Staley also performs and records with the Tone Road Ramblers, a collaborative chamber-improv ensemble, together since 1981.

Zeena Parkins, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, is a well-known pioneer of the electric harp and also has extended the language of the acoustic harp with the inventive use of unusual playing techniques, preparations, and layers of digital and analog processing. She accurately describes her harp as a "sound machine of limitless capacity" and has expanded her instrument using everything from household objects and hardware store finds to leslie cabinets, guitar pedals, numerous other digital processing hardware, and assorted software. Ms. Parkins has appeared on over 70 CDs and in hundreds of concerts in both large and small spaces all over the world. She is a sought after collaborator, performing with Jim O'Rourke, Nels Cline, Lee Renaldo, Kaffe Matthews (Weightless Animals), Thurston Moore, and Pauline Oliveros. Special projects have included touring and recording with Bjork (Vespertine, World Tour and Family Tree Tour), Tin Hat Trio (Book of Silk), Yoko Ono (Blueprint for a Sunrise), Don Byron, Butch Morris (International Comprovisation Ensemble), Elliott Sharp (Psycho~Acoustic, Orchestra Carbon), Ikue Mori (Phantom Orchard, B Side, Hex Kitchen), John Zorn (Cobra, Bezique, Darts, The Bribe) and Fred Frith (Soloist in Traffic Continues, Graphic Scores, Skeleton Crew and Keep the Dog).

Jennifer Monson has been pursuing an original approach to experimental dance forms in NYC since 1983 when she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. In that time, she has created a wide body of work that incorporates well-developed collaborative relationships with many artists including Zeena Parkins, John Jasperse, Yvonne Meier and David Zambrano. Her solo work has been presented at many venues in the US, Australia, Europe, Latin America and Tanzania. Her project, BIRD BRAIN, has been awarded two Rockefeller Foundation MAP Grants (2000 and 2003), a New York Foundation on the Arts (NYFA) BUILD Grant (2000), Creative Capital Foundation Grant (including second round competitive funding, 1999-2001), Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grant, New England LEF Foundation grant and Altria Inc. grants. Since 1985, Monson and composer Zeena Parkins have been committed to an ongoing investigation of the dynamic interplay of dance and music. In January 2002, they premiered atlas of holes - pitfall, dug/out, crater at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Monson also teaches releasing, improvisation and composition. She has taught widely in NYC and at various colleges throughout the U.S., and internationally at The International Summer School of Dance in Tokyo, Japan; The Performance Space in Sydney, Australia; Chisenhale Dance Space in London, England; Center for New Dance Development in Arnhem, Holland; Festival de Danza Post Moderna in Caracas, Venezuela; Acarte in Lisbon, Portugal; Bagamoyo College of Art in Bagamoyo, Tanzania; and in Havana, Cuba.

Natalie Rose LeBrecht

Natalie Rose LeBrecht began performing and recording music in 1998 under the name Greenpot Bluepot.   She has self released five full length recordings - all hand assembled and packaged as art objects - and has been awarded a Roulette/Jerome Foundation Commission for New Experimental Music. She is based in New York and will be featured on WNYC's Spinning On Air on March 11, 2007 (www.spinningonair.org).

This Roulette concert will feature Natalie’s distinct, ethereal vocals over freeform, semi-improvisational piano, harmonium, and guitar playing, in addition to a vocal loop piece.

Kevin Davis

Kevin Davis is an improviser, composer and cellist currently living in Chicago. Over the last four years, his work has engaged the discipline and practice of improvisation, facilitating direct research into sound and perception and using it as a vehicle for discovering new cello techniques and compositional strategies. Born and raised in Appalachia, Kevin earned a degree in music composition from the University of Memphis, but subsequently veered away from academic composition towards musics that fuse composition and performance, as well as more sculptural and process-oriented projects. Kevin is also especially motivated by both free jazz and the post-Cagean continuum. This ultimately led him to Chicago where he has worked with many like-minded collaborators in the city’s vibrant improvised music community.

Simultaneously indebted to Euro-American concert music (conservative and avant-garde), American traditions of improvisation, and elements of popular music, Kevin’s main interests now are in the synthesis of the compositional/improvisational space. Kevin’s current work applies internal logic or structural devices to improvised performances, using indeterminate elements in compositions and working with extended, often timbre-oriented cello techniques.

Andrew Dewar

Premiere of "Six Lines of Transformation (2006)"

palimpsest, n.
1. Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable
after any writing on it has been erased.
2a. A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has
been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a
manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier
(effaced) writing.
2b. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in
having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its
earlier form; a multi-layered record.

Performers:
Matt Bauder, bass clarinet
Jennifer Caputo, percussion
Andrew Lafkas, contrabass
Jane Rigler, flute
Nate Wooley, trumpet
Katherine Young, bassoon

Andrew Raffo Dewar (b.1975 Rosario, Argentina) is a composer, improviser, woodwind instrumentalist and ethnomusicologist. Since 1995, he has been active in the music communities of Minneapolis, New Orleans, the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, performing his
work in North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. He has had the good fortune to study and make music with saxophonist/composers Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton and Phillip Greenlief, composer Alvin Lucier, trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon and improviser Milo Fine. He has also had a long involvement with Indonesian traditional and experimental music. As a composer, Dewar's music has been performed by the Flux Quartet (NYC), Sekar Anu (Indonesia), the Koto Phase ensemble (USA/Japan) and the XYZ composer collective (NYC). He has received grants from Arts
International and Meet The Composer to support this work. For more information: www.freemovementarts.com

Briggan Krauss

"Lensing” is a suite of compositions written for eight musicians. Although incorporating some group improvisation, "Lensing" focuses primarily on composition which draws on influences ranging from Varese to Morricone and Japanese Gagaku. "Lensing" was commissioned by Roulette in 2001 with funds From The Jerome Foundation and was premiered at Roulette on April 18th, 2002.
Musicians performing will be:

Ron Caswell - Tuba
Jacob Garchick - Trombone
Michel Gentile - Flute
Ron Horton - Trumpet
Briggan Krauss - Alto Saxophone
Andy LAster - Baritone Saxophone
Chris Speed - Clarinet
Kenny Wollesen - Percussion

Jim Pugliese - Conductor

Saxophonist, electronic musician and composer Briggan Krauss began attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in music performance in 1992. In 1994 Briggan moved to Brooklyn, New York where he still lives today.
Briggan has performed and recorded with musicians such as John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, Robin Holcomb, Anthony Coleman, Steven Bernstein's "Sex Mob", Madeski Martin and Wood, Skuli Sverrisson, Jim Black, Hal Willner, Joey Baron, the New York Composer’s Orchestra and many others.

Briggan has made three records as a leader on Knitting Factory Records and has appeared on over forty other records as a sideman. He has been reviewed and interviewed in jazz and new music publications in the United States, Europe and Japan. In the 2002 "Downbeat Magazine" critic's poll, “Sex Mob” was awarded “Best Beyond Band” and “Best Acoustic Jazz Band TWR”. Briggan was also named in the “Alto Saxophone TWR” category in both 2002 and 2003. The CD "Unspeakable" by guitarist Bill Frisell, on which Briggan appeared, won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2004. The most recent album by Sex Mob called "Sexotica" has been nominated for a Grammy Award for 2007 in the same category.

“Good Kitty”, the first band in which Briggan was the leader, featured an unusual trio of himself on alto saxophone, clarinet/tenor saxophonist Chris Speed, and drummer Mike Sarin. Briggan recorded his first CD as a leader for Knitting Factory Records with “Good Kitty” in 1995.
Briggan’s next recording project “300” featured another trio which reunited Briggan with “Pig Pen” leader Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, and added fellow “Sex Mob” member Kenny Wollesen on drums. Recording for the Knitting Factory record label in 1997, “300” garnered notable critical acclaim for their self-titled debut recording culminating in making the “Jazziz Magazine Critic’s Top-Ten recordings of 1998” list twice.

While at Cornish College of the Arts, Briggan studied electronic music and advanced theory with composer/professor Jarrad Powell. In 1999 “Descending to End”, a solo studio project, was made over the course of nine months and received excellent reviews by the music press.
As a composer, Briggan was commissioned by Roulette New York with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation to present a program of new music. A mostly through composed chamber piece in eight parts, for eight musicians and conductor titled “Lensing”, was premiered at Roulette in April 2002.

Briggan continues to work with electronic music. He has released the CDs “Object #1” and "Object#2" which are part of a series of releases each dedicated and inspired by the work of a particular visual artist. He has also begun working with live electronics in several duo and trio settings with the likes of Wayne Horvitz, Jim Black, Skuli Sverrisson and others. He is also involved with a variety of collaborations with the visual artist Raha Raissnia which fall under the title "Systems" which has appeared in New York City galleries and at Anthology Film Archives. His electronic music was recently featured on WPS1 Art Radio.

Kevin Norton

"Compositions and Improvisations"

Angelica Sanchez: Piano
 
Esther Noh : Violin
 
Connie Crothers: Piano
 
J.D. Parran: Reeds, flutes
 
Kevin Norton: Vibraphone, drums, compositions

This concert features the first public performance of "The Pilgrim Variations" (for violin and clarinet) and other compositions of new "chamber music".  Also featuring the unique and developed improvisational skills of Norton, Connie Crothers, J.D. Parran and Angelica Sanchez.

Renowned percussionist and composer Kevin Norton has performed and recorded with a wide array of musicians such as Paul Rogers, Joëlle Léandre, Paul Dunmall, Frode Gjerstad, David Krakauer, Milt Hinton and Fred Frith. Also, for about ten years, Mr. Norton was Anthony Braxton's main percussionist in both the "ghost trance" phase and the "standards" phase, plotting out the course for all percussionists who followed him. His most recent projects include compositions for various sized chamber groups and a duo with pianist Connie Crothers.

In June of 2002, Kevin Norton was a resident composer at the prestigious MacDowell Colony. He has served on the faculty of several schools including the University of Maryland and is currently on the faculty of William Paterson University.

James Rouvelle

Formally trained in music composition at the Aspen Music Festival and Juilliard schools, James Rouvelle changed media when the Contemporary Classical Music scene became impossible, and focused his attention on electronics and programming. Presently acting chair of Interactive Media at
the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, James teaches programming, networking, physical computing, and interactive theory and practice. Having happily worked on various team based, interdisciplinary, tech-intensive projects over recent years, his current, personal efforts can be described as shared,
de-centralized, perhaps even aimless events, unfocussed by design to investigate collective intelligence, enhance social relationships, and foster empathy through the practice of listening and dialogue.

For tonight's show, James will be "performing" with the audience...

Blithe Riley

Blithe Riley is an artist working with video, performance and installation.
Her work combines narrative elements with systemic based structures. Recent
projects have explored the operations of spectatorship in various contexts,
including performance-based religious practices. Her work has been screened
nationally an internationally at venues such as the Hallwalls Contemporary
Art Center in Buffalo, NY, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's 125 Maiden
Lane Space in New York City, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, The Warhol Museum, and
Regina Miller Gallery, in Pittsburgh, PA and The European Media Arts
Festival in Germany. Riley received a BFA from Alfred School of Art and
Design in 1999, and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 where she
taught courses in video and performance. In addition to her own work, she
has organized and programmed video screenings since 1998. She currently
resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Lynn Book

RE:Next at Roulette is a divining tool for the future made of 3 women, voice, violin, extended piano, electronics and video.   This project originated with Lynn Book in North Carolina, then Katharina Klement in Vienna, Austria stepped in and Jacqui Carrasco, North Carolina, along with myriad other collaborators and participants intent on actively anticipating and even shaping our collective 'next'.   This collaborative culture project takes on utopian desire and many of its wild ideas through interactive synergistic processes that combine towards a "no-place" yet to emerge. RE:garding Next premiers at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC as both a changing exhibition and a multi media performance event with over 50 participants, including 30 high school and college students.   Sound maps, vocal scores and frames of action form the armature for the larger project and New York and Pittsburgh audiences will experience concert versions in the evolution of this 'utopia-work'.  

Lynn Book has a long history of interdisciplinary artistic practice that traverses boundaries between performance art and new music forms.   Critics from the New York Times and Village Voice have called her work "bold and inspired" and "strange and captivating".   Her performance work has included citations, fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace and MacArthur Foundation funding for the production of a radio drama based upon her performance theater piece, "Gorgeous Fever". Book's last performance at Roulette was "notes on desire" premiered in 2003 with percussionist and composer Kevin Norton.   The New York Foundation for the Arts has supported several projects with Book as originator, writer, composer, choreographer, and producer, including the The Dice Project (with Elise Kermani) involving the production of a CD of adventurous women composers and an accompanying series of live concert and media events at Thundergulch, EAR Studios at RPI and The Kitchen in New York.   Elsewhere in New York she has performed at the Knitting Factory, HERE, Judson Church, Roulette and Dixon Place and at other venues in the US and Europe including the Museum of Contemporary Art and Hothouse in Chicago, the Cleveland International Performance Art Festival and Emmetrop in Bourges.   Book has collaborated and/or worked on diverse projects with architect Johannes Knesl, percussionist and composer Kevin Norton, director Valeria Vasilevski, vocal artist Theo Bleckmann, architect and writer Madeline Gins, extended pianist Katharina Klement, violinist Jacqui Carrasco, bassist Tatsu Aoki, experimental filmmaker Sharon Couzin, theater artist Ping Chong and others.   Book founded Voicelab in New York in 1999 through which she produced emerging artists featuring extended voice in original performances.   She relocated to Winston-Salem, NC in 2005 where she teaches and develops creative projects at Wake Forest University.   She has contributed to the development of groundbreaking programs that foster innovations in performance and new media in Chicago: The School of the Art Institute (1985-95), in New York City: The Sidney Kahn Kitchen Summer Institute (2000-05) and in Austria at the Transart Institute (2005-present).

Katharina Klement

Katharina Klement was born in Graz, Austria. She moved to Vienna for studies in piano, composition and electro-acoustic music. Since the early 90's she has worked as a "composer-performer" in the field of instrumental and elctronic composition, she does crossover projects in music/video/text, works for mechanical and electronically customised piano, sound installations, and she is a founder and member of several ensembles for improvised music.

In 1996 she founded her own CD label KalK where she did several publications among others.
several scholarships, awards, prizes (at last federal scholarship for composition 2002, prize for electronic music Viktring 2004, honorary mention at the prix ars electronica Linz/Austria 2006)
Composition works i.a. for Austrian radio and television, "jeunesse" Austria, City of Vienna, Styria Province concerts in Austria and abroad (Budapest, Berlin, Zürich, Moskau).

She has collaborated with musicians and artists such as Oskar Aichinger, Cordula Boesze, Lynn Book, Peter Brandlmayr, Jacqui Carrasco, Angélica Castelló, Annelie Gahl, Nikolaus Gansterer, Hemma Geitzenauer, Thomas Grill, Seppo Gründler, Peter Herbert, Josef Klammer, Eden McNutt, Josef Novotny, Arturo Parra, Fredi Pröll, Wolfgang Reisinger, Elisabeth Schimana, Marianne Schuppe, Hannes Schweiger, Paul Skrepek, Hermann Stangassinger, Burkhard Stangl, Daniel Studer, Manon Liu Winter, Uli Winter, Martin Zrost.

She is currently a guest teacher at the institute of electronic media and computer music in Vienna.

Elliott Sharp - BINIBON

Composed and directed by Elliott Sharp with text written by noted sci-fi author Jack Womack, BINIBON is a work of both musical theater and alternative history based on the 1981 murder by Jack Henry Abbott of Richard Adan, a waiter and the night manager at the Binibon, a cafe and 24-hour hangout on 2nd ave at 5th St. in the East Village, a nexus for artists, musicians, neighborhood characters and bohemians true and faux.  Abbott was a talented writer as well as an imprisoned killer who became the protege of famed author Norman Mailer who sponsored his release into a halfway house on E. 3rd st. The killing was an important cusp-point in the history of the neighborhood, it's culture, it's daily life, it's real-estate, and its future.  The music draws upon E#'s own compositional and performance language that he developed during the time of the events ( & reflecting his many hours hanging out at the Binibon) and reveals ties to punk, No Wave, electronic dance music, noise, and industrial sounds.  The cast includes Mike Lubik,  Latarsha Rose, Deian McBryde, and Jack Womack.

Composer/producer/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and biological metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, The Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Rezonanz, Continuum, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Flux Quartet, sirius Stirng Quartet, and Zeitkratzer and collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, blues legend Hubert Sumlin; playwright Dael Orlandersmith, cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti, sci-fi writers Pat Cadigan and Lucius Shepard; jazz greats Sonny Sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah.  Sharp's orchestra piece "Calling" was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik and the CD won the January 2004 German Critics' Prize.  His composition "Quarks Swim Free" was premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 2003 and his chamber opera EmPyre was premiered at the 2006 Biennale.   Sharp's most recent CD releases include "Quadrature", a collection of solo acoustic guitar compositions; "Calling" with the Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; Terraplane's "Secret Life"; and the string quartet "Dispersion Of Seeds".  He founded the ongoing zOaR Records in 1978 both for his own productions including the critically-acclaimed compilations Peripheral Vision and State Of The Union and for other radical music.  He has recently completed the scores to the feature-films "What Sebastian Dreamt"", "Commune" by Jonathan Berman, and "Spectropia" by Toni Dove.  Installations include: "Suspension", a video and audio work in collaboration with video artist Janene Higgins, Chelsea Art Museum, NYC, 2003;  "Fluvial", computerized multichannel audiowork commissioned by Engine 27 gallery, NYC June 2002;  "Chromatine", an interactive string sculpture/audiowork created for the Gallery of the School of Museum Of Fine Art, Boston, 2001.