3/13/12: Soft Delete/Purgative Dryness at Cafe Fixe

I'll be performing "Soft Delete/Purgative Dryness" for amplified trumpet and pre-recorded electronics tomorrow night at 8pm as part of Non-Event's Experimental Coffee House series at  Café Fixe , 1642 Beacon Street  (Washington Square), Brookline, MA 02445, 617-879-2500. $5.

This is just a few doors down from The Publick House, so your possibilities are manifold.

"Soft Delete/Purgative Dryness" is a two-part piece exploring themes of philosophical and aesthetic absence, including the potential absence of meaning and content. The solo work will feature amplified but otherwise acoustic trumpet and some pre-recorded electronic elements. It was premiered in Chicago in December 2011. Special thanks to Lampo for instigating the piece and presenting the premiere.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Brookline Commission for the Arts, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

 

3/2/12: Rawlings/Tonne/Meginsky/Kelley open for Alvin Curran

No Idea Festival 2012: Austin, Houston, San Antonio

No Idea Festival 2012

Austin, Houston, San Antonio

February 2, No Idea Festival @ The Broken Neck, Austin TX 8pm

Premiere of a new work by Nick Hennies for ensemble and vibraphone

with Andrea Neumann, Bhob Rainey, Brent Fariss, Chris Cogburn, Gaute Solaas, Vic Rawlings

February 3, No Idea Festival @ The Broken Neck, Austin TX 8pm

with Andrea Neumann/Vic Rawlings

February 4, No Idea Festival @ The Broken Neck, Austin TX 8pm

with nmperign/Jason Lescalleet

February 5, No Idea Festival @ Art Palace, Houston TX 3pm

with Brian Eubanks

February 6, No Idea Festival @ SMART Art Project Place, San Antonio TX 8pm

with nmperign/Jason Lescalleet

Reading

Reading:

Ken Bruen: Headstone (Mysterious Press)

Benjamin Black: Elegy For April (Picador)

John Gray: Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions (Granta UK)

Richard Mabey: The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn: Reflections on Natural Science and Romanticism (Profile)

Chuck Klosterman: The Visible Man (Scribner)

Eli Kezsler: Cold Pin LP (Pan)

ELI KESZLER 'Cold Pin' (PAN 21)

Over two years in the making, Cold Pin is the new full length record by Eli Keszler. Both a composition and stand alone installation, 14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables. Recorded in Boston's historic Cyclorama, a massive dome built to house the Cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg painting in 1884. The b side features in addition, a 'dry' version of the installation with motor attacks on metal squares rather then strings, creating dense percussive clusters. Cold Pin works within the frame work of left to right time and vertical structure. The installation acts as the architecture of the music, surrounding and immersing the live instruments into incredible density and sharp angular mass shapes, and functions alone as the performers stops. Rather then an individual sound the sustained horns, strings, drums and metallic attacks function as a singular unit, and continue too when they stop alongside the installation. Cold Pin features Eli Keszler (drums, crotales installation and guitar), Geoff Mullen (guitar), Ashley Paul (clarinet, guitar, greenbox) Greg Kelley (trumpet), Reuben Son (bassoon) and Benjamin Nelson (cello).

Eli Keszler is a composer, artist and multi-instrumentalist based in New York City. In performance, he often plays drums, bowed crotales and guitar in conjunction with his installations. In his ensemble compositions, he uses extended strings, motors, crotales, horns and mechanical devices to create his sound, balancing intense harmonic formations with acoustic sustain, fast jarring rhythm, mechanical propulsion, dense textures and detailed visual presentations. Eli has toured extensively throughout Europe and the US, performing solo and in collaboration with artists such as Phill Niblock, Aki Onda, Joe Mcphee, Loren Connors, Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Coleman, Joe Morris, Steve Beresford, C Spencer Yeh, Greg Kelley (Nmperign), T Model Ford, Ran Blake, Ashley Paul and Steve Pyne. He has recorded solo releases for labels such as hiw own REL Records, ESP-DISK' and Type (Red Horse). His installations have appeared at the Boston Center for the Arts and Nuit Blanche NYC and the Shreveport MSPC New Music Festival. He has most recently won the Mata composers competition for the 2012 season. Eli Keszler is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston where he studied with Anthony Coleman and Ran Blake.

The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.

http://www.pan-act.com/pages/releases/pan21.html

http://relrecords.net/catalog/1/PAN21

The BSC: Manual

http://bhobrainey.bandcamp.com/album/manual

Note: There are 100 hardcovers available at the paperback price ($20 for book and music). A good chunk of these are already claimed with pre-orders. Once they're gone, they're gone.

Music by the BSC (with Pauline Oliveros)
Book edited by Bhob Rainey with contributions from Damon Krukowski, Aaron P. Tate, Ben Hall, and Mike Bullock
3 tracks, 65’30″
Hardcover and Paperback with Lossless Download (CD-r available on request): 5.8125″ x 8.25″, 112 pages
Published by NO Books

Manual is a combination full-length album and book focusing on the music and improvisational practice of the BSC, an eight-member electroacoustic ensemble formed by saxophonist and composer Bhob Rainey in 2000. More than just music with copious liner notes, Manual examines the process of improvisation from both within and outside the BSC, encountering topics ranging from genealogy to architecture, the boundaries of sense to the benefits of failure, flows of energy to bouts of guilt. The intersection and unfolding of ideas is often complex, but the writing in Manual is earthy and comprehensible, keeping jargon to a minimum without sacrificing the depth of the subject matter. Manual is not a monument to the BSC but rather an appreciation of improvisation from the perspective of an especially prolific community.

The music portion of Manual consists of three extended improvisations covering a six-year period in the BSC’s history. The most recent piece, a vividly captured concert highlighting some of the more elegant aspects of the BSC’s unique musical lexicon, was recorded in 2009 and includes renowned composer Pauline Oliveros on accordion. The earliest piece was recorded in November 2003 at the end of The BSC’s only extended tour and contains some of the noisiest, most unhinged work the ensemble has ever released. 2007′s “23% Bicycle and/or Ribbons of the Natural Order”, recorded in Somerville, MA, provides a balance between the other two tracks, illustrating the BSC’s strong formal control amidst chaotic conflagrations of feedback, tape degeneration, and general instrumental instability. Stage plots and recording notes are included for each track.

The book portion of Manual contains contributions from five writers. Bhob Rainey (director and founder of the BSC) provides an introduction in which he engages with the book’s other contributors while reflecting on failure, adaptable dispositions, and the upside to being oblique. Damon Krukowski (musician, poet, half of Damon & Naomi, one-third of Galaxie 500, and one-fourth of Magic Hour) contributes a series of prose poems aimed at evoking certain effects the BSC’s music has on him. Aaron P. Tate (classicist at Cornell University whose areas include ancient and contemporary improvisation), through extensive research and interviews, pieces together and examines the BSC’s early history and rehearsal practices. Tate uses this information, along with recorded documentation, to approach the music with great insight from a dynamic, open-ended perspective. Ben Hall (percussionist, gospel archivist, and restaurateur) unravels ideas about genealogy, community, politics, and authority as they present themselves in the tradition from which the BSC emerges. And Mike Bullock (audio/visual artist and bassist for the BSC) develops two metaphors for evaluating music like that of the BSC, applying these metaphors to an analysis of the 2009 performance with Pauline Oliveros featured in this release.

Bhob Rainey: soprano saxophone, director
Mike Bullock: contrabass, amplification
James Coleman: theremin
Chris Cooper: guitar and electronics
Greg Kelley: trumpet
Vic Rawlings: amplified / prepared cello, open circuit electronics
Howard Stelzer: tapes
Liz Tonne: voice

Pauline Oliveros plays accordion on Track 1.

Greg Kelley/Olivia Block: Resolution CD (Erstwhile)

Greg Kelley: trumpet

Olivia Block: electronics, piano

Pinholed and perpetual light, part 1 (11:08)
Looking through bone (9:28)
How much radiance can you stand? (8:06)
Some old slapstick routine (8:24)
Pinholed and perpetual light, part 2 (9:05)

This CD is out now on Erstwhile Records and available via all your favorite distributors of recorded music, including Mimaroglu Music Sales who had these kind words to say about it and from whom I stole the above scans (thanks!):

november 2011 release ; ... long in the works (i remember dropping greg off at olivia’s place in chicagoaround the time of the first neon marshmallow fest way back when) collaborative work between musique concrète composer olivia block & trumpeter / composer / connoisseur greg kelley ...

... largely involving olivia’s prepared piano crackle & greg’s metal tube-resonance air-movement this relates to similarly-aligned through-composed sub-aquatic piano renderings (such as g*park’s “one hour as bernel & hofmann”) while keeping a leg in the purely improvised-music sphere ... the results are incredibly rich, dense,multi-layered, and as complex & rewarding as you can possibly imagine ...

one of my favorite discs of the year thusfar & a perfect complement to the style / sound / conceptualframework of lambkin & lescalleet’s discs for the label ; highly recommended !!!