Charlotte Hug and Guillermo Galindo: LIFT, Edgetone Records
Swiss/Mexican avant-garde duo perform a concert to celebrate the release of "LIFT", their first joint recording
Free Admission but online RSVP requiredAfter noted collaborations with NEXMAP and swissnex San Francisco in 2008, viola improviser Charlotte Hug, a Zurich-based mainstay of music's global avant-garde, returns to San Francisco this May to perform in the ROVA Saxophone Quartet's "Rovaté 2009" at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
In addition, Charlotte will celebrate the release of her duo album "LIFT", recorded last year in the Bay Area with Mexican composer, performer and sound architect Guillermo Galindo, with an exclusive concert performance by the Hug and Galindo duo at swissnex San Francisco.
Trained in Western classical music and intrigued by the visual arts, instrument fabrication, performance, interactivity and installation art, Swiss viola player Charlotte Hug and Mexico City-born Guillermo Galindo first met at the Sound Symposium vol. XIV event held in St. Johns, Newfoundland in 2005.
Digging into their respective cultural roots in an era of global culture, disconnection and constant migration, Hug and Galindo have acquired very distinctive but complementary musical vocabularies.
As documented on "LIFT", their collaboration is an invitation to ride a third musical rail into improvised territories that are new to both performers and audience.
This event is part of swissnex San Francisco's ongoing series of encounters at the crossroads of art and technology, made possible thanks to the support of the Swiss Arts Council, Pro Helvetia.
Charlotte Hug is a musician, composer, and visual artist living in Zurich and London. Hug often seeks out unusual venues for her performances, places that lend surprising acoustic, visual or emotional accents to her playing - from the icy caverns of the Rhône Glacier to an acoustically insulated S&M torture chamber in Zurich's red light district.
In addition to her solo activities, Charlotte Hug is a member of the London Improvisers Orchestra and collaborates with other composers as well as with the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technologies of the Zurich University for the Arts. She collaborates with such performers as John Butcher, John Edwards, Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols, Evan Parker, Elliott Sharp and Phil Wachsmann. Her domain encompasses the most diverse fields, including composition, improvisation, electro-acoustics, performance, music for film and musical theatre, as well as visual art and sound installations.
A virtuoso violist, visual artist and composer, she maximizes the use of extended performance techniques. Her 'soft-bow' (a viola bow whose hairs have been rendered completely slack) allows Hug to produce up to eight separate voices in her instrument at a given time, and is only one of many tools and techniques Hug uses to bring out the most in her instrument. Charlotte Hug also specializes in mixing the sounds of viola and voice to create her own unmistakably musical language: her unique singing style gathers a collection of regional European chants and blends with her string playing, as she mutters in tongues in an extremely personal and indistinguishable, invented language.
Guillermo Galindo's artistic work spans a wide spectrum of expression, from symphonic composition to the domains of musical and visual computer interaction, via electro-acoustic music, opera, film music, instrument building, three-dimensional installation work, live performance and sound design. His music has been performed and his works shown at major festivals and art exhibitions throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia.
A composer by training, Galindo has over the years developed his own interactive - "cybertotemic," as he puts it - sonic device to channel his musical experiments. "MAIZ" is a cinetic sonic structure made from hybrid recycled industrial materials and found objects, sonorous bodies controlled by computerized means. A syncretic cyber sonic talisman, and a post-Native American instrument, it proposes an alternative approach to concrete music and the theories of qualitative listening proposed by French concrete music composer Pierre Schaeffer.
Cost: free, online RSVP required