Live at BAM/PFA, 7-9PM
John Krausbauer and Kaori Suzuki of Oakland will present an improvisational composition with voices, amplified strings, electronics, and bell percussion. Their work originates from their shared interest in ecstatic and spiritual musics as much as in the western "avant-garde", utilizing sustained tones, long durations, and playing endurance, aiming to create 'experiential' environments rather than the strictly 'musical'.
Tetuzi Akiyama, on tour from Tokyo, will begin the evening with a solo guitar performance.
Since emerging in the 1980's from Tokyo's insurgent improvising underground, guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama has blazed a thrillingly confounding trail. Over the decades Akiyama has developed an utterly unique musical language; his playing reveals a total mastery of the achingly beautiful sounds of roots and country blues music as well as the nuanced avant garde abstractions that embrace subtle sounds and silence. Akiyama is perhaps the only artist that can lay equal claim to the inspiration of John Lee Hooker's boogie guitar runs and John Cage's silence.
In addition to making a variety of solo albums covering everything from fingerpicking and slide acoustic guitar atonalism to noisy experimental drone to never ending boogie, Akiyama has made many albums in collaboration with highly praised artists such as Jozef Van Wissem, Donald McPherson, Greg Malcolm, Bruce Russell, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, Michel Henritzi, Phantom Limb, Gul3, Tim Barnes, Oren Ambarchi, Martin Ng and Alan Licht, just to name a few. Akiyama is also a band member of "Koboku Senjû", "Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society" and "Hontatedori". Akiyama has been frequently invited for international music festivals in Asia, East & West Europe, North & South America, Australia and New Zealand in recent years.
http://www.otooto.jp/tetuzi-akiyama
http://www.japanimprov.com/takiyama/
Kaori Suzuki (b.1984) is a Tokyo-born music maker currently based in Oakland, CA. She has toured and presented her work in various venues across the U.S., Japan, Mexico, and Canada.
Her compositions combine electronics, bowed percussion and string instruments, resonating objects, and others. Her feedback/synthesizer recordings are found on Newsun (Sounds et al), and her recent release of a durational composition for very high frequencies, Conduit, is out on Second Editions (Berlin).
In addition to her solo music endeavors, she collaborates with partner, John Krausbauer, on voice, amplified strings, bells, and immersive light/sound environments, and plays drums in the Oakland based minimalist psych-punk group, Night Collectors. Her solo and collaborative works have been presented at San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Debacle Fest, Berkeley Art Museum, CCRMA, The Lab, S1, Mills College, Elastic Arts, and others.
John Krausbauer (b. Indianapolis) is a music composer/multi-instrumentalist/improviser currently living in Oakland, CA.
He has performed and presented his music in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Japan, in a multitude of settings - from basements, sidewalks, and rock clubs to colleges, churches, and art galleries. Numerous recordings of his have been released on independent labels in the US, Europe, and Japan.
A long time purveyor of the ur-drone and trance-psychedelia, his work involves audio transmissions for TOTAL/immersive sensory experience. Transcendence through repetition, duration, alternate tunings, maximum volumes, and (often) stroboscopic lighting.
His current music projects include the Ecstatic Music Band (a 10+ member-collective of strings players); solo music for voice, violin, and synth; his collaboration with partner, Kaori Suzuki, with bells, voices, strings, tape; the Minimalist psych-punk group Night Collectors; an ongoing collaboration with the steel bodied resonator guitar player, R. Keenan Lawler, as well as new duo collaborations with NYC bagpipe player, David Watson, and Tokyo based guitarist, Tetuzi Akiyama.
Cost: included with admission