Aloha New Music Lovers,
Phil Dadson is in town from New Zealand and we at the Grotto are celebrating with another wild night of invented instrument music with local golden boy Dan Gottwald. Your ears wont believe your eyes! Also, at the bottom of this email is information on Phil’s open house at Headlands Center for the Arts on July 17. Enjoy!
Inventors’ Quarrum:
Phil Dadson (New Zealand) and Friends
Dan Gottwald; the Analegous Ensemble
Sat July 30, 8 PM
Turquoise Yantra Grotto
32 Turquoise Way SF
$10-15
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BIOS:
Phil Dadson is a New Zealand intermedia artist working essentially in sound, music, performance, and moving image. His works have been resonating throughout the international music and art worlds since the early 1970s.
American composer Lou Harrison was so impressed by the sound of Dadson’s instruments he named a star in the Eridanus constellation after him.
Dadson's sound-based artworks take many forms: performances (solo and with his group, From Scratch); videos; installations that crunch underfoot or surprise one with singing stones and talking drums; radio works; sound sculptures and experimental musical instruments; compositions; graphic scores; and sound stories.
A founding member of Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra (1969), Dadson launched the rhythm/performance group 'From Scratch' in 1974. Over the next decade, the group performed to wide international acclaim. Dadson's musical compositions were praised by New Zealand curator/author Wystan Curnow as "among the greatest works in any art form to come out of this country."
Former senior lecturer and head of Intermedia at Auckland's Elam Art School, Dadson retired in 2001 to pursue his experiments work full-time. Travel and research grants have allowed this New Zealand artist to explore and perform in India, Thailand, Indonesia, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, South America, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Antarctica.
In 2001, Phil Dadson received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award; in 2005, he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Dan Gottwald is a sculptor, instrument builder, video/installation/performance artist and composer. His work focuses largely on the tactile and the sonic as temporary events.
His work has been shown and performed in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico as well as in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco, California.
Gottwald holds a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of New Mexico (where he ended up making music) and is currently pursuing an MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College (where he mostly makes sculptures).
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Now in our 6th season, 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, part concert 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, Tom Nunn, David Samas, Dan Gottwald, Peter Whitehead, Bryan Day, Larnie Fox, Susan Rawcliffe and many others. The 4 pianos in the house are each uniquely tuned for a variety of repertoire showcased in our solo piano series.
Cost: $10-15