Experimental Meditations (2018)

January 20th 2018
Experimental Meditations in Taylor Texas
406 Talbot St. Taylor, Texas
2-8pm no admission cost

Lisa Cameron and Skullcaster

Lisa Cameron (aka Venison Whirled) is from Austin, TX. Using amplified percussion and strings; she locates resonant frequencies in space to create oscillating overtones, which are then employed as sound sources for live improvisation. Lisa has improvised live with Jandek, Mani Neumier, Eugene Chadbourne, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Faust, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Tom Carter, Nathan Bowles, Sharkiface, Dromez, Sandy Ewen, Leslie Keffer, Jonathan Horne, Steve McKay, Rat Bastard, Hora Flora, and others. Lisa has also played with an impressive array of experimental and traditional bands including Sky City (Important Records), ST 37, Roky Erickson And Evil Hook Wildlife, Brave Combo, Timbuk 3, Glass Eye, Daniel Johnston, and projects with SST record’s engineer Spot (Glen Lockett).

https://soundcloud.com/venisonwhirled

Skullcaster (aka Chris Cones) got his start in the San Francisco Bay Area noise scene in the mid 2000’s. He began in the brutal soundfx, improvised, electroacoustic ensemble known as Earwicker. He has appeared on dozens of recording projects including 3 Leafs, Power in the Blood, Le Flange Du Mal, a ST37 album, and many recordings in the Austin based project How I Quit Crack, where he contributes with guitar and electronics. His work has appeared on the Cruel Nature and Holodeck record label. Skullcaster strives for a sort of “live soundtrack/tone poetry to present a dystopian big-datascape and lampoon modern neuroscience as late-phase phrenology “. His music comprises of textural static electronics that are minimal in nature. Abrasive and controlled.

https://holodeckrecords.bandcamp.com/album/revaluation-hd024

Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill

Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill have collaborated in performance and installation pieces since 2015. Using field recordings, vintage telephone test equipment, magnetic oscillators, light and space, their work has addressed the agents and artifacts of change in the urban and acoustic realms. In 2017, they released an LP called Kruos on the Elevator Bath label, and a CD called LCLX on the Mimeomeme label. Alex Keller is an audio artist, sound designer, curator and teacher based in Austin, Texas. His engagement with performance, installation, and recording is an outgrowth of his interest in architecture, language, abstraction and music.

https://soundcloud.com/alexkeller

Sean O’Neill is a multi-media artist, who explores both the visible light spectrum and the audible frequency range to determine how they influence our lived environments, and vice versa; he has a stated interest in how perception shapes the dynamics of spatiality.

“From the interior to the exterior, inside then out, Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill wrap passages of field recordings with synthetic accompaniment, manipulating, oscillating, obfuscating. The two sound artists aim to freeze time with these passages, and even though time actually does pass while listening, from minute one to minute thirty-five, the result is a moment and a place (or places) that exist in that moment, specifically trapped on grooved vinyl for repeat experience. For study, for meditation, for nostalgic rediscovery, Kruos entertains the idea that it functions more as an image than as a sonic enquiry, a photograph of sound framed by Keller and O’Neill’s accompaniment. They display a deft hand in allowing the field recordings to drive the experience, but their obvious fingerprints on the record guide the mood.” Ryan Masteller, Critical Masses Media

https://elevatorbath.bandcamp.com/album/kruos

H.R. Mullin

H.R. Mullin serves as an experimental platform for Austin based musician James Lambrecht. Having previously performed in the Texas duo Chippr Jones, James continues to explore instrumental themes of repetition, ambient drone, and aggressive techniques sourced by use of the electric guitar. Focusing on improvisational looping, H.R. aims to approach composition more akin to sketching; starting with light strokes that gradually take form (or dismantle) as it spirals outward.

https://soundcloud.com/toyot

Thomas Bey William Bailey | Rick Reed | Nayantara (Tara) Bhattacharya Reed | Brent Fariss (quartet)

Electronic Quartet

Rick Reed is a sound and visual artist born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1957. He has always had a deep abiding interest in electronic sound starting in the mid 60s when he would play around with his parents short wave radio and an old reel to reel recorder making what he thought sounded like background scores for imaginary science fiction movies. After moving to Austin in late 1978, Reed was finally able to purchase his first synthesizer and thus began creating his own brand of hellish electronic soundscapes. Over the years, Reed has released several albums, and has played in many different cities on both the east and west coast and has also appeared in various festivals in Scotland and England (including multiple shows with AMM guitarist Keith Rowe as The Voltage Spooks). Beginning in 2004, Reed began collaborating with New York filmmaker Ken Jacobs, creating soundtracks to 4 of his digital films, Mountaineer Spinning, Spiral Nebula, Capitalism: Child Labor, and Another Occupation. Capitalism: Child Labor won the grand prize at Curtas Vila de Conde Film Festival in Portugal in 2006. These days Reed mainly focuses his live work using a Buchla Music Easel, with projected film/video work usually of his own design (but is known to collaborate with other visual artists such as Kjell Bjorgeengen), conjuring a sound and visual environment designed to lull the listener into otherworldly places both unsettling and strange, yet comfortably familiar. His work can be heard on records issued by labels such as Elevator Bath, Obsolete Future, Somatic, Mikroton, Beta Lactam Ring and many others.

https://www.facebook.com/synthclouds/

Nayantara (Tara) Bhattacharya is film programmer at Experimental Response Cinema in Austin, TX and director of Antumbrae Intermedia Events + Installations, a sound and multimedia organization in Austin, TX and an audiovisual artist. Her alma mater is Hunter College, City University of New York where she graduated with a degree in Art History and Asian American Studies. Her musical oeuvre encompasses a wide variety of different genres including improvisation, electronic composition, chamber music, Indian classical music and Bengali Tagorean songs. Past performances include a sound composition/ performance art work at Soundspace: Musical Outsiders and Soundspace: A Portrait of Alice Coltrane both at The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. Her work with Texas based video-artist Liz Rodda for Hyperreal Cinema Club and COTFG presents: NMASS 2016 and her performances with Rick Reed at the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland 25th Anniversary at the Dada Centennial celebrations at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland and performing a live score to avant-garde 60’s filmmaker Aldo Tambellini’s Black Cycle films curated by Experimental Response Cinema at Austin Film Society.

Get to know Tara here:
http://www.fieldsmagazine.com/interview-tara-bhattacharya-reed/

Thomas Bey William Bailey is an author, sound artist and educator. He has spent his creative life exploring the extremes of information as well as the anomalies of human consciousness and perception. His published works to date include a survey of unothodox electronic music (Micro-Bionic, 2009 & 2013) and Unofficial Release (2012.) His forthcoming work, To Hear The World With New Eyes will deal with the cultural history of synesthesia and will be offered via SONM in Spain. A restlessly ‘transitional’ and uncategorizable artist, TBWB has performed, recorded, and taught in several different countries, sharing with others the joys of chaos and of the valuation of creative process over end product. With a minimum of outside assistance and with little more than a shoestring budget, he is gradually forging a path as an iconoclastic (yet insightful) creator and thinker in an otherwise conformist era. + www.tbwb.net | tbwbworks.typepad.com

Brent Fariss is a composer / performer living in Austin, Texas. He has collaborated in several modern music settings including the Gates Ensemble, Waco Girls, and The April Fools. In the past decade, he has worked alongside Phill Niblock, Ellen Fullman, Michael Pisaro, Jandek, Radu Malfatti, Pauline Oliveros, JG Thirwell, and Arnold Dreyblatt. Fariss holds a Master’s degree in Composition from Texas State University, where he also studied the contrabass. He has become increasingly interested in the ideas of a conceptualism; using minimalist techniques to unite texture, form, room/instrument resonance, and abstracted programmatic ideas to create a musical environment. He is the recipient of two Meet the Composer grants for the compositions, “Dim Gleam” (for choir, 2 basses, 2 percussionists and choir chimes) and “The Water Bowl” (for 4 performers, horn, trombone and percussion). His goal in music is exploring the nature of sound (timbre), elevating it to the same level as melody, harmony, rhythm, and form.

https://soundcloud.com/brentfariss

Colin Andrew Sheffield | James Eck Rippie

Performing together for the past 17 years, Colin Andrew Sheffield (samples, processing) & James Eck Rippie (turntables, samples, processing) are an improvising duo who sculpt primarily with commercial recordings to create works interested in turning aspects of plunderphonics and conceptual sound art into subconscious composition. Their work together has always been about their dialogue within a given meditation, bringing concrete sounds in and out of focus with hints of musicality underlying. Their debut LP, “Variations” (Elevator Bath), originally released in 2001 (with a 2016 reissue), was recorded “live” with no additional production. Each of the album’s pieces utilizes sounds from a single acoustic instrument as its sole source material. These sources are manipulated and shattered in multiple ways inside the performance. Since the release of their album, Sheffield & Rippie have continued to perform and to record, expanding the concepts utilized in “Variations” with the “Essential Anatomies” cycle. Volume One and Two of “Essential Anatomies” focuses more on the chaos and control within longer narrative work, and the duo’s very personal investigation into their juxtaposition, and the turmoil and otherworldly unity it creates. Or as said in Richard Allen’s A Closer Listen review ” Sheffield and Rippie use samplers and turntables to sculpt the past into new forms that defy instant categorization.. Touches of modern classicism grace the recording, lending it an air of sublimated dignity.”

James Eck Rippie is a visual/sound artist currently residing in Austin, Texas. His recorded work has been primarily as a turntablist. But has also worked extensively with other instruments and mediums. His focus with turntables has been creating abstract sound and concrete assemblages from various records while utilizing altered needles, turntable feedback, effect pedals, damaged records, resampling, etc. While decomposing the original sound source, Rippie’s intentions are to understand the transcending possibilities of sound as well as testing the capabilities of the turntable as an instrument. He releases his work for the Cronica Electronica (Portugal) and Elevator Bath (US) labels. And has collaborations with sound artist’s Simon Whetham (UK), Paulo Raposo (PT) and erikM (FR).

http://www.jameseckrippie.com/

Colin Andrew Sheffield is a sound artist focusing on the strict re-contextualization of other commercially available recordings. His aim is to distill the essential qualities of these works and to then utilize that essence for new recordings. Usually only very brief sections of the original works are selected. These raw components are then contracted, expanded, layered, and/or otherwise processed until something new is forged. The resultant music is an atmospheric soundscape, gradually shifting and unfolding. In 1998, Sheffield founded the Elevator Bath recording label which has continually issued experimental works from a variety of artists from the United States and abroad (including Rick Reed, Tony Conrad, Merzbow, Francisco López, and many more). Sheffield has released a number of solo recordings, including 2005’s “First Thus,” his debut long-player, as well as 2009’s “Signatures” (via the Invisible Birds label), 2010’s “Slowly” (on the Mystery Sea label of Belgium), and 2012’s “Time Will Tell” (on the Quiet World label of the UK).

http://elevatorbath.com/cas_jer.html

Aux Aux

A key figure to the new music scene of Austin, Henna Chou is a sound creatore, composer, music curator, and managing director of COTFG (http://friendlyghost.org/). Chou’s work deals in both classical composition and modern electronics, utilizing both in many other genre bending forms. Chou has appeared on recordings with Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, My Education, Ellen Fullman, Cory Allen, and performs regularly in the art rock trio Moist Flesh.

Henna will be presenting with her project Aux Aux.

https://soundcloud.com/leisuretourniquet
https://www.facebook.com/auxauxatx/