SOUND SALON | A six-program music series at Swarm Gallery
Swarm Gallery is pleased to announce a three-week musical series between January 26 to February 17, 2013. Please join us for this sound-based art experience, featuring six evenings of radical and experimental music and image-making by local musicians, performers and artists.
01/26/13 | Andrew Weathers, Dan Paul Grody, Sun Hammer | Curated by Tim Kim
01/30/13 | X v. Y: The Music of Albert Ayler | Curated by Karl Evangelista
02/01/13 |...
SOUND SALON | A six-program music series at Swarm Gallery
Swarm Gallery is pleased to announce a three-week musical series between January 26 to February 17, 2013. Please join us for this sound-based art experience, featuring six evenings of radical and experimental music and image-making by local musicians, performers and artists.
01/26/13 | Andrew Weathers, Dan Paul Grody, Sun Hammer | Curated by Tim Kim
01/30/13 | X v. Y: The Music of Albert Ayler | Curated by Karl Evangelista
02/01/13 | Oakland Art Murmur | Artwork by Sharaine Bell with music by DJ Aztec Parrot (of KPFA)
02/13/13 | Beep, Kim Cass, PIKI, Ross Peacock | Curated by Sam Ospovat
02/16/13 | Vanessa Beggs, Grex, Efft | Curated by Karl Evangelista
02/17/13 | Joshua Churchill + Paul Clipson, Tana Sprague, Ben Bracken + Ashley Bellouin | Curated by Joshua Churchill
Doors open at 8PM.
$10-15 sliding donation. No one turned away for lack of funds.
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DETAILS:
01/26/13 | Andrew Weathers, Dan Paul Grody, Sun Hammer | Curated by Tim Kim
Andrew Weathers is a composer and improviser from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His music blurs composition, improvisation, and appropriation, taking key elements from folk, experimental, and punk traditions. Dan Paul Grody is a solo musician and founding member of several San Francisco-based bands including Tarentel and Moholy-Nagy. He is a self-taught guitarist, and the melodies at the core of his songwriting elegantly bring to mind such disparate references as West African kora and Tacoma style fingerpicking. Sun Hammer is a Portland-based sound artist who loves eating sweets but restricts his intake with a weekends-only limit. He adores mainstream rap, utilizes bass for its healing properties and identifies as an Enneagram Type Five.
01/30/13 | X v. Y: The Music of Albert Ayler | Curated by Karl Evangelista
X v. Y: pitting the hearts and minds of Bay Area musicians against the legacies of legends. One enterprising local offers original music and interprets the music of a master, to interesting results. X v. Y's first show of 2013 features the music and concepts of iconoclastic saxophonist/composer Albert Ayler. Interpreting Ayler's music will be a cavalcade of Bay Area powerhouses, including Rent Romus's Life's Blood project (featuring the dynamic piano of Thollem McDonas) and legendary United Front reedman Lewis Jordan (collaborating for the first time with Karl Evangelista's Ai-Ai band).
02/01/13 | Oakland Art Murmur | Artwork by Sharaine Bell with music by DJ Aztec Parrot (of KPFA)
Studio artist Sharaine Bell will be featuring Conveyor, a site-specific installation, in collaboration with Jane Elliot. Conveyor invites viewers to participate in the act of mark making. Comprised of a single, moving plane, the piece challenges he notion of control amid the circumstances of movement and continuous change. KPFA’s DJ Aztec Parrot of Ritmo De Las Americas will be spinning a mix of Latin, Funk, and electronic beats.
02/13/13 | Beep, Kim Cass, PIKI, Ross Peacock | Curated by Sam Ospovat
Beep features Nate Brenner (from tUnE-yArDs) on bass, Michael Coleman on keyboards, and Sam Ospovat on drums. Kim Cass will play a solo set of highly original music for the acoustic bass and electronic looper. These compositions are melodically compelling and rhythmically complex, breaking new ground as multidimensional vehicles for improvisation. PIKI, Sam Ospovat's solo project, will perform Tow Away Zone, a piece with egg timers, hand bells, gamelan angklung, acoustic bass with 6-10 improvising musicians. The performance will incorporate the choreographed pedestrian movements of 5 modern dancers. The musicians will include Theo Padouvas on the trumpet, Jason Gillenwater on the saxaphone, Jorden Glenn with percussion, Lorin Benedict with vocals, Mark Clifford on the vibraphone, and Lisa Mezzacappa on bass.
Ross Peacock of the Oakland band Mwahaha will finish the night doing a DJ set of 70s German synth music.
02/16/13 | Vanessa Beggs, Grex, Efft | Curated by Karl Evangelista
Vanessa Beggs is a natural musical force. When she starts singing the room is alive with presence and power. Her joy, humor and ease on the stage make her an admired performer and a pleasure to witness. This evening's set mixes moody rock with experimental pop songs narrated with Vanessa's dynamic voice and magnetic charm. Grex is a Bay Area creative music partnership composed of Karl Evangelista (guitar, vox, etc.) and Margaret Rei Scampavia (keys, winds, vox, etc.), with Robert Lopez as touring drummer. Efft's music is dark, beautiful, and intense--an intersection between bare folk pop and space rock, intermixing experimental tendencies with songs that are compellingly stark and surreal. Featuring the uncanny vocals of Sarah Elena Palmer and Noah Phillips's shattering, resonant guitar work, Efft is the all too rare pairing that actually surpasses expectations.
02/17/13 | Joshua Churchill + Paul Clipson, Tana Sprague, Ben Bracken + Ashley Bellouin | Curated by Joshua Churchill
Using electronic and acoustic instrumentation and Super 8 film respectively, Joshua Churchill and Paul Clipson create collisions of sound, light, and image that span the spectrums of light(ness) and dark(ness), ethereal and austere. Allowing chance to play a major role in their ever-evolving collaborative performances, each artist simultaneously presents densely layered and textured abstract collages within their mediums without premeditations on their coalescence — the film and audio content are intentionally not discussed ahead of time, and Churchill furthermore faces away from the projection screen while performing — allowing the audience’s subconscious to intertwine the two. Churchill and Clipson first performed at Swarm Gallery in 2011 in conjunction with Threshold(s), Churchill’s solo exhibition. They have been performing collaboratively throughout the US since 2007.
Through field recording, synthesis, signal processing, and other technology that has transformed the definition of an instrument, Tana Sprague’s work explores, mirrors, and aims to expand the edges of perception and consciousness. With a growing discography of sound releases and live cinema collaborations (occasionally under the moniker Lissom), she has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally. Sprague is an artist, curator, and producer based in Oakland, CA. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts from UCSD, and an MFA in Electronic Music & Recording from Mills College.
Ashley Bellouin and Ben Bracken make music with hand made instruments which exploit the natural overtones and sympathetic vibrations that highly redundant tuning systems generate. Minimal structures and simple harmonic relationships give rise to the meditative washes of sound. Each composition is constructed by considering the personal experience of a physical site, the materials used in the construction of the instruments, and the interplay between the two. Their performances are a mixture of the imagined and real, of natural phenomena, and direct action. Their most recent performance took place in the Marin Headlands as part of the 5th annual Soundwave Festival.
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Visit http://swarmgallery.com/art/public-events/ for updated information on events, artist bios and other details.
Swarm Gallery
560 Second Street
Oakland CA 94607
swarmgallery.com
tel 510-839-2787
info@swarmgallery.com