May 2015 session – 5/30/2015 – 7:30 PM
The Three Jewels, NYC
LEILA BORDREUIL [violoncello]
HANS TAMMEN [tabla machine and live sound processing]
KEVIN WOODS [saxophone + processing]
live visuals by KURT RALSKE
Curated by WvS / Produced by WvS & Miah Artola
https://www.facebook.com/events/829222217170519
LEILA BORDREUIL is a Brooklyn based cellist, composer and sound artist from France. Her cello playing is often improvised, and mainly focuses on texture variations and a collage of phantom overtones and pitched utterances. Through an original vocabulary of extended techniques, preparations, and imaginative amplification methods, her instrument is used as an abstract resonant body to challenge conventional cello practice. Her composed works draw from a similar texture-based musical aesthetic, but also focus on the relationship between sound and space.
Since moving to Brooklyn in 2012, Leila has maintained an active concert schedule performing with Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Chris Corsano, Eli Keszler, Richard Garet, Lea Bertucci, and Michael Foster among many others. Notable venues where she has performed include the Whitney Museum, Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, and the Performa Biennale.
http://
KURT RALSKE‘s video installations and performances enact a dialogue with history: an exploration of the past that proposes a new view of the future. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2015, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Kurt is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship, and received First Prize at the Transmediale International Media Art Festival in Berlin in 2003. Kurt programmed and co-designed the 9-channel video installation that is permanently in the lobby of the MoMA in NYC. He is also the author/programmer of Auvi, a popular video software environment in use by artists in 22 countries.
Kurt resides in New York City. He is Chair of the department of Media Arts (Digital Media / Video / Film / Animation / Sound) at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Alongside his art practice, Kurt is active as an improvising musician and composer.
HANS TAMMEN: PERCUSSORES for tabla machine and live sound processing
“The celebrated automata (of the eighteenth century) were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power. Frederick (the Great), the meticulous king of small machines, well-trained regiments and long exercises, was obsessed with them”. (Michel Foucault)
Hans Tammen’s Iron Foundry is a name for projects that use electronic sound processing on various instruments to fragment, distend and otherwise transform their sounds, creating an alien world of bizarre textures and polyrhythmic machinations. Intended to portray live sound processing as an instrument rather than a row of effects, his software was originally developed about 15 years ago for the Endangered Guitar project, and it “listens” to the playing, to then determine the parameters of the live sound processing. By using a tabla machine as a sound source, two automata playing off against each other, creating an alien world of bizarre textures.
Hans Tammen creates sounds that have been described as a journey through the land of unending sonic operations. He produces rapid-fire juxtapositions of radically contrastive and fascinating noises, with micropolyphonic timbres and textures, aggressive sonic eruptions, but also quiet pulses and barely audible sounds – through means of his interactive software programming, by working with the room itself, and, as a critic observed, with his “…fingers stuck in a high voltage outlet”. Signal To Noise called his Endangered Guitar works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, AllAboutJazz called the music of his Third Eye Orchestra “nothing short of breathtaking”, and “a masterpiece of musical evocation”.
http://www.tammen.org/
Iron Foundry YouTube Playlist: http://tinyurl.com/mnpu2w8
As a player, KEVIN “BLUE” WOODS brings a depth of knowledge and experience to his craft that simply sets him apart. Having studied Jazz Performance on Saxophone at Mt Hood Community College as well as the prestigious University of North Texas; skill, technique, & education go hand in hand.
As a composer he draws from the Legacy of Jazz and R&B and then blends that with life experience to create a fresh and forceful new voice in Jazz, Pop, Avant Garde, and R&B. As a lyricist and vocalist he writes from the heart what he knows and expresses what he feels and his audience hears him. As an arranger for film and television scoring, visual emotion becomes musical emotion. He has played in countless New York bands and has worked with ELEKTRA Records as a touring musician.
Active in the Noise/New Music genre finds him performing adaptations of classic Jazz Standards in ways never imagined, specifically at the Ab Uno Pluribus Xperimental music series in NYC. Currently “Blue” is completing a new full length CD of original Pop R&B and an accompanying video for one of the album’s singles.