SUMMER 2007

SUNDAY AUGUST 5, 2007 AT 4PM. $7–10 SUGGESTED DONATION.
DANGEROUS CURVE 1020 E. FOURTH PLACE, LOS ANGELES, CA.

STEVE RODEN

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance.

Roden has been exhibiting his visual and sound works since the mid 1980’s, and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including museums, galleries and arts spaces in USA, Italy, France, Japan, Bulgaria, Slovenia, England, etc.

Roden’s working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self invented systems into scores; which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. the inspirational source material then becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon.

Roden has performed his soundworks at various arts spaces and festivals worldwide including the Serpentine Gallery London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MIT Boston, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the DCA Dundee Scotland; the Musee de Beaux Artes Nantes; as well as performance tours of Brazil and Japan. He has also released over 20 cds of audio works on labels worldwide.

Roden received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 1989, and a BFA from Otis Parsons in Los Angeles in 1986.

Grants include: Nimoy Artist In Residency grant, COLA grant from the city of Los Angeles, California Arts Council Grant, Subito grant from the American Composer’s Forum, City of Pasadena Artist’s Grant, and the Durfee Foundation.

Upcoming projects include: a site specific sound installation for the Museum of Open Air Architecture in Ivrea Italy; a new audio work commissioned for the James Turrel Skyspace at the Henry Museum in Seattle; a commissioned work for the 100th anniversary of Edvard Grieg’s death in Oslo Norway; a sound/sculptural installation for the Mercosur Biennial, and a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture at Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects, Berlin Germany.

JEREMY DRAKE

Jeremy Drake is an improvising guitar player, sound artist, concert organizer and educator living in Los Angeles. Active in the improvised music community, he is co-founder of LINE SPACE LINE new and improvised music series, a weekly concert series dedicated to improvised music which began in May 2002. Jeremy Drake has continuing projects with the following artists: Mitchell Brown, Jessica Catron, Alex Cline, Nels Cline, Harris Eisenstadt, Stephen Flinn, Vinny Golia, Chris Heenan, Kurt Heyl, David Kendall, Noah Phillips, David Rothbaum, G.E. Stinson, Kris Tiner, Ben Wright and has performed and/or recorded with many others. Releases can be found on the experimental musical research and Reify Recording labels.

DAVID MONACCHI

Composer, sound artist, and researcher in acoustic ecology. His primary research activity is recording natural sonic environments throughout the world with experimental field recording techniques, creating eco-acoustic compositions for multimedia concerts.

In 2002, in collaboration with Greenpeace, he travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to collect high definition sound portraits from the primary tropical rainforest. From 30 hours of extraordinary sound recordings, he composed the electroacoustic opera “Fragments of a Sonic World in Extinction” which toured theatres and contemporary music venues in Europe from 2003. He has recorded in Africa, South America, Canada and Europe, using the recordings as material for 3D sound documentaries, and multichannel installations.

His music has been performed in the Kryptonale (Berlin), Teatro Groggia (Venice), Nuova Consonanza and Tevereterno (Rome), La Via Lattea (Lugano), Community Art Council (Vancouver), Nuit Blanche (Paris), Ear to the Earth (New York) and many other international venues for as much as 180 concerts and installations, and broadcast throughout the world by many radio stations. In 2005, his eco-acoustic research project in the Foreste Casentinesi National Park became part of the Italian proposition to UNESCO for environmental projects. From 2005, he works as musical director for the project Tevereterno, a large scale multimedia spectacle on the Tiber River in Rome.

His honours include the “Erato Farnesina” Fellowship from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affaire for the World Soundscape Project – Vancouver, the “Fulbright” research fellowship to work at the CNMAT-University of California, and prizes from the “Russolo-Pratella” competition (Italy), “Locarno Film Festival” (Switzerland), and “Multiple Sound Festival” (Holland).

He is currently Professor of Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Music of Foggia, and Acting Chair at the University of Macerata and the Conservatory of Pesaro – Italy. His music is been broadcasted throughout the world by many international TV and radio stations. He is based in Italy and travels widely pursuing his research and concert activities.

Nightingale-study I [for wood traverse flute, natural soundscapes and real time spectrogram analysis] is a research on a bird’s song whose melodic virtues are described from the ancient times. Analyzing many hours of field recordings, carried out by the author during night time of May in the Urbino countryside, we came to notice how the nightingale, unlike most of the other birds, doesn’t articulate his singing through standard patterns codified in a simple language, but through evolving improvisations, with a stunning variety and richness to which it’s possible to attribute musical qualities.

On the compositional side, the pure unelaborated recordings of three different nightingales evolve through a progressive stretching that brings the singing on a more recognizable articulation of time and frequency. In this sense the “melodic” structure becomes visible, while on the other side the sound of the flute, sampled and speeded up, tends to another order of time and frequency. All the sound material, except the drones, the initial traffic and the flute, are made from the nightingales’ stretching.

The live improvisation on the medieval traverse flute, searches progressively an interaction into a non-human sound aesthetic, playing a role of melodic junction between the background-static drones and the foreground-dynamic nightingale’s modules.

This work came out as a concerned reflection about the relationship between nature and the human being: during the recordings of the nightingale in a quiet countryside night, the microphones picked up a series of imperceptible very low frequencies which in studio became surprisingly clear. Cut off in a first moment as an undesiderate noise, they became instead the emotional knot of the entire composition; only later they were discovered as being several military airplains convoys flying high, probably directed to Kosovo; it was May 25th 1998…

MARC THOMAS

After a year at Berklee College of Music, Marc Thomas returned to his native Southern California to continue his studies at and graduate from the Studio/Jazz Guitar program at USC. He has since performed in all the major rock and jazz venues throughout Los Angeles, most recently concertizing at Walt Disney Hall with Burt Bacharach. He belongs in the indie rock band Madras who has just completed their second full length album.

SUBSTRATE

Substrate is an improvisational electroacoustic group consisting of Laura Thomas-Merino on cello, M. Cera and RS-232 on electronics, and Jen Boyd on field recordings. The project began in 2006 with the creation of a piece for Soundwalk 2006 in Long Beach, CA which consisted of a 10-foot tape loop with sounds of cello, electronics, birds, and a plucked heater. This will be their first live performance together with one member, Jen Boyd, performing via the web from her home studio in Oakland, CA.

LAURA THOMAS-MERINO

Laura Thomas-Merino is a professional cellist originally from Los Angeles, currently residing in Providence, RI. Upon graduating with distinction from the School of Music at Indiana University, Laura accepted a cello position with the Graduate String Quartet at Wichita State University, where she received her graduate degree in cello performance. She has since performed in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Peru, and Italy. She is an orchestral and chamber musician, cello teacher, electronic musician, and concert presenter. In Fall 2006, Laura was awarded a two-year fellowship with Community MusicWorks, an organization that provides free instruments and lessons to youth in the West Side of Providence. Recent performance highlights include a collaboration with Pamela Z in concert with the Robin Cox Ensemble, the world premiere of Andre Cormier’s Infections with the group OXO as part of the Sonic Boom Festival in Vancouver, and a house concert of Mendelssohn’s string octet with the Providence String Quartet. Laura is co-curator of CTRL+ALT+REPEAT and a member of Mem1, an electroacoustic duo with media artist M. Cera.

M. CERA

M. Cera is a media artist who is interested in exploring control systems that are intuitive as well as experimental in nature. A large portion of his work is devoted to creating custom applications for live audio/visual performance. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems in art, design, and sound creation, Cera’s work frequently employs such strategies as feedback loops and genetic algorithms, and is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. He is the co-curator of CTRL+ALT+REPEAT and a member of the experimental media art group Redux, recipients of a 2006 Creative Capital grant for their Callspace project and the electroacoustic duo Mem1 alongside cellist Laura Thomas-Merino. Mem1’s second full-length album Alexipharmaca was recently released by Interval Recordings. Cera has performed at such venues as REDCAT (Disney Hall), the Orange County Museum of Art and the Knitting Factory (Los Angeles). He is currently pursuing an MFA in the Digital + Media program at the Rhode Island School of Design.

RS-232

RS-232 (Joe Cantrell) has been active in the performing community of the Los Angeles Area for about 10 years and has shared the stage with such varied artists as; The Secret Machines, The Midnight Movies, Fog, O.S.T., and Jeremy Drake. His work spans numerous musical disciplines from jazz to indie rock to experimental music and incorporates differing instruments and techniques such as re-purposed devices, tape destruction and computer generated sounds, as well as more traditional instruments. RS-232’s music appeared on Simballrec’s 45 Seconds of… CD, and he will be releasing an album of minimal dub tracks on the blankartists lable in september, 2006. As an installation artist, RS-232 takes inspiration from the incessent acceleration of technology and media and the waste it produces. The more inseverable they become, the less our lives are defined by “genuine” interactions and experiences. With M. Cera, he performed at the 2005 CEAIT festival held at REDCAT in the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, as well as having a sound installation at Soundwalk 2005.

JEN BOYD

Jen Boyd spends her free time collecting microscopic recordings of trees, plants, and other audible organic matter; and creating layered compositions in real-time with the use of a portable mixer. She captures natural sounds as they unfold. Working with contact microphones and a flash recorder, Boyd constructs stereo soundscapes to give depth to the delicate sounds of trees and plants alike. She has a BFA in music technology from CalArts and is Currently working on her masters in electronic music at Mills College. While at Mills, Boyd plans to explore the depths of natural sound and their presentation as art in the form of live performance and sound installations. Jen is currently exploring various means of releasing her recorded works of natural sounds and plans to continue to build an archive of phonographies and contact recordings.

JAMES TENNEY KOAN

James Tenney (August 10, 1934 – August 24, 2006) was an American composer and influential music theorist.

Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A., 1958) and the University of Illinois (M.A., 1961). He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Chou Wen-chung, Lionel Nowak, Paul Boepple, Henry Brant, Carl Ruggles, Kenneth Gaburo, Lejaren Hiller, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Var•se. He also studied information theory under Lejaren Hiller, and composed stochastic early computer music before turning almost completely to writing for instruments with the occasional tape delay, often using just intonation and alternative tunings. Tenney’s notable students include John Luther Adams, Larry Polansky, and Peter Garland. He performed with John Cage, as well as with the ensembles of Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.

Tenney’s work deals simply and artfully with perception (For Ann (rising), see Shepard tone), just intonation (Clang, see gestalt), stochastic elements (Music for Player Piano), information theory (Ergodos, see Ergodic theory), and with what he calls ‘swell’ (Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion for John Bergamo), which is basically arch form. His pieces are most often tributes and subtitled as such. As his friend Philip Corner says, For Ann (rising), “must be optimistic! (Imagine the depressing effectiveness of it — he could never be so cruel — downward)…”

Tenney wrote the seminal Meta (+) Hodos (one of, if not the, earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music), the later Hierarchical temporal gestalt perception in music: a metric space model with Larry Polansky, and other works. An entire issue of the academic journal Perspectives of New Music was devoted to Tenney’s music.

Tenney also wrote the in-depth liner notes to Wergo’s edition of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. (Nancarrow, as a favor, punched the roll for Tenney’s Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow). Tenney also starred nude in a 1965 silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between him and his then partner, Carolee Schneemann called Fuses.

He taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, and York University in Toronto.

He died on 24 August 2006 of lung cancer in Valencia, California.

ROBIN STREB

Robin Streb is an active performer and teacher from Vancouver, BC, Canada. She holds the position of assistant principal viola with the Vancouver Island Symphony and has performed with the Victoria Symphony, Vancouver Opera Orchestra, and the Kamloops Symphony. She is a member of Melange Chamber Ensemble and the Vancouver Miniaturist Ensemble. Robin has performed in the Los Angeles area with the Okiro Series, Tonoi Ensemble, CTRL+ALT+REPEAT, New West Symphony, and various events at the California Institute of the Arts. Robin earned her BMus. from the University of Victoria (1999) and her MMus. from Rice University (2002). In addition to her performing schedule, she also teaches at the Vancouver Waldorf School and the Vancouver Academy.

Koan is from James Tenney’s Postal Pieces, a series of ten short pieces printed on postcards. Koan was composed in 1971 for violinist and composer Malcolm Goldstein. A Koan is a story or question that a Zen master gives to a student to think about. It may have no answer, but meditating on the Koan is said to help the mind achieve enlightenment. The piece will be performed at CTRL+ALT+REPEAT on the viola.