Tom's Place
3111 Deakin Street Berkeley
Click for Venue page

Tania Chen and Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) performing Electronic Music for Piano (1968) by John Cage.

Tania Chen is a great improvising pianist, and also a brilliant interpreter of experimental piano literature. We're happy every time she chooses to grace the Tom's Place stage, and this concert should be a standout. This evening she'll be teaming up with Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) to perform John Cage's Electronic Music for Piano.

I'm pretty stoked about this show. Hope to see you.

More details about the performers, and samples of their work at

http://taniachen.com/
http://www.detritus.net/Wobbly/

Tom's Place
3111 Deakin Street, Berkeley CA
Directions: http://4-33.com/directions.html
Information: http://4-33.com/toms-place/index.html

Program notes:

John Cage's Electronic Music for Piano (1968)

Cage wrote "Music for Piano" throughout the 1950s. When working with David Tudor, he decided to electrocute them and scrawled a note in a hotel room in Sweden in 1964 with some vague directions, essentially the piano becomes a giant amplifier and sounds on piano captured using any means of electronic devices. In a recent recording of Cage's Electronic Music for Piano, Thurston Moore stuck his guitar in Tania's piano which created giant feedback. David Toop stuck a large tub of water in her piano which caused some excitement with the studio engineer in London. Tonight Jon Leidecker will be using digital electronics and re-processing sounds to create a new and ever changing version of this extraordinary composition.


Tania Chen

Tania Chen is a performance and video sound artist, experimental musician and free improviser. She performs internationally on piano, keyboards, digital, vintage electronics and found objects.

Tania has recorded with Stewart Lee, Steve Beresford, Henry Kaiser, William Winant, Wadada Leo Smith, Thurston Moore, David Toop, Jon Raskin and with the bands Bad Jazz and Tender Buttons. Forthcoming recordings are John Cage's "Electronic Music for Piano". Her solo recordings include Michael Parsons & Cornelius Cardew's Piano music, John Cage's "Music of Changes" and a forthcoming recording of Andrew Poppy's piano music. Tania is Sound Artist in Residence at Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco.

http://taniachen.com/ for recordings and shows


JON LEIDECKER / Wobbly

Jon Leidecker has been producing music under the name Wobbly since 1990, improvising with recordings to produce music which inherently resists the act of being captured. Recent performances deploy a battery of mobile devices driven by their built-in microphones, reacting instantly with error-prone variations on the notes and sounds they believe they are hearing: a tightly-knit orchestra with inhuman reflexes, resulting in structures which the human performer influences more than controls. Wobbly's live and studio collaborations with Negativland, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Fred Frith, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, Sagan and the Freddy McGuire Show compliment live mix media collages broadcast twice a month on KPFA FM's Over The Edge radio program.

http://www.detritus.net/Wobbly/ for recordings and shows

Cost: Free, donations accepted.

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play: