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Elliott Sharp / Wobbly + Chen / Euphotic

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/16/2017
7:30 PM - 10:00 PM

Location
Canessa Gallery

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$10-20 Sliding Scale

We are excited to present luminary NYC guitarist Elliott Sharp for our October 16 event at Canessa Gallery. Also performing will be a duo of Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) and Tania Chen and the electronic-organic trio Euphotic (Cheryl E. Leonard, Tom Djll, Bryan Day).

Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka. Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson’s Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary “Doing The Don’t” by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.

Wobbly is the moniker of Jon Leidecker a San Francisco–based musician/composer of experimental electronic music. He has released works on Tigerbeat6, Illegal Art, Alku, Phthalo, and others. He has been producing music since 1987 and ongoing studio and live projects involve collaborations with People Like Us, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Blechdom, Tim Perkis, Matmos and The Weatherman of Negativland. He is also a member of the Chopping Channel and Sagan. In 2002, Leidecker was responsible for the first montage and final cleanup of the Keep the Dog album, That House We Lived In (2003). With Negativland’s Mark Hosler and Peter Conheim along with Doug Wellman, Leidecker produced “There Is No Don”, a live tribute to the late Don Joyce and his work, on July 23, 2015. In 2015 he joined Splendor Generator with Bill Thibault, Tim Perkis and Xopher Davidson (of ANTIMATTER).

Tania Chen is an experimental musician and free improviser. She plays the piano, found objects, toys, keyboards and electronics. She is a leading interpreter of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Morton Feldman. Tania creates video pieces and compositions that explore the role of performance and sound making. She holds a BA (Hons) degree in Art and History of Art from University College London and a Masters degree (MMus) in Performance Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her exploration of sound has taken her across the globe, performing and recording in Berlin, London and Tokyo, to San Francisco, LA, New York and beyond. Tania’s live and recording collaborations include John Cage’s “Music of Changes” for solo piano, John Cage’s “Indeterminacy” with Stewart Lee & Steve Beresford, and Cornelius Cardew & Michael Parsons’ Piano Music. She plays found objects and toys in the group Bad Jazz’s “Bad Dreams in the Night” and cassette “Tincture”. Tania plays toys on the album “Ointment” with Steve Beresford, and piano with Gino Robair & Tom Djll playing electronics in the group Tender Buttons.

Tom Djll studied electronic music with Stephen Scott at the Colorado College, working with the EMS Synthi 100 system at Packard Hall. He spent the years 1981-1993 working with the Serge Modular Music System before enrolling in Mills College Contemporary Music Program, where he extended his quest to develop and integrate a personally developed extended trumpet language into an electronic sound environment, while also pursuing advanced improvisation studies with Pauline Oliveros and Jack Wright. While at Mills, Djll concentrated on microtonal composition, split-tone trumpet technique, and computer music. He also worked extensively with Chris Brown, resulting in contributions to Brown’s recordings LAVA (Tzadik) and DUETS (Artifact).
Further development of trumpet languages and free improvisation with his band Grosse Abfahrt was undertaken from 1999 – 2010, with international CD releases resulting on the Emanem and Creative Sources labels, wherupon Djll gradually re-introduced electronics and traditional keyboard technique into his sound-set. The results are heard today in projects such as hackMIDI (extreme electro-mechanical piano music), the hardcore free-noise trio BEAUTY SCHOOL, piano + analog electronics in TENDER BUTTONS (with Tania Chen and Gino Robair) and ongoing sessions and performances within the lively and ever-evolving Bay Area scene, with playing partners old and new (including but not limited to Julia Mazawa, Tim Perkis, Kyle Bruckmann, Jacob Felix Heule, Suki O’Kane, Matt Ingalls, Tom Nunn, bran(…)pos, and Karen Stackpole.

Glass shards and pinecones, glaciers, boxspring mattresses, a flock of accordions, circular saw blades, viola, the erhu, hyenas and whales and elk, Cheryl E. Leonard’s music finds its raw materials just about anywhere. From these diverse sources come works that embrace the spectrum of musical possibilities: improvised to composed, acoustic to electronic, diaphanous to bombastic, notes to noise. Over the last decade Cheryl has focused on investigating sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Many of her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments. Leonard uses microphones to explore the micro-aural worlds contained within her sound sources and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. Her projects often involve constructing one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments that are played live on stage. She is particularly interested in collaborating across artistic disciplines and developing site-specific works. Cheryl holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from Mills College, both in music composition. She studied composition and electronic music with Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, George Lewis, Frederic Rzewski, Laeticia Sonami, Salvatore Macchia, and Alan Bonde; and performance art with Moira Roth, Carole E. Schneemann, and Betsy Damon.

Bryan Day is a sound artist, musical instrument designer, and conceptual artist. His sound work focuses on the subtle textural interplay of natural recordings and amplified electronic sounds generated by his invented instruments. Using scavenged electronics, repurposed mechanical components, and amplified materials that you might find in your garage or your great uncle’s office, he re-imagines them into constructivist sound sculptures. In addition to his own audio work, he has run the Public Eyesore / Eh? labels since 1997.

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