modern music guild

We've moved!

2009-08-28T11:44:00.001-04:00

Check out http://oberlinmmg.wordpress.com for the new MMG website.

Friday, June 12th 2009

2009-05-21T16:41:00.003-04:00

Gregg Kowalsky of Kranky Records
Ben Bracken from Oakland, Californi

9pm at Fairchild Chapel

GREGG KOWALSKY resides in Oakland, California where he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College. Kowalsky’s compositions range from drone and noise pieces to meditative psychedelia, which are highly influenced by the thick, humid air of South Florida where Gregg lived for most of his life. After his debut album, Through the Cardial Window (Kranky), Gregg started working with cassette tapes, sine oscillators, mixer feedback, contact mics, etc... His recent series of Tape Chants explores the acoustics where the performances occur by setting up cassette players around the space, using only the cassette players' speakers for amplification. Throughout the piece, Gregg moves around the space adjusting the amplitude of the players as a live mix. The first incarnation of Tape Chants was released in 2007 called Tape Chants A Million (Rootstrata).

Kowalsky has had the opportunity to perform throughout Europe and the United States over the past several years. He participated in festivals such as WDR’s SoundArt-Köln Festival, Sonar, OFFF (Online Flash-Film Festival) and The Nursery Summer Festival in Sweden. His recordings have released on Kranky, Rootstrata, Kning Disk, Nosordo, Ruralfaune and others. He has composed for dance, sound installations, film and acoustic ensembles.

Tuesday, December 9th 2008

2008-11-28T23:48:00.004-05:00

Sun Circle with Greg Davis and Zach Wallace
Bird Show from Chicago, Illinois
Emeralds Cleveland's drone-sound

10pm at Fairchild Chapel

SUN CIRCLE is the duo of Greg Davis and Zach Wallace. Psychoacoustic minimalism meets psychedelic maximalism. Ecstatic high volume drones, long form trance musics and peace noise. Bowed strings, voices, organs, percussion, home-made and world instruments. Greg Davis lives in Burlington, Vermont. He has played shows all over the world with many different people and has released solo and collaborative albums on many different labels, including Carpark Records and Kranky. Zach Wallace lives in Swan Valley, Montana. He performs solo, with Memorize the Sky and Sun Circle and has played with people ranging from Tony Conrad to Anthony Braxton.

Discography:
Sun Circle CDr (Lichen Records - Jan 2007 - LP reissue in Dec 2008)
Sun Circle / Wind-Up Bird Tour Cassette (Lichen Records - Feb 2007 - LP reissue on Music Fellowship in Dec 2008)
Sun Circle / Eleh Split LP (Important Records - March 2008)
Sun Circle / Pregnant Moon Split Cassette (Nu-New Age Tapes - June 2008)
Sun Circle Tour Cassette (Lichen Records - Dec 2008)

Saturday, Novermber 15th 2008

2008-11-12T12:58:00.010-05:00

nmperign from Boston, Mass.
Trauma with Chris Riggs and Ben Hall
Sam Goldberg mesmerizing guitar drone
Walter Carson from Lexington, KY
Fluxmonkey/J. Guy Laughlin duo

9pm at Fairchild Chapel

NMPERIGN is Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey from Boston, Massachusetts. Nmperign has been hailed the world over as the leading purveyors of whatever that strange thing they do is. Their palette of sounds makes laptops seem as flexible as doorbells, and their precise but wildly unpredictable improvisations would have you at the edge of your seat if you weren't so afraid of the noise you would make getting there. Fierce and fragile, lush and fractured, nmperign is tough to pin down and all the better for it.

BHOB RAINEY’s music has become a model in the world of experimental sound. He is the founder of both nmperign (with trumpeter Greg Kelley) and the BSC, which he also directs. Collaborations with musicians such as Ralf Wehowsky, Le Quan Ninh, Günter Müller, and Lionel Marchetti, dancers Nicole Bindler and Yukiko Nakamura, and filmmakers Loren Boyer, Harvey Benschoter, and William Pisarri highlight Rainey’s broad experience and outline a complex body of work that continues to expand and surprise. His music occupies a charged space between synthetic and organic sound, bringing forth improbable sensual and narrative experiences through virtuosic extended techniques, homemade synths and sound processors, found recordings, and a kind of living silence that is apt to wreak havoc with the perception of time.

GREG KELLEY (b. 1973, Boston) began studying trumpet in 1983. He attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore from 1991 to 1995, where in addition to studying the Conservatory curriculum, he also immersed himself in a deep study of avant-garde and experimental music, eventually coming to the conclusion that his musical focus lay outside of the academic environment. After his studies, Kelley moved back to his native Massachusetts and quickly insinuated himself into the local avant-garde circles and soon commenced a period of intense travel and collaboration, bringing him across the United States, throughout Europe, Japan and South America. He has recorded over 40 albums and despite a more limited travel schedule, he still manages to play in a number of groups including Nmperign (as abstract improvisatory duo and as horn section for ex-Galaxie 500-ers Damon & Naomi), Heathen Shame, Cold Bleak Heat, the Life Partners, the Eagles of Hair Metal, and the BSC, among others. Other collaborators have included Jandek, Keiji Haino, Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Anthony Braxton, Kevin Drumm, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee, and Lionel Marchetti.

Saturday, October 11th 2008

2008-10-02T17:16:00.008-04:00

Carlos Giffoni from Brooklyn, New York
Emeralds from Cleveland, Ohio

9:30pm at Fairchild Chapel

The CARLOS GIFFONI sound can be described as psychedelic electronics for the new era of death and destruction hope music. He is a Venezuelan artist who resides in the New York City area since the year 2000, applying feedback systems, modular manipulation, rewired electronic instruments, analog and digital synthesis to the composition of electronic music pieces, as well as improvising live with local and international renown musicians. Carlos remains very active performing live in New York and in a number of tours and festivals in the US, South America, Europe and Japan. He is the curator of the No Fun Fest, a yearly event in Brooklyn bringing together a wide variety of international experimental musicians. He is also a member of No Wave/Noise/Rock trio Monotract.

Friday, September 26th 2008

2008-08-24T16:40:00.007-04:00

John Wiese from Los Angeles, California
Aaron Dilloway from Oberlin, Ohio
Skin Graft from Cleveland, Ohio
Andrei Popozuda from Oberlin, Ohio

10pm at Fairchild Chapel

JOHN WIESE is an artist and composer from Los Angeles, California. His ongoing projects include LHD and Sissy Spacek, with plenty of freelance work with many artists as diverse as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Dave Phillips, Smegma, Kevin Drumm, Cattle Decapitation, and C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core). He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering Europe, Scandinavia and Australia as a member of Sunn O))), the UK as part of the Free Noise tour (a tentet including Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Yellow Swans, etc.), the United States alongside Wolf Eyes, and recently performed in the 52nd Venice Biennale with artist Nico Vascellari.

SKIN GRAFT brings the noise.

ANDREI POPOZUDA is the greatest living composer in the world? Who knows what he'll be doing this time.

Wednesday, September 17th 2008

2008-08-16T15:34:00.006-04:00

The New Monuments
Christopher Riggs

9pm at Fairchild Chapel

THE NEW MONUMENTS is a collaboration between saxophonist Don Dietrich, violinist C. Spencer Yeh and percussionist Ben Hall.

DON DIETRICH is a saxophonist and founding member of New York City based improvisational group, Borbetomagus. Borbetomagus formed in 1979 when Dietrichjoined with saxophonist Jim Sauter and electric guitarist Donald Miller. Their aggressive music has been described as "a huge, overpowering, take-no-prisoners mass of sound" by Byron Coley.

While the core trio listed above has been responsible for most of Borbetomagus's music, they have collaborated with Swiss circuit bending duo Voice Crack, Dutch cellist Tristan Honsinger, German double-bassist Peter Kowald, and others. In 2006, they recorded a collaborative album with Hijokaidan live at the Festival de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville, Canada, and in 2007 their long out-of-print cassette Live In Allentown was released on CD. Sauter and Dietrich have also recorded a duo CD, and a collaborative CD with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore.

Borbetomagus are considered widely influential on the Japanese noise music scene, as demonstrated by the re-release of their limited Live At Inroads cassette on CD by the Japanese label P.S.F. Records, as well as having a CD released by Osaka-based noise label Alchemy Records. They have been influential on many American rock, free jazz, and noise musicians, such as Sonic Youth, Pelt, Thomas Ankersmit, and Kevin Drumm.

C. SPENCER YEH was born in Taipei, Taiwan 1975, moved to the US in 1980, studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, and is now based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeh is active both as a solo and ensemble artist, as well as with his primary 'organized sound' project, Burning Star Core. As an improviser, Yeh has focused on developing a personal vocabulary using violin, voice, and electronics. As a sound organizer/composer, Yeh works with all aspects available surrounding a work, aurally and physically, as elements key to the cumulative experience. He is concerned not only with the sensual aspects of sound, but the gestural qualities as well.

Yeh has performed alongside and collaborated with a deep and ever-growing list of artists and groups including Tony Conrad, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, The New Humans with Vito Acconci, Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, John Wiese, Aaron Dilloway, John Olson, Amy Granat, Jutta Koether, LaDonna Smith, Carlos Giffoni, Okkyung Lee, Atsuhiro Ito, Audrey Chen, Nate Wooley, JP Feliciano, Rafael Toral, Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio All-Stars, Damo Suzuki's Network, and many others, and has performed across the U.S.A. and Europe in a variety of settings and festivals. Most recently he participated in the 24 Hour Drone People project in Stockholm, alongside artists such as CM Von Hauswolff, Mika Vainio, Joachim Nordwall, BJ Nilsen, Hildur Gudnadottir, and Mark Wastell. He has also had visual art and video works presented internationally.

BEN HALL is a percussionist and member of Detroit, Michigan improv-noise project Graaveyards with John Olson and Hans Buetow. Hall and Buetow also collaborate with Chris Riggs under the name Trauma, and with Nate Wooley under the name Mêlée, and release music under the Brokenresearch imprint.

CHRIS RIGGS is, well...

Saturday, April 26th 2008

2008-04-19T17:24:00.006-04:00

Ryan Jewell/Larry Marotta from Columbus, Ohio
Emily O'Leary featuring Chris Riggs and Klaus Sternhagen

10pm at Fairchild Chapel

RYAN JEWELL was born in a small Appalachian river town in southern Ohio in an environment set between the rundown post-industrial factories and train yards and the natural beauty of the forested foothills on the Ohio River. The juxtaposition of these two seemingly conflicting environments has profoundly affected his aesthetic. He studied percussion and electronic composition techniques at Capital University and has since studied drumset with Susie Ibarra and tabla with Dr. Lowell Lybarger. His improvisations are equally influenced by Midwestern underground experimental noise, psychoacoustics, reductionist impov and certain schools of modern composition. Ryan regularly works as a solo performer in the arenas of very quiet free improv and very loud harsh noise, and is often called to play drums for established free jazz musicians, experimental rock bands, and iconoclastic songwriters. In addition to being a perpetual traveler of the US, he recently completed two solo tours of Europe and the UK and was invited to perform as such respected international festivals as the SOWIESO 1 festival in Paris, the Kraak Festival in Brussels, the International Noise Conference in Miami, and SXSW in Austin.

LARRY MAROTTA is guitarist and composer based in Columbus, Ohio. He has performed with David Reed, Mike Shiflet, Ryan Jewell, Jason Roebke, Ben Bennett, Kyle Bruckmann, Ernst Karel, Neil Feather, Matthew Sperry, Rat Bastard, Bill Orcutt, David Gross, Spencer Yeh, Tatsuya Nakatani, Dave Rempis, James Ilgenfritz, Avant Collective, Brian Casey, Rocco Di Pietro, Steve Perakis, and the Rattling Wall Collective. In the last several years, he has scored several independent and classic silent films. His scores for the silent films Christmas, USA and The Cage were released on DVD by Kino International in summer 2007.

Larry Marotta was born in East Orange, New Jersey, but raised in North Miami Beach, Florida. He started studying guitar at age 10 with his father, the drummer/percussionist Mike Marotta, as his primary teacher. He divided his time between garage rock bands and playing and learning jazz (he was the guitarist in the Florida All-State Jazz Band in 1985). While studying philospophy at Florida Atlantic University in the late 1980s, he became actively involved in the Miami punk and noise scene. After graduating, Larry relocated to Columbus, Ohio, where he currently lives with his life partner Becky Sicking and their daughter Kate.

EMILY O'LEARY is collaborative improv by guitarist Chris Riggs and bassist Klaus Sternhagen. Pretty cool, huh?

Saturday, April 19th 2008

2008-04-09T15:15:00.010-04:00

Mike Khoury/Leyya Tawil Violin/Dance duo
Andrei Popozuda of Oberlin, Ohio

8:30pm at Fairchild Chapel

MIKE KHOURY was born in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan in 1969. As the son of visual artist Sari Khoury, he was exposed to various forms of visual arts, and creative musical forms. Growing up in a university town also availed Mike to various forms of art and music. Mike is Palestinian.

Mike began studying violin at the age of 10 and eventually came under the guidance of Juliard graduate Nancy Smith. Abandoning the violin for electric bass, Mike played in various rock combos and eventually settled with The Urban Farmers.

Mike went on to explore the possibilities of free and improvised music and resumed his studies of the violin. He furthered his involvement in the creative improvised realm with Jason Shearer (winds) and Ben Hall (percussion). Mike also played with Siege Machine, a larger ensemble including Ben Hall, John Olson, Jason Shearer, Mark Sawaski and Joel Peterson. Siege Machine balanced graphical score compositions with improvisation. The development of the improvisational duet has also consumed much of Khoury's time and is a preferred format. Often times, Khoury joins Ben Hall, Hans Buetow, Piotr Michalowski or Leyya Tawil in duo performances. Current playing partners include Will Soderberg, Hans Buetow, Ben Hall and Piotr Michalowski.

Mike studies violin at the Art Center Music School with composer/violinist David Litven. Mike continues to work on compositions and improvisations as well as operate Entropy Stereo Recordings, a free improvisation music label.

LEYYA TAWIL is an active participant in the contemporary dance community. Born in Detroit, Michigan to Syrian and Palestinian parents, Leyya enjoys exploring aspects of contemporary urban culture through her collaborative projects. She works in a movement style that integrates momentum, precision, and personality. Leyya has performed, choreographed and taught internationally, and has been presented by the Arab American National Museum, Oakland Art Gallery (CA), MT Space (Beirut), Alwan for the Arts (NYC), Studio 303 (Montreal), and in numerous venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Leyya has held faculty positions at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (Visiting Artist), the University of San Francisco, Sonoma State University, Dance Mission Theater/School (SF), and ODC Dance Commons (SF). In the fall of 2007, she will join Middlebury College (Vermont) as the Artist-In-Residence in Dance. She has also guest taught at Mills College, Lebanese University, and other professional institutions.

In the bay area, Leyya co-directs the Temescal Arts Center, a low-cost performance and rehearsal space for Oakland artists. She served on the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee (“the Izzies”) from 2003-2006. Leyya received degrees in dance from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (BDA) and Mills College-Oakland (MFA).

ANDREI POPOZUDA is the greatest living composer in the world. He will perform from his opera-in-progress The Brower Poker.

Saturday, April 12th 2008

2008-03-23T20:42:00.009-04:00

Thus featuring Neil Feather and John Berndt
Traum from Detroit, Michigan

8pm at Fairchild Chapel

Neil Feather and John Berndt have collaborated since 1994 as THUS, using their unique, self-built instrumentation to develop their own idiom of otherworldly music. Like a civilization of two, like a cargo cult in reverse...

Sound mechanic Neil Feather has been creating radical and unusual musical instruments for thirty years, and is increasingly known outside of Baltimore as one of the most original musical thinkers of his day. His instruments each embody uniquely clever acoustic and engineering principles, and are visually arresting. The music he plays on the instruments is equally original, embodying new principles and resulting in a nearly alien idiom of music. A founding member of Thus and The Official Project, as well as the leader of Aerotrain, he has a long history of collaborative projects and solo concerts.

John Berndt is a musician and organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland who is best known as an extended-technique experimental saxophonist and electronic musician. As an enfant terrible, he participated in what might be called the second wave of the neoism cultural movement. Berndt participated in the "86th International Neoist Apartment Festival" in 1986 in Berlin, & the "One Millionth" in New York City in late 1988. Subsequently becoming a respected businessman and grafting those skills onto his avant-garde roots, Berndt, one member of a collective of artists and improvising musicians in the spirit of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, works on the Red Room experimental performance series, which has presented weekly events since the early 1996, and the High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music, a large annual improvised music festival begun in 1999 in Baltimore where all performers play in new groups. He also runs the Recorded record label which has issued several discs by Berndt's sometime collaborator Henry Flynt.

TRAUM is Ben Hall and Hans Buetow of Graveyards and Mêlée plus local favorite Chris Riggs. John Olson of Wolf Eyes says that their work "sounds like some Bailey shit but without all that art shit."

Wednesday, April 9th 2008

2008-03-13T16:22:00.018-04:00

Truant Runts with Jack Wright and Michael Johnsen
Don Ayler's Psychosis from Oberlin, Ohio

8pm at The Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse

TRUANT RUNTS is Michael Johnsen and Jack Wright, who have been playing together since 2000 and have toured in the US and Europe, sometimes adding French trumpet player, Sebastian Cirotteau. As a duo they have created a CD on the Sprout label by that name.

Jack Wright taught at various universites in the 1960s, and left academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics. By the late 1970s he directed his energies into playing the saxophone, which had been his childhood dream. He is today one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since that time. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as an underground legend, the "Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away.

Michael Johnsen was born in 1968 to two German immigrants in Pittsburgh, where he continues to live. Over the past several years he has wired together an melange of analog electronic devices for live performance, whose highly idiosyncratic behaviors are revealed through their complex interactions. As an antidote to all that wire, he is equally devoted to the saw, a simple folk instrument. He is especially fond of putting himself in difficult, confusing situations. Most of what he might have learned has come from the so-called natural world, like watching robins run. "My favorite sound is the one that's over."

DON AYLER'S PSYCHOSIS performs ritualized improvisation. Through wayward stabs at solar divination, the group encourages you to witness absolute presence all of the time.

Saturday, March 15th 2008

2008-03-05T23:32:00.026-05:00

Death in the Maze of Baltimore, MD
Aaron Dilloway formerly of Wolf Eyes

8pm at Fairchild Chapel

DEATH IN THE MAZE is Baltimorians Rose Hammer (Baritone & alto sax), Samuel Burt (clarinets), John Berndt (alto and soprano sax) and Paul Neidhardt (percussion), playing occult (in the sense of "not revealed") chamber improvisation of the highest order. Combing elements of topiary aesthetics with eerie winds Scottish that steal your pocket watch, but during a Tibetan funeral at least 200 years ago. Once you get in, no way out.

AARON DILLOWAY is the former guitarist and tape manipulator of the noise group Wolf Eyes. Currently, he runs the noise label and mail-order Hanson Records, which he began in 1994, and performs solo using eight track tapes and vocal sounds. He also records modular synthesizers as Spine Scavenger, and with an ever-changing cast of sound artists as The Nevari Butchers.

Saturday, March 8th 2008

2008-03-01T14:41:00.112-05:00

Traum featuring members of Graveyards, Mêlée
Aaron Dilloway formerly of Wolf Eyes

8pm at The Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse

CANCELLED
Due to the nasty blizzard that blew through the midwest,
the Traum/Dilloway show had to be cancelled.

TRAUM is Ben Hall and Hans Buetow of Graveyards and Mêlée plus local favorite Chris Riggs. John Olson of Wolf Eyes says that their work "sounds like some Bailey shit but without all that art shit."

AARON DILLOWAY is the former guitarist and tape manipulator of the noise group Wolf Eyes. Currently, he runs the noise label and mail-order Hanson Records, which he began in 1994, and performs solo using eight track tapes and vocal sounds. He also records modular synthesizers as Spine Scavenger, and with an ever-changing cast of sound artists as The Nevari Butchers.