Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/20/2018
7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Location
Canessa Gallery
Category(ies)
- Music
- Visual Arts
- Multimedia
- Audio
- Avant-Garde
- Electronic
- Experimental
- Improvisation
- International
- New Music
- Premiere
- Sonic
Add This Event to Your Calendar
$5-20
February’s Canessa Gallery concert will feature a duo of Easton, Pennsylvania saxophonist Jack Wright and Chattanooga, Tennessee bassist Evan Lipson, San Francisco Bay Area violinist Thea Farhadian with Heike Liss (skratchklang) and electronic works by Silvia Mattheus.
skratchklang is a new collaboration between visual artist Heike Liss and musician/composer Thea Farhadian who join forces for audio-visual life improvisations. Thea brings twisted echoes, jagged rhythms, and microtonal landscapes that she skillfully performs with electronic violin. Heike pairs projected video footage and life drawings synchronistically to Farhadian’s sound and music. The resulting work together is haunting, abstract, and satiating. It is cultural evidence of an uncertain time.
Thea Farhadian is a performer/composer based in San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin. Her projects include solo violin and interactive electronics, acoustic improvisation, solo laptop, radio art, and video. Her solo pieces for violin and electronics combine a classical music background with extended technique and digital processing using the program Max/MSP. Her work has been seen internationally at venues which include the Issue Project Room, and Alternative Museum New York City, Galerie Mario Mazolli, Sowieso, and Quiet Cue in Berlin, the Room Series, and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Kachaturyan Museum in Yerevan, Armenia, International Women’s Electroacoustic Listening Room Project at Bimhaus in Amsterdam.
Heike Liss works in a variety of media, including video, photography, drawing, sculpture, sitespecific installation and public intervention. Heike’s award-winning work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and at film festivals. She has collaborated with choreographers Sonsherée Giles and François Verret, musicians Ellen Fullman, GAW, Marcus Weiss, Sylwia Zytynska, Caroline Penwarden, Theresa Wong and Toychestra, multi-media artists Ellen Lake, Nomi Talisman, and Michael Trigilio, painter Soffia Saemundsdottir, chef Michal Ingber and poets Lyn Hejinian and Julie Gilbert, to name a few. Since 2014 Heike is performing live visuals with her longtime collaborator and travelling companion Fred Frith, as well as other musical improvisers such as Ikue Mori, Lotte Anker, Okkyung Lee, Chris Cutler, Susana Silva Santos and Shelley Hirsch. She lives and works in Oakland and Basel and teaches at the Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivia.
Silvia Matheus is an internationally accomplished electronic music composer who has been composing with computers and electronics since the early 1980. She studied composition under the direction of Hans Koellreutter in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Described twenty years ago as an “undergrounder by design,” Jack Wright is a veteran saxophone improviser based mainly in Philadelphia. He has played mostly on tour through the US and Europe since the early 80s in search of interesting partners and playing situations. Now at 75 he is still the “Johnny Appleseed of Free Improvisation,” as guitarist Davey Williams called him in the 80s, on the road as much as ever. He continues to inspire players outside music-school careerdom, playing sessions with visiting and resident players old and new. His partners over the years are mostly unknown to the music press, and too numerous to mention. He’s said to have the widest vocabulary of any saxophonist, including leaping pitches, punchy, precise timing, sharp and intrusive multiphonics, surprising gaps of silence, and obscene animalistic sounds. He has had a book published, Jan. 2017, The Free Musics, which is becoming very popular among improvisers. A reviewer for the Washington Post said, “In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king”. But for a true assessment listen to the music he and his partners create: Spring Garden Music, for sounds and writings.
Evan Lipson (b. 1981) has operated as a musician since adolescence—intuitively seeking the liminal realms in which intellect and instinct, history and myth, and creative and destructive force intersect. Drawn towards aberrant perspectives at an early age, his formative experiences were primarily rooted in extreme and often discordant forms of rock, metal, free improvisation, modernist composition, jazz, oddball pop, soundtracks, noise, and electronic music.
Massimo Ricci, of Touching Extremes writes, “Lipson easily stands among the best bassists I’ve heard lately, his terrifically strapping tone epitomizing the decision to really learn how an instrument works.”
Lipson most frequently tours with Roughhousing (featuring Zach Darrup and Jack Wright). He is also active with Who’s Your Daddy? featuring dancer Cilla Vee/Claire Elizabeth Barratt and guitarist Davey Williams. Lipson has composed music for several films, as well as a recent collaboration with Duplex Planet-creator David Greenberger, Tyson Rogers, and Bob Stagner of the Shaking Ray Levis. He also may or may not have some degree of affiliation with an organization known as MEINSCHAFT.