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The
SoundLAB Series
COMPACT DISCiples
Notorious tune robber J Lesser teams up with the sample-happy Blevin Blectum for an evening of twisted digital pulsation mixed with a heap of honest sarcasm. Whether they are ripping-off the Olsen twins or a skipping Sheryl Crow CD, the breezy shamelessness of their appropriation smacks of juvenile delinquency rather than cutesy postmodern quotation. Both artists straddle the divisions between the drum n’ bass and noise scenes, conjuring a fiendish mixture of beats and spastic freakouts that manages to win over members of both camps. Video artist Ryan Junell will be on hand to embellish the entire spectacle. Wielding a pluralistic approach and often using recordings of pop songs to evoke meaning in his compositions, Ben Piekut’s music explores the mechanics of established patterns of listening, turning the audience/composer paradigm on its ear. Piekut’s Lecture on Identity, structured after John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, scatters samples from the composer’s entire collection of CDs over several boom boxes, each operated by an individual performer. Scored for live instrumentalists, including ma++ ingalls on clarinet, and choreographed movement through the performance space, Lecture on Identity examines the complexities of artistic expression filtered through the medium of CD-recording technology, generating positively unpredictable results. Post-Retro-Futurists
Armed with vaudeville aesthetics and bastardized 80s beats, no-wave
band Crack: We Are Rock mingles minimalist disco deformities with
unimpeded noise-rock. These young futurists are the house band of
the primordial underground set. With a flair for irreverence and
mimosa-guided poetics, lyrically demonstrated by front-women Le
West and L-Erin (aka The Cave Twins), C:WAR spreads a contagious
giddiness intensified by King Riff and Obscuratron’s electro-tweaks.
C:WAR recently completed a micro-tour of Japan; tonight is your
chance to catch them before they ship off to the Detroit Electronic
Music Festival. Spontaneous Obsessivism John Zorn’s Cobra produced by David Slusser & directed by William Winant Brown Bunny Ensemble Sunday, April 28, 8 PM $7-$10 sliding scale admission
Composer, performer, one of the foremost sound designers on the
West Coast, the mad genius of David Slusser has enhanced the films
of David Lynch, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and the music
of Angelo Badalamenti, Mike Patton, and John Zorn; whom he's been
associated with since the mid-eighties. Cobra, Zorn's best
known "game piece", codifies just about every aspect of
free improvisation through a complex set of rules detailing the
use of colored cue cards, headbands, intricate hand signals, and
other indicators. The Bay Area has the largest group of Cobra
veterans outside of downtown NYC, and they'll be prompted by William
Winant, one of the world's premiere new music percussionists, and
long time Zorn associate. The prompter, as well as individual ensemble
members, can determine orchestration, dynamics, density, types of
material, endings, even the ability to call back events which happened
earlier in the performance ("memory systems"), and for
those who want to wrestle control from the prompter Zorn has provided
regulations for "guerrilla tactics". Slusser has gathered
some of the Bay Area's top improvisers in what is certain to become
the most unforgettable renditions of this subversive masterpiece
in recent years.
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