Culture > Music

Sonic Circuits Festival

Sunday, September 30th, 2012

7:00pm – 11:00pm | $40.00

Closing night of the festival. Performances by:

Glenn Branca Ensemble
Isabelle Duthoit & Franz Hautzinger & Zsolt Srs
Alec Redfearn & the Eyesores
STYLUS!BLACK!FACTORY!

Glenn Branca Ensemble
"Sometimes it seems like every musician in New York has played with the Glenn Branca Ensemble. That's not entirely true, but its close." Glenn Branca's compositions center around multiple guitars four or more, heavily amplified augmented by a rock-based rhythm section of drums and bass. Later works added other instruments, including mallet guitar, keyboards, and occasionally a second drummer. Branca's minimalist compositions frequently require unusual guitar tunings more recent works have them strung with two sets of three strings tuned an octave apart. He's received many commissions from such groups as the Twyla Tharp Dance Company, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Bang on a Can, to name just a few. Branca's music has also been heard in films and performances by Peter Greenaway, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the Joffrey Ballet, Eric Bogosian, and many others.
http://www.glennbranca.com

Isabelle Duthoit & Franz Hautzinger & Zsolt Srs
Duthoit Srs Hautzinger Trio is one of the seminal group at the intellectual, cultural and spiritual border of Eastern and Western Europe so-called metaimprovisational music, which has been working together since 2011. (But Franz Hautzinger from Vienna and Isabelle Duthoit, living in Paris has a lot of joint projects in recent years; Hautzinger and the Budapest based experimental musician, Zsolt Srs Ahad is playing together since the spring of 2000.)
The trio working in the fertile areas suggested by the best elements of contemporary improvisation: non-heirarchical group interaction, static structures to quick changes, silence to noise, and sound to music. They are keenly interested in all of the sonic potential of their instruments (voice, clarinet, viola and the trumpet) to build up and break down instantly composed structures built with intricate detail as well as broad gestures. The trio has a very strong stage presence and an intensive concentrative state linking together the work of the three musicians are both typical of the concerts of the group, consisting of an Austrian, a French and a Hungarian musician. On the concerts of the trio using the opportunities of the sounds in an economical way and their use of noises and non-conventional sounds under the influence of the moment are bound together in a new, intimate, very sensuous whole, in specific, longer, meditative processes also from re-interpreting the landscape music of e.g. John Cage to the pure, loud, harsh and wild punk noise.
The members of the trio are one of the most colourful personalities of the current European improvised and experimental music scene with their vivid musical, performance and theatrical activity. During their concerts in their instrument-playing they utilizes the most intimate, on the one hand brilliantly simple, on the other unbelievably complex and at the same time extraordinarily immersed sounds. During several home and foreign concert and festival appearances they developed their improvisational metamusic based on the concept of the random error noises of their instruments and various sound objects, of which diverse soundsequence-associations, the dtournement of the sounds and the ambientalism are all typical.
Their musical attitude and concept means (and based as well) the rule of one, or single origin, designating the aesthetic and musical path they intend to explore during their collaboration as members of the trio: composition as probability and improvisation as subconscious, viz. spontaneous and autonomous shamanistic composition. Thus, the groups members all have a background of acoustic improvised music, a musical dialect whose limits have been shown by its very own characteristics developed during the past decades.
http://franzhautzinger.com/

Alec Redfearn & the Eyesores
This marvelous large ensemble from Providence, Rhode Island has been in existence for a decade now, bringing their very original music to audiences in the US and Europe. The Blind Spot is their 6th release and their second for Cuneiform and it's also surprisingly different from The Quiet Room. It includes a few shorter songs but the main focus of the album is a very ambitious work entitled "I am the Resurrection and the Light", which is a song cycle for a large ensemble featuring a number of different players: appearing are accordion, violin, viola, French horn, guitar, alto sax, bassoon, contrabass, drums, 'loops, processing and other eletronic mayhem' and layers and layers of vocals from up to 4 vocalists (Alec and 3 female voices). This song cycle is a eulogy and meditation about drug addiction and death from drug addiction and related causes. A compelling, powerful, demanding and ultimately beautiful and moving work. No one else sounds like The Eyesores and with this album, no one combines such purity of vocal and instrumental work with such a sense of impending uneasiness (and I mean this as the highest compliment!).
aleckredfearn.com