VauxFlores Industrial Label Showcase
Usufruct, [ruidobello], Oa, Travis Johns
Usufruct (YOO-zoo-fruckt) is the right of the people to harvest the fruits of common property. The duo Usufruct, consisting of flutist, composer, vocalist/improviser Polly Moller Springhorn and computer musician
Tim Walters, deconstructs, lovingly reassembles, and improvises around found texts and musical materials in the public domain.
[ruidobello] is Jorge Bachmann, a Sound Artist living and working in
San Francisco, California.
oa is Hugh Behm-Steinberg and
Matt DavignonHugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of two books of poetry and 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. In 2015 his short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. He’s a shop steward for the California College of the Arts Adjunct Faculty Union/SEIU 1021, where he teaches in the MFA Writing and BA Writing and Literature Programs.
Matt Davignon’s music is “fragile and gorgeous and stubbornly weird,” according to the SF Bay Guardian. He’s best known for combining drum machine and pre-recorded source material with a variety of electronic
processing devices to create shifting layers of organic and expressive sounds. His music is inspired by field recordings, natural sound phenomena, irregular and imperfect rhythms, and psychedelic, drone and
space music.
Travis Johns is a sound artist residing in Ithaca, NY, whose work includes performance, installation and printmaking, often incorporating electronic instruments of his own design. Active in the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene for several years, Johns moved to Costa Rica in 2011 where he collaborated extensively with visual artist Paulina Velazquez-Solis on Raro, an immersive sound and sculpture installation that represented Costa Rica in the 2013 Biennial of the Central American Isthmus (BAVIC). Since returning to
the states, first to Baltimore and later to Ithaca, he’s continued to apply his trade as a composer, educator and sound artist under the nom de plume of VauxFlores. He holds a B.M. In Technology in Music and Related Arts from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, studies conducted with Tom Lopez, as well as an MFA from Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media, studies conducted with Chris Brown, Les Stuck and Hilda Paredes. He has participated in residencies at such places as the Atlantic Center for the Arts and RPI’s Create @ iEar, and has had work featured by/at el Museo Centroamericano de Arte Video (MUCEVI), the
Electronic Music Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the Bienarte 8 Costa Rican Biennial, el Museo Nacional de Costa Rica, MAC Panama, The California Academy of Sciences, Alianza Francesa de Guatemala, The Lab (San Francisco), Battery Townsley (Marin County, Ca), Rhizome DC (Washington DC) and Cornell University.
Cost: $8-$15 sliding scale