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SONIC CIRCUITS PRESENTS QUEERING SOUND 15 // Intonarumori
AN EVENING OF SOUNDS + DIGITAL ARTS
FROM LGBTQ ARTISTS + ALLIES SATURDAY 06 JUNE // 7:30 PM PYRAMID ATLANTIC ARTS CENTER 8230 GEORGIA AVENUE SILVER SPRING MD
20910 USA QUEERING
SOUND gathers together artists – with a non-exclusive curatorial focus
towards gay, lesbian and post-gender-identified participants – who explore
alternative avenues of expression through audio, the digital arts,
performance art and spoken word. The annual event – now in its fifteenth year
– features live performances from local talents and touring artists as well
as seeks to introduce Washington D.C. audiences to new sounds and challenging
visions from across the globe through digital contributions. Intonarumori ('noise makers' in Italian) are a group of
experimental musical instruments built and invented by the Italian futurist
Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There
were 27 varieties of intonarumori in total built to perform the music outlined
in his L'arte dei Rumori manifesto. QUEERING
SOUND celebrates the noise makers now armed with feedback drenched shoegazer,
frantic punk, live video mixing, electronica, dark ambient, modern classical,
electronic soundscapes, experimental folk, dream pop, and drone. LIVE PERFORMANCES ARTHUR LOVES PLASTIC ●
BLK w/BEAR
● MARCUS WEBB ●
PRAXIS CAT ● FLAMERS CURATOR NOTE: We regret that THE
SCHOOL OF NEW YORK had to cancel their D.C. debut performance. DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS :
AUDIO + VIDEO ROSHI
feat.
PARS RADIO [ GBR ] ● NG [ ITA ] ●
RAF and O [ GBR ] ● NOWHERIANS [ GBR ] GURUN GURUN
feat. CUUSHE [
CZE . JPN ] + CHRISTINA MALDONADO [
MEX ] |
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© Intangible
Arts |
ARTHUR LOVES PLASTIC is Bev Stanton, who was born in the Bahamas and raised near Walt Disney World. She has won over a dozen Washington Area Music Awards in the Electronica category. Her music has appeared in shows on the Discovery Channel, VH1, MTV and other cable television networks. Stanton is one of 24 female electronic artists and deejays profiled in Pink Noises: Women in Electronic Music and Sound (Tara Rodgers; Duke University Press, 2010), alongside Anne Lockwood, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Le Tigre and Mira Calix. Stanton has also made loops of her music available as themes for the Mikrosonic SPC sketchpad app for Android. Her newest EP is DRAG-ON and features vocals by Lisa Moscatiello, samples from The Window Shoppers, and loops created on iPad and Android apps. [ LIVE PERFORMANCE ] |
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© Intangible
Arts |
BLK w/ BEAR – JS Adams; Doug Poplin; Renée
Shaw; and PD Sexton – first garnered glowing reviews and international
airplay for the thought-provoking and moving ‘Wish for a World without Hurt’
collaboration with London's Rothko and the limited edition
‘fahrenheit_drafts’ 12-inch single (Trace Recordings). Their audio has
accompanied film/video projects in NYC and London and selections from Wish for a World were used in the
Discovery Channel's poignant ‘The Flight that Fought Back’ program. The
four-track 'Version 3' extended play is available for download at the Long
Division with Remainders ‘14 versions of the same EP’ project site and also
available in a box-set collection with all fourteen versions plus an
additional digital-download outtakes EP including a 21-minute remix of BLK w/ BEAR’s Version 001. The
mini-album Sorry about your (remixes)
was released on Front & Follow (UK) in 2011. Additional material has been
released through Ultra-red’s free download site Public Record, Little Red
Squirrel Collective (UK), Cohort Recordings and Sonic Circuits’ District of
Noise imprint. In 2013, the group contributed remixes to Total Fears: Bronze Eye Reinterpreted (Ōnyūdō)
and Fuzzy Lights’ Rule of Twelfths
(Little Red Rabbit). The Final Mapping of New Constellations (Little Crackd Rabbit; 2013) – the group’s album-length
reconstruction of Lost Harbour’s ‘The Stars Looked
Down – is "an album of deeply eerie and beautiful woodland
instrumentals. Electronica for long cold nights…This is music to be foraged
through and sifted, sense-impressions escaping your fingers like sand. A
disquieting triumph, the album unsettles with a mysterious broken grace; a
forbidding and confrontational beauty; subtle in execution but quite profound
in affect..." Best of 2013; EARS FOR EYES [UK] BLK w/BEAR contributed
remixes to MY GOD IT’S FULL OF STAIRS (Trace Recordings, 2014), THE SLY &
UNSEEN (Hibernate, 2015), and building
castles out of matchsticks (2015). The group has also been asked to
contribute to Brain Music, a radio
play by Simon Grab (MRI), based on the hypothesis that, in the close future,
people will be able to make their imagined music audible by neuro-technology. Poplin also
performs with the Bach Sinfonia; Adams acts as artistic director / composer
for STYLUS vintage turntable ensemble and performs with Chris Videll (Tag
Cloud) as dark ambient/noise collective BLK TAG. [ LIVE PERFORMANCE + VIDEO MIX ] |
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MARCUS WEBB Noir, pastoral, gothic, and modern. Webb creates
textural sound environments influenced by instrumental 50's
and 60's guitar twang Americana plus global
psychedelic music, 80's tape culture, and 90's shoegazing. Marcus Webb studied music with guitar great Thomas
Newman and Ted Dunbar and attended Oberlin Conservatory. Returning to New
York he pursued a musical career working alternately as a recording studio assistant,
session musician and club DJ. In 2009 he took his World Jazz band The Marcus
Webb Trio (Subliminal Six Music) on a tour to Canada. Simultaneously pastoral
and modern, spaghetti western and noir, electronic and organic, Webb’s compositions live in the landscape of an all encompassing
American music skyline and conjures up images of everything from
b-movie classics and big sky country to burlesque style seedy back door
guitar punch. [ LIVE PERFORMANCE ] |
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FLAMERS is
a punk band based in Brentwood, M.D. Formed in 2013, the band played its first
show at a pizza parlor in May 2014, and quickly progressed to playing
bathhouses, record stores, and library basements. FLAMERS play loud,
energetic guitar based music that is simultaneously aggressive and delicate,
featuring interlocking melodic lines colliding over syncopated rhythms. Queer music is not just about a political or sexual
identity, and FLAMERS challenge normative structures of rock or punk music by
employing asymmetrical song structures, conflicting time signatures and
blurring musical styles. Cait
Sherwood wields her bass like a shotgun, playing finger puzzles on the bass
with focus and precision. Drummer Donovan Lessard
lays down punishing beats with a healthy dose of blood, sweat, and no tears.
Jason P Barnett provides jagged guitar riffs alongside acerbic lyrics. The
band plans to release their first recordings in late 2015. [ LIVE
PERFORMANCE ] |
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PRAXIS CAT is D.C.-based
Christine Paluch, who improvises deconstructed
atmospheres and loops interlaced with both beauty and anxiety using
synthesizers and/or guitar. Christine explores the relationship between
acquired synesthesia and urban spaces. With
influences as diverse as Daphne Oram and the
cosmos, new synergies are synthesized from both orderly and random
structures. What starts out as sound soon becomes finessed into a cacophony
of temptation, leaving only a sense of chaos and the inevitability of a new
understanding. As subtle replicas become reconfigured through emergent and
critical practice, the listener is left with a tribute to the outposts of our
condition. [ LIVE PERFORMANCE
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NOWHERIANS is the solo ambient, drone project
from London-based sound engineer/editor and bassist Crawford Blair. Blair:
“All Nowherians music is created as quickly as time will allow, and destroyed
immediately after mixing. Nowherians music makes me think of the patterns I
see when I close my eyes and push my eyeballs in slightly, not the actual
dots drifting past but the warmth and childlike familiarity of that feeling.”
Crawford contributes a video for ‘Radio Tower at ANA sq’ – a track from
Nowherians newest album, ways to access
shiodome city center. [ DIGITAL
CONTRIBUTOR ] |
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GURUN GURUN feat. CUUSHE Czech-based
experimental quartet Gurun Gurun are Tomas Knoflicek, Jara Tarnovski, Ondrej Jezek and Federsel. Their
musical work combines guitars, analogue synthesizers, turntables,
and acoustic instruments to span musical spaces ranging from hypno-minimalist atmospheres to warm tones of slow moving,
repetitive melodic stanzas. Gurun Gurun's eponymous debut album was released on Ian Hawgood's label Home Normal in December 2010. A remix
album Gorogoro Garagara Rimikkusu was released in August 2011, also on Home
Normal. Atarashii hi EP (Home Normal) was released 14 March 2015,
and features Japanese artist Cuushe (Mayuko
Hitotsuyanagi,). The video for the song is
created by Mexican artist, CRISTINA MALDONADO. "This
[video] definitely needed something abstract, I concluded I would cut a bunch
of dark shadowy scenes of suspense and tension where you actually don’t see
anything and put them together, and when I started to select films for that I
found the black eyes, and somehow it felt to me it was totally matching the
music of ‘Atarashii hi’, as they were mysterious,
hypnotic, and dark, yet there was a sweet persuasive invitation, unclear to
what exactly, but mesmerizing and evil." (Cristina Maldonado : Amelia
Magazine) “Post-pop reverie.
Minimalist and atmospheric glitch-pop located between the most narcotic and
panoramic post-rock, the naive electronics of Tujiko Noriko, Dorine Muraille’s collages and the pop deconstruction of early
Ensemble or So.” (PlayGround Mag) [ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS ] ► CRISTINA
MALDONADO interview |
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ROSHI feat. PARS RADIO is the music
project created around the beautiful individual interpretations of Iranian
folk and original songs of Roshi Nasehi. The project features the electronic
soundscapes/beats of Graham ‘Dids’ Dowell (Gagarin, Nico, Pere Ubu, etc. etc.). It's an
unusual sound world combining Roshi's intimate
singing style with Dids-Gagarin's experimental
electronic powers and at times haunting string layers to create a unique
genre-crossing, 'exotic, folktronica landscape.' Their
QUEERING SOUND contribution is two selections from their re-scoring of the Mary Pickford
silent feature, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (Marshall Neilan, 1918), first performed at the Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank
Centre, London, and commissioned by Birds Eye View for the 2012 Women Of The
World Festival. [ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS ] ► ROSHI feat. PARS RADIO online |
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RAF and O are Raf Mantelli
and Richard Smith (O). The two piece band from South East London deliver a
vortex of live electronics, acoustic instruments and fragile, magnetic,
strange lullabies married to a pop spirit. They have garnered
widespread acclaim in the UK / Europe since 2008 being described as ‘Indietronic delicacy’ (Mixmag),
‘Emotively intense’ (Subba Cultcha),
‘Bewitching’ (Raveline Germany), ‘Excellently
knitted experimental and cinematographic world’ (De-Bug) whilst ‘They display
outright pop mastery’ (Flux). Exciting shows
highlight magnetic performances of their unique detailed avant-pop fusing
electro/acoustic drums, self-made triggers, pads, vocals, synths and guitar
to startling effect. Raf and O have performed their songs, a concoction of
emotional journeys, time travel and surreal dreams, extensively in arts,
renowned venues, clubs, UK Festivals, supporting the legendary Faust, Alabama
3, Little Annie Bandez, and Larsen. Time Machine EP includes remixes by Merlin &
Charles Hayward, Kumo and Robert Logan. Video
filmed by Luigi Altilia, directed, edited, and
produced by Raf and O. [ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS ] |
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NG (formerly Northgate) started as Evor Ameisie’s one-man band with a
decidedly Industrial Music sound, though never thoroughly so, as it was
actually always evolving with the aid of all kinds of musicians, all the
while releasing albums and singles, and contributing to compilation albums.
These sounds can be found in the early demo tapes, though the sound soon
turned to a more ambient atmospheres in the first proper album, Liturgie pour la Fin de la Patrie,
released in 1995. The new century
brought an unexpected renewal, with the right partnerships and a fresh desire
to make a kind of music that is more comprehensive and fully-framed. As a result, Dance of the Avantgardes
is the most meaningful album of the band, which can now count on regular
members such as bassist Giovanni Libracub, Larsen’s
Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo (guitar) and Marco 'Il Bue'
Schiavo (drums), as well as Manguss
(guitars) and Arthur Geffroy (keyboards). NG is currently,
and very slowly, working on a new album. Out of some of the related sessions,
the single ‘Stuffedman’ already been released, a
tribute to radical and atmospheric electronics. NG was created as
and will always be a project based on sharing and making music for the love
of it among friends, and not aimed at commercial and widespread results. A
sort of message in a bottle for those who want to get closer to and
understand its sound. [ DIGITAL
CONTRIBUTOR ] |
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SONIC CIRCUITS
is a Washington D.C. area promoter for experimental music. Sonic Circuits
seeks to expose audiences to cutting edge contemporary music that defies
genres, and offer artists new platforms to present their music and
opportunities to network and collaborate with artists from around the world.
In addition to organizing an annual festival since 2001, Sonic Circuits
programs performances year round. Sonic Circuits is presented in part by
Improv Arts Inc., a non-profit 501(c)3 organization
dedicated to supporting the artistic and career development of artists and
creating new markets for contemporary music. |
