FIRE MUSEUM EVENTS
|
Fire Museum Presents: Blevin Blectum (Providence, RI) Wobbly (San Francisco, CA) Matt Davignon (Oakland, CA) Mincemeat or Tenspeed (Philadelphia) Wednesday, July 22nd 7PM The Rotunda 4014 Walnut St. (@40th), Philadelphia $5 (suggested donation) Blevin Blectum: Recently relocated from the industrial armpit of Oakland, California, to the humid lovecraftian greenery of Providence, Rhode Island, Blevin released her fourth solo album, GULAR FLUTTER, on an unsuspecting public via the AAGOO label (New York, 2008). The Wire magazine (UK) chose GULAR FLUTTER as one of its top 15 Electronic records of 2008. Blevin is perhaps best known as one half of the recently reformed and reunited groundbreaking digital duo Blectum From Blechdom, recipients of the 2001 Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Musics (for their album "The Messy Jesse Fiesta"). Blevin was a party to audio/video band SAGAN, alongside fellow e-musician Lesser, keyboardist Wobbly, and video artiste enfant terrible Ryan Junell. SAGAN released their debut CD/DVD, "Unseen Forces" on the Vague Terrain label (Matmos' vanity label), with a follow-up release, "The Resting Pleasures EP", on 333 Recordings (Oakland, CA). Blevin produces continued electronics with a more oblique slant on the basic BFB sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, clanking, creaking grooves and anti-grooves as a coal-powered spacecraft from some steampunk parallel universe potentiality, puffing and straining as it struggles to reach escape velocity, chopped, noise-reduced and timed/stretched to the breaking/boiling point, generally fucked-with samples of everything from hand-slapped rain-drenched leaves in courtship gardens and antique broken Beatnik banks to ProTooledFree classic utterly danceable disembodied-blissful-transvestite-stand-up-comic vocals. Wobbly: Wobbly is the moniker of Jon Leidecker a San Francisco based musician/composer of experimental electronic music. He has released works on Tigerbeat6, Illegal Art, Alku, Phthalo, and others. He has been producing music since 1987 and ongoing studio and live projects involve collaborations with People Like Us, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Blechdom, Tim Perkis, Matmos and The Weatherman of Negativland. He is also a member of the Chopping Channel and Sagan. Matt Davignon: Matt Davignon is an experimental/ambient musician living in Oakland, California. Originally born in Agawam, Massachusetts, Matt Davignon has been developing his own unique form of improvisation (for better or worse) since 1994. Since 2004, most of his work has involved processing the sounds of a drum machine in real-time with various devices. Characteristics of his music include a focus on textures, arrhythmic patterns and musical imperfections, with a focus on evoking biological systems. On some occasions he can still be seen playing turntable, cassette tape recorders, live samples of other musicians or 'the bucket of crap' - an assortment of non-musical objects and toy instruments. Mincemeat or Tenspeed: “Mincemeat or Tenspeed at first comes off as a smart ass take on Steve Reich, but builds some riffs, shatters some rhythms, shifts into new hooks and grooves through. This is loud minimalism.” – Z-GunFire Museum Presents: An evening of electronic music from Finland and Russia with Pekka Airaksinen (Finland) Alexei Borisov (Russia) & Anton Nikkilä (Finland) Kotra (Russia) Charles Cohen (Philadelphia) Monday, September 28th 7PM The Rotunda 4014 Walnut St. (@40th), Philadelphia $5 (suggested donation)
Pekka Airaksinen: For the best part of his career, spanning some forty years, Pekka Airaksinen's music can be said to have been ahead of its time. In the 80's he initiated a series of albums and compositions, each of which is dedicated to one of the thousand Buddhas in the Buddhist mythology. Probably the most prolific recording artist in Finland, at the moment he is "only" about a hundred Buddhas down. Airaksinen is still mainly known for the controversial underground/performance group The Sperm, formed in 1967. He was responsible for the musical side of things of the collective, whose recordings mostly resemble the noise and industrial music of some ten years later rather than any of their contemporaries or Airaksinen's influences - who were mostly the classics of 50's and 60's electronic music, such as Cage and Stockhausen. Contemporaries testify to the fact that especially in their early years The Sperm waged a serious guerrilla war against the status quo in Finland. For this they chose a pro-drug, pro-sexual revolution rhetoric and a rather dadaistic sense of humor as weapons. Much like the revolution-minded students all over Europe in the late 60's, members of The Sperm were influenced by American free jazz, underground rock, and anarchist elements of the counter-culture. After The Sperm disbanded in 1970, Airaksinen continued making experimental music, but primarily stuck to recordings. Together with a few ex-Sperm members he also participated in the exhibitions of the artist group Elonkorjaajat ("The Harvesters") with his psychedelic paintings. What runs through the whole of Airaksinen's musical output is his idiosyncratic mode of expression; the disintegrating, out-of-sync rhythms, the intense dynamics, and the feverish visions. Unlike in most electronic music, his approach is unpolished, spontaneous, and improvisatory. The cosmic "electro-jazz" Airaksinen developed in the 80's, fusing bebop, free jazz and the 808 drum machine sound, still astonishes. On his new album Airaksinen turns to his first musical loves – electronic music of the 1950’s and jazz – as sources for sampling. The result is an improvisatory collage in which his synthetic sound of recent years combines organically with layers of history. Alexei Borisov & Anton Nikkilä: Alexei Borisov (Russia) & Anton Nikkilä (Finland) have been performing since 1998 and have released four albums together. The Wire magazine described their latest album thusly: "They stalk a humid tropic zone where all sorts of electronic tropes circulate: electroacoustic music, glitch, noise, sampling and more... they are aggressively intellectual, forcing the listener to seriously think outside of musical hierarchies." Alexei Borisov was born in 1960 in Moscow, USSR. He started his music career in 1980 as a guitarist of the first Moscow new-wave band THE CENTER. In 1981 with guitarist Dmitry Matzenov he organized THE PROSPEKT, big-beat-ska-mod band. In 1985 with the keyboard-player Ivan Sokolovsky he formed the first Russian techno-industrial-post-rock band NOTCHNOI PROSPEKT. This project is still active, playing concerts and taking part in different festivals in Russia and abroad. Since the beginning of the 90-s Borisov takes part in electronic duo F.R.U.I.T.S. as well as ethno-electronic band VOLGA and GOSPLAN TRIO. "Experimental music is not dependent on institutional definitions; it constitutes a field, albeit fragmentary, of its own - a no man's land. The electro-acoustic music of Anton Nikkilä, for example, a musician with an avant-punk background, neatly defies all conventional definitions. His minimalist industrial dada is equally at home in clubs and in concert halls reserved for classical music." (Tanja Uimonen, Finnish Music Quarterly 3/2007) Kotra: Kotra is the main art project from Dmytro Fedorenko. He started making music in 1994 as bass player in the jazz-noise band Potercha. In 1996 he founded noise duo Zet and made a series of performances with independent visual artists and videomakers. In 1997-1998 he participated in several video-art, net-art and interactive workshops in the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv. Leaving Zet in 1998 he started his solo project Kotra. Since that time he has released 10 full length albums, and has worked with Kim Cascone, Franz Pomassl, Alexei Borisov and others. Charles Cohen: Based in the Philadelphia area, Charles Cohen has been amazing and challenging audiences for over 20 years. His music is entirely improvisational and produced solely on a vintage Buchla Music Easle synthesizer. An avid collaborator, Cohen is most well known to [most] listeners from his work with Jeff Cain in their group The Ghostwriters. With few recorded/commercially available works to his credit, Cohen prefers to concentrate on creating Electronic Music in the setting of the live performance space. His music ranges from completely abstract and challenging to pleasantly rhythmic and infectious. Each performance is original and new, to the audience and to Cohen as well. |