SOUNDSWORDSMOVESSOUNDSWORDS
4 Acts, 4 Poets
Pitta of the Mind:
Amanda Chaudhary & Maw Shein Win
YoyoMama: Bab Marsh & Sandra Yolles
Tom Nunn &
Dean Santomieri w/ Butoh Dancer Ronie Baker
Brother’s Quarrel:
David Samas & Ian Saxton Featuring Tom Clark
@ Turquoise Yantra Grotto
Friday April 24, 8-10 pm
32 Turquoise Way sf ca 94131
$10-15
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Pitta of the Mind is the duo of
Amanda Chaudhary and Maw Shein Win, combining poetry with abstract electronic music. Their highly theatrical performances each center around a theme that is explored via text, sound and visuals.
Amanda Chaudhary is a composer and performer specializing in contemporary and electronic music. Her solo work involves experimenting with innovative sounds via analog synthesis and custom software with computers and mobile devices as well as folk and toy instruments. Her other ensemble projects include Reconnaissance Fly, an art-pop band and composers collective; and Surplus 1980, a Bay Area post-punk band.
Maw Shein Win’s writing has appeared in various journals, and she has work forthcoming in the anthology Cross-Strokes (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). She is a poetry editor for Rivet and was an Artist In Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Win often collaborates with visual artists and musicians, and her chapbook, Ruins of a glittering palace, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. She is a recipient of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize for Innovative Poetry and a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.
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YoyoMama is a duo project that began almost ten years ago. Sandra Yolles plays free wheeling electronic percussion and Bob Marsh squeezes nice and ugly sounds from his cello and decorates them with his voice.
Bob Marsh performs regularly on violin, cello, piano, vibraphone, flute, electronics, and uses extended vocal techniques. He is the leader of String Theory, Out of the Blue Chamber Ensemble, the Quintessentials, the Robot Martians, the Illuminated Orchestra, Opera viva and the Che Guevarra Memorial Marching (and Stationary) Accordion Band; and member of Aaron Bennett's Nonet, Jim Ryan's Left Coast Improv Group, the Abstractions, the Moe!chestra and co-founder of the Cornelius Cardew Choir .
Sandra Yolles is a visual artist working with collage, painting and clay. She has been playing electronic percussion for several years and frequently collaborates with cellist and vocalist Bob Marsh in their duo YoyoMama.
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Tom Nunn has designed, built and performed with original musical instruments since 1976, having received a B.Mus. and M.A. in music composition from the University of Texas at Austin and S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, and post-graduate work at U.C. San Diego. His instruments typically utilize commonly available materials, are sculptural in appearance, utilize contact microphones for amplification, and are designed specifically for improvisation with elements of ambiguity, unpredictability and nonlinearity.
Dean Santomieri composes and performs using electric resonator guitars in non-standard tunings. Stylistically his playing is most closely associated with the modern classical avant-garde, and is characterized by a loose compositional framework that allows for improvisatory explorations. He also regularly performs as a spoken word artist, usually with musical accompaniment. His stories and poems are inspired by music, dreams, the visual arts, word games and intentionally misheard / misread items from radio and newspapers.
Ronnie Baker is an experimental performer, with a background in Butoh and Ballet. He has been studying with Koichi and Hiroko Tamano for 15 years and has studied ballet with Monique Goldwater and ODC Dance for over 5. Since the early 1990’s he has blended mixed-media and interdisciplinary performance with circus arts in the US and Japan.
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Brother’s Quarrel is the avant improvising duo of
David Samas, invented instruments and Ian Saxton, extended percussion. We will be joined by the disembodied voice of poet and mentor Tom Clark, performing Philandering Moon.
David Samas is a composer, cosmologist, poet, painter, performer, philosopher, farmer and father of 4. He has a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art and studied poetics at the New College of California. As a young man he performed with the SF Boys Chorus, the SF Opera and the SF Symphony with which he won a GRAMMY for the “best classical recording” of 1994. He also makes sacred geometry amulets and talismans, is an excellent cook, and self publishes small editions of hand bound art books.
Ian Saxton is an experimental percussionist and theatrical activist with a background in computer music and a deep passion for complex polyrhythms. He completed a music BA at UC Santa Cruz with David Cope, a Computer Music MA at UC San Diego with Miller Puckette, and worked closely with David Wessel while in the Music Composition PhD program at UC Berkley before leaving in “protest” over the corporatization and militarization of public education and arts research. He was the founding drummer for Cash Pony and long time percussionist for Sun Hop Fat, both Bay Area bands who traverse the ethno/prog/jazz/white-boy-funk/rock fusion space.
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The Turquoise Yantra Grotto is a house concert series for avant improvisers and invented instrumentalists with a focus on ethno-modernism and extended techniques. We hold a monthly event which is part concert, and part social club, and part art opening, near Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The Turquoise Yantra Grotto is home to many unique invented instruments including the Zen Industrial Gamelan (or grand metalliphone), the Gamelan Piano, and several sonic paintings, as well as instruments by Bart Hopkin and
Tom Nunn.