The Lab

2948 16th St San Francisco, CA, 94103

(415) 864-8855

The Lab is a nonprofit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Alvin Lucier performed by Charles Curtis & Dafne Vicente-Sandoval
Dec
17
3:00 PM15:00

Alvin Lucier performed by Charles Curtis & Dafne Vicente-Sandoval

Sunday, Dec. 17 at 3pm
Free | RSVP

Please join us for an end-of-the-year event, with works by Alvin Lucier performed by cellist Charles Curtis and bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval.

Alvin Lucier, Same and Different (2021) for bassoon and pure wave
Alvin Lucier, Slices (2007-2011) for cello and pre-recorded orchestra

Same and Different: During the course of the performance an electronically generated pure wave tuned at 442 Hz flows from a single loudspeaker mounted behind and above the heads of the audience. A bassoonist plays a series of 126 long tones consisting of near-unison variations of the pure wave caused by different fingerings. Small variations in pitch cause audible beating. The farther the distance between the pitches, the faster the beating; at unison, no beating occurs. Furthermore, the beating patterns may be heard to spin in space above the heads of the listeners.

In Slices for cello and pre-recorded orchestra, a 53-note chromatic tone cluster is sustained by 53 orchestral instruments, each recorded individually and looped. Against this sustaining surface, the solo cello performs melodic orderings of the 53-note set; with each played tone, the cluster is successively erased and then re-inscribed, in a gradual process timed and inflected by the soloist in real time. The entire cluster is traversed seven times altogether.

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Stephen O'Malley and François J Bonnet + Andy Guthrie
Dec
15
8:00 PM20:00

Stephen O'Malley and François J Bonnet + Andy Guthrie

Fri., Dec. 15 at The Lab
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
Buy Tickets
$29.46 advance / $30 door / discounted or free for members
Request your personal member DICE Code here.
Questions? Contact thelabsf@thelab.org

François J. Bonnet and Stephen O’Malley are long-term collaborators around editorial projects like Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM labels & SPECTRES journal. Their first album, Cylene appeared in late spring 2019, and the Cylene Suisse Redux LP in spring 2021 (with production by Jim O’Rourke and Ryoji Ikeda), both were released on Editions Mego. The music of this duo suggests a world at the same time serene and anxious, evoking the calm before or after the storm without excluding, from time to time, the storm itself.

François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theoretician based in Paris. He’s been a member of INA GRM since 2007 and became its director in 2018. He has published several books : The Order of Sounds, The Infra-World, After Death(all published by Urbanomic) and The Music To Come(Shelter Press).

Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone and experimental music groups for over two decades – SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate being among his best-known creations. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity and multidisciplinary interests. O’Malley is also a vigorous live performer and has toured around the world since 2000. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism – sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.

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Prepared Guitar Ensemble: Workshop and Performance with Fred Frith
Dec
9
1:00 PM13:00

Prepared Guitar Ensemble: Workshop and Performance with Fred Frith

Sat., Dec. 9 at The Lab
Workshop 1pm / Performance 3pm
$15 Suggested Donation for Performance

Get Tickets Now

Request your personal member DICE Code here.
Questions? Contact thelabsf@thelab.org

Prepared Guitar Ensemble, a collaboration founded by San Francisco based composer Matt Robidoux in 2019 with Creativity Explored, a SF studio-based collective that partners with people with developmental disabilities to nurture and celebrate creative potential in all of us, is a space where artists meet to make sound inclusively with instruments of their own design. Our instruments were designed by CE artists remotely in a series of Zoom workshops from 2020-2021 and realized by instrument builder and multi-instrumentalist Sudhu Tewari.

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