ASAC Presents The Synapse Brothers, Matts Weston and Davignon

Albany Sonic Arts presents an evening of percussive-driven electronic music featuring The Synapse Brothers (Bob Gluck, John Myers), Matt Weston and Matt Davignon.

Saturday July 25 @ 8pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
$5 suggested donation

If you’d like to study up for this show, check out Davignon’s Some Notes on Drum Machining.

Artist Bios:

The Synapse Brothers fuse together elements of electroacoustic music with improvised jazz and funk. Bob Gluck on the keyboard and electronics and John Myers playing guitars and MIDI-guitar will play live. They will be virtually accompanied by sound designer Pat Gleeson’s lustrous beats and sounds. Bob is well known for his presence on the local jazz scene. His repertoire spans jazz performance both acoustic and with electronics and free improvisation, avant-garde concert music and music for electronic expansions of acoustical instruments, including the ram¹s horn, Disklavier (computer-assisted piano) and Turkish baglama saz. Bob Gluck is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the University at Albany Electronic Music Studio.

Matt Weston has recently relocated to Albany, and we couldn’t be luckier to have such an incredible musician in our midst. Matt plays percussion and electronics, and has performed throughout the US and in Europe. He has appeared on CNN, VH1, and CBS TV. He has studied and/or collaborated with Arthur Brooks, Bill Dixon, Kevin Drumm, Milford Graves, William Parker, Jack Wright and others. He has recorded for the Tautology, Sachimay, Breaking World Records, Imvated, Crank Satori, BoxMedia, and Drag City labels. He currently records for the new 7272music label. In addition to his solo work, Weston is a member of Barn Owl (with guitarist Chris Cooper and bassist Andy Crespo); and is guitarist with Thrillpillow (with guitarist/vocalist Plum Crane, bassist/vocalist Maggie Nowinski, and drummer James Z).

Matt Davignon is an experimental musician living in Oakland, California. Since 1993, he has developed his own unique style of music, which focuses largely on textures, arrhythmic patterns and musical imperfections. Since 2004, he has been working almost exclusively with a drum machine. Instead of using it as a rhythm device, he plays the pads manually while processing the sounds through an array of effects devices and samplers, improvising music made of organic-sounding textures, hums, gurgles and crackles. Matt is also a member of the Crank Ensemble, and is the founder of the Pmocatat Ensemble. He’s active in organizing experimental & unusual music performances in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to being responsible for such events as The San Francisco Found Objects Festival, and regular DroneShift concerts, he’s one of the curators for the Luggage Store Gallery Experimental Music Series.

ASAC Presents The Human Quena Orchestra, Grab Ass Cowboys and More

Much more…so much more. Albany Sonic Arts pulls out the noise stops for tomorrow’s show.

Firday July 17 @ 8pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
$5 suggested donation

The Human Quena Orchestra – Punishing duo from PA/CA on Crucial Blast Records.
“like having your face ground into a brick wall” -Signal to Noise Magazine

Grab Ass Cowboys – Albany freeformnoiserock cheapskates

Requiem – 1/2 of Human Quena Orchestra…sweet drone shindig

Derealize – (also known as Worlds of Sh*t) – a one man harsh noise mugging

ASAC Presents Sublime Frequencies

The Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Sublime Frequencies, film screenings and rare 78rpm records from around the globe from Ian Nagoski and Robert Millis.

Saturday June 20 @ 8pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
$5 suggested donation

Ian Nagoski (Black Mirror/Canary Records/Mississippi Records)

Robert Millis (Climax Golden Twins/Victrola Favorites/Sublime Frequencies)

Rare and unseen Sublime Frequencies (www.sublimefrequencies.com) films will be screened, with the director in attendance. This very special night will appeal to music lovers, film buffs, world scholars, those interested in South Asia, history fiends, and anyone with an eye for the beauty of uncovered cultural treasures from around the globe.

I wrote about Ian’s last visit to the Capital Region here and look forward to hearing him again. Sublime Frequencies’s releases have provided consistent inspiration and enjoyment, particularly Radio Sumatra.

Program:

India at 78rpm
Folk and classical music in India through the lens of the largest private collection of 78rpm records and dusty ephemera on the sub-continent.

My Friend Rain
Decay and rebirth and death through the endless Asian monsoon cycle. A collage of musical segments and tropical ambiance from Robert Millis and Alan Bishop.

Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan
A traditional Buddhist ghost festival from Thailand’s Isan province that features beautiful handmade masks, outrageous wooden phalluses, ceremony, ritual, dancing, and endless music.

ASAC Presents Tape Chants

The Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Gregg Kowalsky and Ben Bracken from Oakland, California. Gregg will be presenting his Tape Chants project which involves sounds from cassette players distributed throughout the performance space. Tape Chants has just been released on Kranky Records.

Also performing are Fossils From the Sun (Ray Hare solo project) and Rambutan (Eric Hardiman solo project).

Friday, June 19 @ 8pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St. Albany

Tax Refund

Here’s your tax refund from The Field Guide: two new recordings from my recent Albany Sonic Arts Collective performance at the Upstate Artists Guild. See photos from the show here.

The first piece features an in-progress version of my Fender Telecaster morphing into an electric 6-string banjo. I replaced the lowest string on the Tele with another high string to serve as a drone. Soon to come are railroad spikes so I can change the pitch of the drone string more easily and my usual allotment of sensors added to the instrument. This piece is played in a traditional thumb lead two-finger style using a modified mountain-minor tuning (dG’DGcd) run through a loopy MSP patch.

[audio:spring_dissent_bubbling.mp3]

Spring Dissent (Bubbling)

The second piece is a modified version of a work for banjo and electronics with the banjo replaced by my Base On, a circuit-bent walkie-talkie. Not much of the circuit-bent sound is heard, though, since it drives an elaborate resynthesis process in MSP that simultaneously retunes the pitches to just-intonation and smears the transitions with glissandi. A touch of feedback in the process opens up slightly unstable areas where the algorithm fights with itself to settle on a consistent pitch.

[audio:wichita_mind_control_estate_capital.mp3]

Wichita Mind Control – Estate Capital

ASAC Presents Corridors, Delicate Sen, Benny Nelson, Jay Sullivan

asac april 25 flyer
Albany Sonic Arts Presents Corridors, Delicate Sen, Benny Nelson and Jay Sullivan.

Saturday April 25th at 8pm
at the Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany, NY

Corridors [Brooklyn]
sound + video by byron westbrook

Delicate Sen
Anne Guthrie / Billy Gomberg / Richard Kammerman [Troy and Brooklyn]
French Horn and electronics

delicate sen

Benny Nelson [Boston]
Jay Sullivan [Boston]
Analog synth, turntable and harmonium

ASAC Presents Trauma, Herons, Sleepy Demons, Twilight of the Century

Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Trauma, Herons, Sleepy Demons, Twilight of the Century.

Wednesday, January 28
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St. Albany
Doors at 7:30 pm: show at 8:00
$5 suggested donation at the door

More on the musicians from the press release after the break. Continue reading

ASAC given Best of 2008 nod by Times Union

The Albany Sonic Arts Collective is included in the Albany Times Union “’08 Year in Arts” article.

Sonic bright spot

Last fall, a group of experimental musicians formed the Albany Sonic Arts Collective as an outlet for musicians not into strict recitations of the verse-chorus-verse structure. Soon, there were musicians coming from all corners of the Capital Region to contribute to the sonic palette. And twice this year, indie rock godfather Thurston Moore, leader of Sonic Youth, came to unleash his own twang-wangery.”

Read the full article here.