Fell Clutch

A 'Jam Band' that casts its net wide but keeps a sharp focus. "What King Crimson did for rock and Voivod did for heavy metal, [Fell Clutch] might one day do for improvised music". An amazing and unlikely downtown all-star quartet, with Tony Buck's drums and Stomu Takeishi's electric fretless effected bass providing searing rhythms over which David Tronzo's guitar and Ned Rothenberg's circular-breathed reeds bubble, neither aimless or indulgent but with a stunning degree of precise interaction.

Magda Mayas / Matt Bauder

Magda Mayas is a pianist and curator currently based in Berlin, Germany. Mayas studied jazz and improvisation at Universität der Künste, Conservatorium van Amsterdam in 2001 under Misha Mengelberg and completed a diploma at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler under Georg Graewe in 2005. During this time she began developing a specific set of techniques for inside-piano performance. Mayas has concentrated her musical investigations on the piano and its sonic possibilities, utilizing extended techniques, amplification and preparations as a process of abstraction, whilst focusing on the physicality of both internal and external parts of the piano.
As a continuation of this research Mayas founded the festival Tasten-Berliner Klaviertage featuring contemporary and innovative approaches for the piano. Mayas performs internationally in a variety of roles as interpreter, solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers: in a duo with Tony Buck, in the trio Phono Phono with Michael Renkel and Sabine Vogel, the Quartet Mayas,/Nutters/ Olsen/Galvez and as part of the Amsterdam based N-Collective. She has appeared in various festivals including "The Total Music Meeting", "Konfrontationen" and Festival of Exiles. Over the years Mayas has performed with many leading figures in improvisation such as Michael Zerang, Johannes Bauer, Christoph Kurzmann, Andy Moore, Steve Heather, Thomas Lehn,Tristan Honsinger, Frank Gratkowski and Michael Moore.

“...Mayas has an ingenious way of using both the inside and keyboard of the piano to create sparse, tiny fragments of motion that are compatible with multiple layers of the musical context... she is definitely a leading light of the next generation of improvisors...” -Michael Anton Parker, Downtown Music Gallery

www.myspace.com/antheacaddyandmagdamayas
www.myspace.com/notriangle
www.n-collective.com/mnog
www.tasten.org

Matt Bauder
Matt Bauder's Day in Pictures
MB- Tenor Saxophone, Clarinet
Kirk Knuffke - Trumpet
Angelica Sanchez - Piano
Jason Ajemian - Bass
Tomas Fujiwara - Drums

Matt Bauder is a saxophonist and composer who has studied with Ed Sarath, Anthony Braxton, Ron Kuivila and Alvin Lucier. He has been an active member of the new music scenes in Ann Arbor, Chicago and New York, where he has performed with, among others, Braxton, Andrew D'Angelo, Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, Jim Baker, Ken Vandermark and Phil Minton. He appears on recordings with Jason Ajemian (Locust Music), Warn Defever (Perforate My Heart), Neil Michael Hagerty (Drag City), His Name is Alive (4AD/Time Stereo), Saturday Looks Good to Me (Polyvinyl) and Bill Brovald (Tzadik).

ROULETTE BENEFIT NIGHT

Improv ensemble curated by Okkyung Lee:

Miya Masaoka
Marina Rosenfeld
Shoko Nagai
Brian Chase
Seth Cluett

$20

A native of Korea, Okkyung Lee has been developing her own voice in contemporary cello performance, improvisation and composition. Using her solid classical training as a springboard, she incorporates jazz, sounds, korean traditional music, and noise with extended techniques
to create her unique blend of music. Okkyung has released her debut album, Nihm on Tzadik; a duo recording with Christian Marclay on My Cat is an Alien label's split LP series; and a solo cello album I saw the Ghost of an Unknown Soul and it Said...

Marina Rosenfeld is a noted composer, improviser and artist whose works have been commissioned in recent years by the Whitney Biennial 2008 and 2002; Creative Time; Tate Modern; The Kitchen; Artists Space; Contemporary Jewish Museum; Electronic Music Foundation and many others. Frequent collaborators include Christian Marclay, DJ Olive, Lee Ranaldo, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and Kaffe Matthews, among many others.

Miya Masaoka resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer and sound/installation artist. She has created works for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video. She also has made works for sculpture installations and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra and mixed choirs. In her pieces, she often works with the sonification of data, and maps the behavior of brain activity, plants and insect movement to sound.

Seth Cluett (b. 1976, Troy, NY) is a composer and visual artist whose work includes photography, drawing, video, sound installation, concert music, performance, and theoretical writing. His pieces are an exploration of the role of sound in everyday life. Operating at the boundary between the auditory and other senses, his work engages sound's ability to be both collectively shared and distinctly personal. Many of his pieces investigate the acoustic signature of specific locations, where sound is experienced as an activity (audio tourism), architectural property, or as geological process.

Jason Kahn

Jason Kahn is a musician and visual artist based in Zürich. His work includes sound installation, performance and composition. He was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and relocated to Europe in 1990. Originally a percussionist, Kahn later began integrating live electronics into his playing. He currently performs with different combinations of percussion, analogue synthesizer or computer. Kahn has given concerts and exhibited his sound installations throughout Europe, North
and South and America, Japan, Mexico, Korea, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, Egypt,
Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.

'In my solo concerts I view the performance space as the actual instrument I am playing, exploring its inherent sonic charateristics with amplified percussion and analog synthesizer. Imbued with a sense of timelessness, these concerts attempt to create an immersive sound environment addressing the entity of sound as both a physical and psychological factor shaping our consciousness.'

"Kahn's work bears some similarity with the late music of Morton Feldman. What Feldman and Kahn often manage to do is suggest that what you're hearing when you're listening to their compositions is a continuum: moment without time." Brian Marley, The Wire, 4.2006

"A stunning sound art, uncategorizable by any standard."
Darren Bergstein, e|i Magazine, 8.2007

http://jasonkahn.net

Val-Inc

Haitian electronic music composer/percussionist/turntablist, Val-Inc evokes the musical esoteric realms of the creative subconscious and self defined as "Afro-Electronica®". Her work invites the Lwas as she incorporates her African Haitian Musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics and the archaic with the post-modern. She workes with a diverse array of artists like Steve Coleman as a turntablist/composer, Tracie D. Morris as a percussionist and Anthony Braxton as a recording engineer. Her solo "Afro-Electronica" installations have been showcased in New York City at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Village Vanguard and internationally at SaalFelden Music Festival in Austria, Stanser Musiktage in Switzerland, Jazz a la Villette in France, and the Biennale di Venezia Museum in Italy.

Esther Venrooy & Heleen Van Haegenborgh / Barry Weisblat & Margarida Garcia

Mock Interiors
Heleen Van Haegenborgh (inside piano and harmonium)
Esther Venrooy (electronics)

Pianist Heleen Van Haegenborgh and electronic composer Esther Venrooy join forces in a project that explores the synergy of acoustic piano with electronica and digital sound processing. Both musicians are keen collaborators and have worked extensively with different media. Van Haegenborgh has collaborated with electro-acoustic outfits like Tape Tum and Köhn and she has provided a live soundtrack for Nam June Paik's "Zen for Film". Venrooy collaborated with pianist Frederic Croene and pipa virtuosa Min Xiao-Fen and has created works for choreography as well as sound installations. Their collaboration aims to draw the listener into the inner workings of the piano. Armed with a battery of microphones they set out to find hidden sounds within the piano. Resonating elements and tiny inaudible mechanical sounds are captured, manipulated and magnified through electronic means, resulting in fragile textures where the boundaries between electronic and acoustic
sound become blurred.

Esther Venrooy (°1974, Rosmalen, The Netherlands) is a composer and sound artist working in the field of electronic music. After completing studies in classical saxophone, Venrooy attended the European Dance Development Center (Arnhem) as a composer in residence, where she began employing electronic and digital techniques in pieces aimed at choreography and stage performance. Gradually her music evolved into an independent means of expression and she continued her work with electronica at the IPEM (Institute for Psycho-acoustics and Electronic Music) in Ghent, Belgium where she still resides. At this time she started utilizing film editing paradigms as a foundation for her personal composition methods. Her works range from purely electronic composed music to improvised combinations of electronica with traditional instrumentation such as piano, flute and satsuma-biwa. She has created site-specific works as well as multimedia performances and installations. Much of her music has been released on CD or vinyl and has received good critical acclaim. Esther Venrooy has performed her music extensively for audiences in cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, Hamburg, Cologne, Washington DC and The Hague. Upcoming concert destinations include New York, Dusseldorf, Berlin and Rotterdam. Apart from her artistic activities, Venrooy is a lecturer on 20th century music and experimental arts at the Ghent school of fine arts, where she also runs the audio workshop. Together with her husband she runs Odradek - an organization that curates events, releases and concerts dedicated to sound art and innovative or experimental music. Venrooy also presides the board of (k-raa-k)3 organization.

Heleen Van Haegenborgh (°1980, Gent, Belgium ) studied piano at the Ghent conservatory with Claude Coppens and Daan Vandewalle. The improvisation lessons with Godfried Willem Raes (Logosfoundation.org) were crucial for her musical development. She followed master classes with
Jan Michiels, Boyan Vodenicharov, Louis Pas, John Tilbury, Luc Vaes, and Claire Chevalier. Her musical activities are a series of different projects where new music and extended techniques on piano are the starting-point. She’s trying to develop projects in which she brings new experimental music approachable for a wider public without doing concessions on the difficulty of the pieces. This happens through eg. working with other media ( ‘Songbooks’ and ‘Zen for film’),
recovering the original function of the music ( ‘Re:construction’), adapting the environment on the contents of the music (“contcont”)…

Since 2006 she has a duo with composer Thomas Smetryns. They bring own compositions for piano, electric guitar; 78 rpm players, tape, inside piano. Their cd was released at the Logosfoundation (2007). In april this year, they played in Chicago where they played together with Jonathon Kirk and Brent Wetters. Heleen Van Haegenborgh has several improvisation groups. A trio with Tape Tum (laptop, electric guitar and piano), a new improvisation quintet with Guy De
Bièvre, Esther Venrooy, Thomas Smetryns and Xavier Verhelst and a duo with Esther Venrooy (electronics). She’s also working on productions with Hermes Ensemble and playing solo concerts with experimental music (James Tenney, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Morton Feldman…) . See heleenvanhaegenborgh.be for her whole repertoire (click "projecten", then click "programma’s").. Played in Vooruit Ghent, Netwerk Aalst, Gallery Marijke Schreurs Brussels, Flemish Opera
Antwerp, Brakke Grond Amsterdam, International Filmfestival Rotterdam, Ossia Fine Arts Building in Chicago (US)...

http://www.myspace.com/heleenvhaegenborgh,
http://www.myspace.com/esthervenrooy

Barry Weisblat

Born 1975, Brooklyn, New York. Sound Artist/Improviser and Electronic Instrument Builder. Extensive experiments with electro-magnetic devices, solar technology, homemade and modified circuits for application in sound generation/manipulation, audio engineering and photography. Musical collaborations with Margarida Garcia, Tim Barnes, Toshio Kajiwara, Tower Recordings, Sean Meehan, Ricardo Arias, Tetuzi Akiyama, Mattin, Dean Roberts, Dion Workman, Michael Rodgers, Anthony Guerra, Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Instruments built for Peter Kowald, Okkyung Lee, Samara Lubelski, Glenn Kotche , Manuel Mota. Sound engineering for Erstwhile Records, Drag City Records, Jon Gibson, Matthew Valentine.

Joe McPhee w/ Trio X (Dominic Duval & Jay Rosen)

Roulette TV

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. McPhee’s first recordings as leader appeared on the CjR label, founded in 1969 by painter Craig Johnson. By 1974, Swiss entrepreneur Werner X. Uehlinger had become aware of McPhee’s recordings and unreleased tapes and was so impressed that he decided to form the Hat Hut label as a vehicle to release McPhee’s work. The label’s first LP was Black Magic Man , which had been recorded by McPhee in 1970. The earliest recordings by McPhee are often informed by the revolutionary movements of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; for example, Nation Time is a tribute to poet Amiri Baraka and Joe McPhee & Survival Unit II at WBAI’s Free Music Store, 1971 (finally released as a Hat Art CD in 1996) is a sometimes anguished post- Coltrane cry for freedom and liberation.

In the early 1980s McPhee met composer, accordionist, performer, and educator Pauline Oliveros, whose theories of “deep listening” strengthened his interests in extended instrumental and electronic techniques. McPhee also read Edward de Bono ’s book Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity, which presents concepts for solving problems by “disrupting an apparent sequence and arriving at the solution from another angle.” Since then McPhee has appeared on such labels as CIMP, Okkadisk, Music & Arts, Cadence Jazz Records, and Victo, and collaborated with such artists as Ken Vandermark, Kent Kessler, Peter Brötzmann, Dominic Duval, and Jay Rosen (Trio X).

With a career now spanning over 37 years and more than 60 recordings, Joe McPhee has shown that emotional content and theoretical underpinnings are thoroughly compatible — and in fact, a critically important pairing — in the world of creative improvised music.

Earl Howard - live taping of Roulette TV

Earl Howard has been performing his compositions in the United States and Europe for the past thirty-five years, expanding the boundaries of saxophone, live electronics, and synthesizer performance. Tonight he is joined by longtime collaborators Gerry Hemmingway (percussion) and Anthony Davis (piano) for the premiere of "Shattered Matters", a new composition of structured improvisation exploring the de-positioning, reforming, and regrouping of events, and "Ditch" - a new piece for solo saxophone.