Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

Sun, May 4 2025 7:00 PM

West Oakland Sound Series
2201 Poplar Street Dresher Ensemble Studio Oakland
Click for Venue page

CELEBRATING 2 CD RELEASES!

CRACKING THE SURFACE (David Michalak + Scott R. Looney + Thomas Dimuzio)
Chris Brown + Ben Davis


CRACKING THE SURFACE (David Michalak, instruments of skatch; SCOTT LOONEY, piano, hyper-piano, and Thomas Dimuzio, buchla 200E, processing) CD release show celebrating our new release recorded at Fantasy Studios with Tom Nunn, released by Chris Cutler's ReR Megacorp in the UK, Gench Music in the US. This was Tom Nunn's last recording.

"There’s real structural depth; no repetition, no settling into a groove, nothing obvious, but everything is in constant motion and there’s never any fat, or waiting for the next idea... an exemplary release, not least because these sounds are organic and mechanical and played interactively by people in real time and with a high level of musical sensitivity." -- Chris Cutler

The Bay Area duo of Chris Brown (piano, electronics) and Ben Davis (cello) celebrates their four years of creative development with the CD release of Jongleurs on ArtifactRecordings. Inspired by the Medieval itinerant musicians who lived outside society, without fixed employment, and were “neither elitist nor monopolistic of creativity.” (Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music). Their music is developed primarily through free improvisation, but draws on their backgrounds in classical contemporary music with an emphasis on timbral diversity, from just intonation to noise that exploits extended techniques on their instruments, and live, interactive electronics. For this concert they will perform within an a newly developed aleatoric live sampling system that fragments and expands their improvisations projected through three loudspeakers that render instantly composed orchestral textures.

Cost: $10-$25 sliding scale
Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
Scott R. Looney, Lisa Mezzacapa, and Donald Robinson at Berkeley Arts Fest space - May 31, 2014