Gig report from Amar

I'm so glad he likes blogging. Click here!

Mourning Moon concert this Thursday in SF

The Mourning Moon will be waning on Thursday night, November 5th, when the Mourning Moon concert takes place at the Luggage Store Gallery. You're invited to contemplate death and rebirth with Andrew Raffo Dewar (Alabama), his friends, and his music...featuring the composer on soprano saxophone plus Kyle Bruckmann, Gino Robair, and John Shiurba.

The Luggage Store Gallery is upstairs at 1007 Market Street at 6th Street, San Francisco. The show starts at 8 pm and admission is $6.00 - $10.00 sliding scale, with no one turned away for lack of funds. The series is sponsored by Outsound Presents.

PROGRAM:

8 PM: Piece for For Four Instruments (2002), dedicated to Earle Brown

INTERMISSION

9 PM: new work for quartet

COMPOSER BIO:

Andrew Raffo Dewar (b.1975 Rosario, Argentina) is a composer, improviser, and woodwind instrumentalist. Since 1995 he has been active in the music communities of Minneapolis, New Orleans, the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, and performing his work internationally. He has studied with saxophonist/composers Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton and Phillip Greenlief, composer Alvin Lucier, trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon, and has also had a long involvement with experimental and traditional Indonesian music. Dewar has been noted as "having the rare ability to translate his knowledge into something beautiful" (Foxy Digitalis). The 2008 debut recording of his music on Porter Records was described as "absorbing" (Dusted Magazine),"enshrouding" and "evoking something unnatural and plugged-in" (Bagatellen), as well as "musical rainfall" and "absolutely essential listening" (Aquarius Records). According to Paper Cuts zine, "Dewar’s music is not a watered down copy or even a respectful imitation of other musical forms; it’s his own thing."

In addition to leading his own ensembles and performing in collaborative groups with known and unknown musicians from around the world, Dewar performs with and appears on several recordings by the Anthony Braxton 12+1tet and the Bill Dixon Orchestra. Dewar is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts in New College at the University of Alabama.

Reconnaissance Fly this Sunday night in SF

This Sunday night, November 1st, at 7:30 p.m., Reconnaissance Fly will take the stage opening for Noertker's Moxie at the Musicians' Union Hall, 116 9th Street at Mission Street in San Francisco. It's the CD release party for Noertker's Moxie and we're playing the opening set.

Who or what is Reconnaissance Fly? It's a band of composers in the midst of co-creating a long-form work. Our first project, Flower Futures, will be a multi-movement “spong cycle” based entirely on spoetry – the deliciously powerful results of robot efforts to evade your spam filter. Some movements are written out, some are improv frameworks, and all celebrate the poetic gifts of the Internet.

Here are the bios of the band members:

Polly Moller (Scorpio) is a composer, performer, improviser, performance artist, curator, and writer based in Oakland, California. Her current passions are found text, extended techniques and improvisation on flute and bass flute, found and/or toy instruments, and composition drawing upon spirituality, ritual movements, and the occult. Polly is currently working on a solo piccolo piece commissioned by Amy Likar of the Oakland East Bay Symphony, and preparing for the Feb. 25, 2010 premiere of her piece Genesis for 12 improvisers.

Amar Chaudhary (Pisces) is a longtime composer and performer specializing in contemporary and electronic music, as well as a developer of advanced software for sound synthesis and music composition. Amar had his music performed internationally and has received several honors for his musical work. He remains actively involved in local electronic and experimental music in the San Francisco Bay Area, and performs regularly, both as a solo artist and in groups, including the ensemble Reconnaissance Fly. His recent music involves experimentation with new sounds and sound-synthesis/processing techniques and new modes of musically expressive performance, free improvisation, combination of disparate elements and styles, and incorporating folk and toy instruments into electro-acoustic music. In addition to his musical work, Amar maintains a deep interest in modern and contemporary art in several media as a creator, consumer and supporter.

Bill Wolter (Sagittarius)is a guitarist, composer, and sound engineer working in the SF Bay Area. His music hovers around experimental rock, jazz, noise, new music, and all areas in between. A restless collaborator who constantly seeks the most diverse and challenging musical experiences, Bill performs and collaborates frequently with a wide range of musicians, artists, and dancers. Recently Bill has been working on musical game design for Guitar Hero videogames, as well as composing music for modern dance, and playing with a jazz organ trio organ-ma-tron. Bill has worked with the Bay Area jazz/rock/prog bands Slydini and Inner Ear Brigade, and has collaborated with other performance ensembles such as sfSound, Moe!kestra and Double Vision. Recently, Bill received the Wurlitzer Foundation composition residency in Taos, New Mexico.

Blood Moon concert this Thursday night in SF

My Full Moon Concert Series which I'm curating for Outsound Presents and the Luggage Store Gallery moves on to the Blood Moon concert this Thursday night.

At 8 pm we have the duo of James Kaiser and A.C. Way. At 9pm we have Past-Present-Future, featuring Myles Boisen, John Hanes and Lisa Mezzacappa.

The Blood Moon concert will happen at the Luggage Store Gallery, upstairs at 1007 Market Street at 6th Street, San Francisco. Admission is $6.00 - $10.00 sliding scale, with no one turned away for lack of funds.

THE PROGRAM

8 PM: Tonight’s first Blood Moon performance will be a live reworking of a piece first performed by Way and Kaiser five years ago, which at the time involved minimal electronics, voice, metals and much atmosphere. This piece will project the mental and emotional state of two artists who share a heavily water and moon influenced birth sign. Inspired by and recorded originally on a blood moon, now performed live on another years later, this marks the completion of a cycle.

INTERMISSION

9 PM: Past-Present-Future will premiere a Blood Moon Suite composed for the occasion.


PERFORMER BIOS:

Andy C. Way is an Oakland based sound artist who has been working in "experimental music" for the last decade. He works primarily with processed sound, in an attempt to reduce his music to the most instinctual and emotional level. His focus tends to his many goups (Maleficia, French Radio, NF Orchest, Carrion, Cannis Lupus, Rostro Negro, Riqis ect..) but solo performances under the moniker A.C.Way do occur.

James Kaiser is a Berkeley transplanted sound artist active since moving here in 1997, with works preceding that time from both Kansas City and New Orleans. Solo works are usually presented under the moniker 'petit mal', and collaborations with like minded cohorts (A.C.Way, Angela Hsu, Bruce Anderson, 'Thomas Carnacki', the 'Zenflesh Collective') are many. Typical instrumentation involves contact mics, a bowed bicycle wheel, shortwave and tape loops.

Myles Boisen is a guitarist, composer, improvisor, and record producer/engineer, best known around the Bay Area for his twin-necked twanging in The Splatter Trio, as well as musical exploits with The Club Foot Orchestra. Over the past two decades Myles has performed or recorded with John Zorn, Tom Waits, Fred Frith, Rova Saxophone Quartet, John Tchicai, Nina Hagen, Eugene Chadbourne, Vinny Golia, Myra Melford, Glenn Spearman, Ralph Carney, and his own "Guitarspeak" and "Past-Present-Future" ensembles. In collaboration with guitarists Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Elliott Sharp, Robert Fripp and others, he has developed a potent musical language that combines a wealth of traditional and contemporary styles, focusing particularly on prepared guitar technique, sparse blues soundscapes and improvisation.

May 16, 2007 Flip Quartet

The second performance of the Flip was on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 21 Grand in Oakland. Organ of Qwerty opened with an ambient sound and video set. The Flip performers were John Hanes, Suki O'Kane, Moe! Staiano and Karen Stackpole.

A wonderful quadrophonic sound system amplified and recorded that performance. It was set up by KFJC's Austin Space with assistance from my late partner Paul Decker.

Here is where you can listen to the whole thing as it happened.

Oakland Flip Quartet, July 17, 2009

Here's an excerpt from the July 17th performance of the Flip Quartet at BookZoo, Oakland, video'd by series curator DJ Cypod.

The players are Amar Chaudhary, Travis Johns, Suki O'Kane and Moe! Staiano. The littlest audience member is 9-month-old Mingus Paul Moreira, the son of emeritus band member John Moreira. The little guy was awesome. He was very enthusiastic about the performance and really wanted to take on the Fire Quarter himself.