The Emerald Tablet is proud and very excited to host the release party for the debut album by Oa, a collaboration between poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg and experimental musician
Matt Davignon, on Saturday, February 7 at 8pm.
OA (Hugh Behm-Steinberg and
Matt Davignon) uses spoken stories, phrases, words and phonemes as the building blocks for improvised experimental music. Oa’s debut CD compiles improvisations for samplers and digital turntables, mixing all the voices into a musical soup with ebbing and flowing narratives.
Matt Davignon‘s distinctive sound palette influenced by natural sounds, arrhythmic musical patterns and a love for psychedelic and space music. Mostly known as a drum machinist, he specializes in modifying and reorganizing familiar sounds to create music that evokes biological systems.
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. His books include The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press) and Shy Green Fields(No Tell Books), as well as several chapbooks including Sorcery (Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv) and Good Morning! (Deconstructed Artichoke Press). He is the author of two libretti: Terrible Things Will Happen But It’s Going to Be Okay: A Donner Party Opera with composer Guillermo Galindo, and a children’s opera based on the Chinese folktale, The Clever Wife, which was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera for their Opera to Go series. He also collaborates on text/sound art projects with
Matt Davignon, and is a member of The Crank Ensemble. He is currently collaborating with his wife on an illuminated manuscript re-working of Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th Century Sufi masterpiece The Conference of the Birds.
Cost: $5-10