The 2007 EDGETONE NEW MUSIC SUMMITCritical Mass, Sounds on the gritty side of the fence...
High Vulture, Van Boven, Jesse Quattro, Eddie the Rat, Gowns
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Van Boven starts with an indie rock aesthetic, and takes it to ominous extremes…combining avant-rock
concepts with dirty underground blues and melodic
meandering…their music is both inspiring, and thoughtfully aggressive.
Jon Brumit composed and improvised music incorporating percussion, electronics, sampling, found objects, and signal processing has been labeled "physically debilitating" and "intellectually refreshing" by art critics, and his performances have been declared "disarmingly powerful" and "extremely adventurous and explosive [for ambient music]" by rock and noise musicians. Not bad for an artist whose last release was made entirely with garbage from the San Francisco Dump.
He has performed and exhibited his sound work nationally at venues including SF MoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sony Metreon, DC's Black Cat, Baltimore's 8 x 10, SF's Luggage Store Gallery, Detroit Art Space, Chicago's Buddy Gallery, Cranbrook Museum of Art, Olympia's Voyeur, and Oakland's Black Box. He has performed, recorded, and collaborated with former members of The Swans, June of 44, the Shaking Ray Levis' Dennis Palmer and Bob Stagner, Gino Robair, Wayne Grim, Lisa Mezzacappa, Bob Boster, Allesandro Olla, and numerous others.
His works have been featured on National Public Radio, Discovery Channel International, ABC, NBC, CBS, and WGN Chicago, among others.
Wayne Grim is a musician and sound artist who lives in Berkeley, California. He has performed and recorded with Nada Brahma, Burning Ghat, Saturn Maps, Et Saw God, Steve Berson's Acoustitronics, Interloper, and other east coast and Bay Areaw artists.
"As a composer and improviser, I user a variety of guitars, Ud, Saz, Adungu and other stringed instruments, computers, electronics and percussion to create music. Currently, I mostly enjoy collaborating with other musicians and making music for film and video"
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Eddie the Rat began in 2000 as an avant- (something) group led by composer/multi-instrumentalist,
Peter J. Martin. Beginning as a one-man electro-acoustic experiment, Eddie the Rat
evolved into an ensemble of up to 15 musicians. The current quartet has been performing actively for the last year and a half.
Martin desribes Eddie the Rat music as "head music for your feet": conceptual in inspiration, primal and visceral in execution. Amoeba Records calls it "sexy avant-garde." Inspired by Indonesian gamelan, American & European folk, and modern 12-tone music, Eddie the Rat tries to bridge the gap between ritual, roots, and concert music.
Eddie the Rat is a music group as much as a musical form onto itself as directed by Martin's personal compositional and bandleading style. The ideal is to cultivate each member's artistic personality into a coordinated musical expression, rather than highlight individual capabilities through soloing, etc...What might sound like "free-form"
is carefully composed and meticulously rehersed, with the arrangements being intended to work for any idiom such as a rock band, musique concrete, or orchestra. It's All Part Of The Ongoing Construct.
PERFORMING ARTISTS
Dan Ake - Lobro, Spike, 2x6
Ronnie Camaro - bass, vocals
Peter J. Martin - piano, cajon (left foot), bass drum (right foot), vocals, Balinese gangsa, Long- Boy, Proto
Molly Tascone - vocals, recorder, glockenspiel, steel drum, triangle
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Jesse Quattro is a composer and vocalist. She sings with Secret Chiefs 3 on 'Book of Horizons' as well as forthcoming releases by the group. She has a duo Old Timey Music project with Eric Landmark of the Numbers, harmonizing on murder ballads and sacred hymnals circa 1910 and prior. While completing her BA in Music Performance/Composition at Mills College in Oakland, she also writes backyard folk-ish songs with guitar and releases about one solo album a year. Her current solo albums are 'Neurotic in the Afterlife', available through her myspace page (see link above), and 'Closer to the Wolf' available through Utech Records. Jesse Quattro's musical projects and bands range from singing with EyeHateGod and Carniceria (metal) to Bulgarian Voice Ensembles, Noise and Freak-Out Jazz Improv. Bands that she has sung for include: The Abstractions, Saint of Killers, Carniceria, Fall of the Bastard, Moe!kestra, Old Timey w/ Eric Landmark, Slaughterhouse Flies, NoLogo, and Secret Chiefs 3.
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High Vulture [Bruce Anderson, John Moremen, Bill Raymond]
"Led by the incinderary guitarist of the famed group MX-80, Bruce Anderson and his improv cohorts, drummer John Moremen, and bassist Bill Raymond, High Vulture, screeched, swooped, soared, and even soothed most effectively under Anderson's guidance and special effects. This music is not for the squeamish, however, if you are bold enough to take the journey with High Vulture, you may find them a trip well worth taking." -E. Doc Smith, BeyondChron.com
Called one of America's "Unknown Greats" by Guitar Player magazine, Bruce Anderson is best known for his playing in MX-80, the hard-art combo he founded in 1975. Outside of the near constant 30 year activity of that group, Anderson has been active with MX-co-founder Dale Sophiea in the abstract O-Type, and the bleak dualilty of The Gizzards and Half Life. Labeled as avant garde and heavy metal, Anderson has described his playing as a "mathmatical modernist in mourning." His 1995 full-length album Brutality was a compilation of two late-'80s cassettes. Outside of related projects in the MX-orbit, Anderson has worked with The Residents, Angel Corpus Christi, Henry Kaiser, Screaming Gypsy Bandits during the early '70s, and most recently High Vulture and French Radio.
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California woven, The Gowns synthesize several musical interests: the formal minimalism and elasticity of folk music, the abrasion of crass-era anarchist punk, the directness and lyricism of grunge rock and the alienating, arguably anti-human time bending techniques of modern digital signal processing. They like to write songs that might fool you into thinking you'd heard before. They want to tell the bleakest and most affecting memories and fantasies of their childhood and adolescence.
Their first ep, 'dangers of intimacy', was released by whitman, a freaky denizen of riverside CA, on his 'folktale' handmade cdr label, in 2005. Their second project RED STATE will be released on cardboard records in brooklyn.
They have and continue to tour the country with thier cracked digital storytelling gospel noise", too wimpy for "rock", too ugly and self-sabotaged for "folk", too simple and straightforward for "free" music group.
Erika Anderson grew up in the dive bars and rotten graveyards of saouth dakota. she played guitar and oscillators in the cultworthy southern calfornia noise-folk outfit Amps for Christ, co-fronted the halloween hospital rock band Blue Silk Sutures with Tara Tavi, and has her own impressive stable of 4track acoustic death rock songs. she is a fierce and beautiful nordic freak and an effortless memorizer of pop lyrics.
Ezra Buchla was born in the same crumbling berkeley mansion the gowns practice in today. he is the son of synthesizer inventor don buchla and is an accomplished music technologist in his own right. he contributed the signature disjointed horrorshow vocals, noise slices and sour church melodies to the first 4 (or six?) albums by the los angeles rock band Mae Shi, thereby garnering piles of jittery praise and crushing disdain. he has also recorded an absurd number of half-baked solo and collaborative experiments.
Corey Fogel was born in flatbush NY! he is a ruthlessly intelligent and disturbing percussionist, or "drummer." his collaborations are far too numerous to list in full, but he has worked live and in the studio with wadada leo smith, mark dresser, gerry hemingway, william winant, john oswald, barbez, the mae shi, carla bozulich, the curtains, and the mountain goats.
A Project of UBU Inc.
Cost: $12/8