The Wire 40 x ESS: Streaming Festival
Thursday, July 28 & Friday, July 29
2:00-5:00pm Chicago
8:00-11:00pm London
Streaming & Archived on ESS’s YouTube
On the occasion of their 40th Anniversary, The Wire Magazine invites Experimental Sound Studio to curate an international streaming festival.
Thursday Line-up
Listed in order of appearance
Hamid Drake
By many Hamid Drake is considered to be a brilliant, sensitive, endlessly rhythmic, intelligent, drummer percussionist,
Hamid's first experience's with music were in the Church. He played bongo's in the St.Pauls's AME Church Youth Choir. Eventually he began playing with the great tenor Saxophonist Fred Anderson. Hamid worked with Fred in the Fred Anderson Creative Music ensemble which included young greats such as George Lewis and Douglass Ewart. Hamid intensely worked with Fred Anderson from 1974 until Fred's passing in 2010.
Hamid's flowing rhythmic expressions and interest in the roots of the music drew other like minded musicians together into a performance and educational collective named the Mandingo Griot Society, which combined traditional African music (particularly from the Mandingo speaking areas of West Africa) and narrative with distinctly American influences. The first recording of The Mandingo Griot society featured the world renowned trumpeter Don Cherry who had a profound impact on Hamid's life not just musically but spiritually as well. Another very important musical influence in Hamid's formative years was his first Tabla teacher (instructor in Indian music) Paul Raman (Raman Papaiah). Hamid Drake studied drums extensively, including East. Caribbean styles of drumming also began to catch Hamid's eye. His interest in Caribbean percussion led to a deep involvement with reggae, which continues tothis day.
Now touring and recording all over the world, and in constant demand everywhere, Hamid Drake has played and /or recorded with Fred Anderson, Peter Brötzmann, Don Cherry, Marilyn Crispell, Pierre Dorge, Johnny Dyani, Hassan Hakmoun, Herbie Hancock, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, bassist William Parker (in a large number of lineups), and has performed a solstice celebration with fellow Chicago percussionist Michael Zerang semiannually since 1991. For 30 years now Michael and Hamid have been presenting Winter Solstice concerts through Link's Hall and now in collaboration with Link's Hall and Constellation Music Venue.
Hamid won the Jazz Journalist Award in 2009 and the Downbeat Critics Poll in 2006, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2019 as best percussionist. In 2017 he was awarded the title of Chevalier Des Arts et des lettres. The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) is an order of France established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture. Its purpose is the recognition of significant contributions to the arts, literature, or the propagation of these fields.
Though a large portion of Hamid's has been the role of a sideman, he is now also devoting his energies and creativity as band leader and co-leader focusing on his own groups and projects such as Bindu, Indigenous Mind and The honoring of Alice Coltrane Project (Premiere in 2022).
Photo by Žiga Koritnik
Ikue Mori
Ikue arrived to New York in 1977 and joined in the original NoWave band DNA started playing drums. In mid 80’s started playing drum machines in the unlikely context of improvised music forged own highly sensitive signature style and involved in downtown improving community since. she has collaborated with numerous musicians and artists throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, while continuing to produce and publish her own music. Ikue won the Distinctive Award for Prix Ars Electronics Digital Music category in 1999 and shortly after started using laptop computer to expand her vocabulary not only playing sounds but create and control the visual work as well. Received grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2006, Instant Award for improvising music in 2019.
JJA 2022 Winners for Jazz Performance and Recordings
Recent collaboration include John Zorn, Fred Frith, ArchperagoX Trio with Brian Marsella and Sae Hashimoto, Sylvie Courvoisier, Satoko Fujii and Joan Jonas.
Tashi Dorji
Tashi Dorji is a Bhutanese guitarist improviser based in Asheville NC.Tashi has released music both as a soloist and as a collaborator, notably with Mette Rasmussen, Aaron Turner (Sumac, Mamiffer), Che Chen (75 Dollar Bill), Aki Onda, Michael Zerang, John Deiterich (Deerhoof), C Spencer Yeh, Patrick Shiroishi, KUZU ( w/ Dave Rempis & Tyler Damon), MANAS (w/ Thom Nguyen), Patrick Shiroishi, Dylan Fujioka on labels like Moone Records, Gilgonko Records, Bathetic Records, Trost,Feeding Tubes, UNROCK, VDSQ, MIE, Aerophonic Records, Family Vineyard, Astral Spirits. Tashi is currently on Drag City records.
Lykanthea
Lykanthea is the project of multidisciplinary artist Lakshmi Ramgopal. Based in New York City and Chicago, Ramgopal uses pop idioms to experiment with Indian sound and movement traditions. Her ensemble performances use improvisatory techniques to explore the natural world and personal family narratives, and have brought her to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and less traditional venues, like the middle of a freshwater stream at dawn. Her recent work includes A Half-Light Chorus, a sound installation in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory, and Hive, a site-specific sound and sculpture installation created with visual artist Nancy Davidson and commissioned by Krannert Art Museum. Ramgopal's work has received praise from from Noisey, Chicago Reader, Public Radio International’s The World, and more. Her ensemble includes dancer and vocalist Asha Rowland, violinist Johanna Brock, and cellist Erica Miller.
Paige Naylor
Paige Naylor is a multimedia artist based in Chicago, IL. Her work aims to bend time, transform space, and create new social and emotional realities through voice and electronics.
Photo by Ricardo E Adame
Nate Wooley
Nate Wooley (b.1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon and began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. He made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic at the opening series of their 2019 season. Considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language.
Wooley moved to New York in 2001 and has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Ken Vandermark, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada. He has premiered works for trumpet by Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, Ash Fure, Wadada Leo Smith, Sarah Hennies and Eva-Maria Houben.
In recent years, he has built a reputation as a composer of music epic in scope and social in design. His series of solo works based on the International Phonetic Alphabet, The Complete Syllables Music, was compared to the literary work of Georges Perec and hailed as “revolutionary solo repertoire” by All About Jazz. At the other end of the spectrum, his decade-long Seven Storey Mountain cycle has encompassed almost 50 different performers, the most recent version consisting of a 32-person ensemble. This iteration, Seven Storey Mountain VI (SSMVI), “expresses communality, with all of its potential for the profound and the spiritual,” according to Pitchfork. SSMVI appeared on many year-end lists, including as record of the year in El Intruso’s International Critics List and critic Peter Margasak’s personal list.
Another branch of Wooley’s compositional work is his commitment to the concept of Mutual Aid Music (MAM), beginning with the quartet work Battle Pieces, commissioned by Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation in 2014, and including a short-lived, but powerful compositional set entitled knknighgh in homage to poet Aram Saroyan. MAM has since matured into a full chamber ensemble work for double quartet
In 2017, Wooley began his commissioning project and festival, For/With. For three years, he commissioned and presented new works for trumpet by composer such as Michael Pisaro, Christian Wolff, Annea Lockwood, Wadada Leo Smith, Sarah Hennies, Eva-Maria Houben, and Ryoko Akama. A champion of experimental music for the trumpet that prioritizes humanity over virtuosity and improvisation/collaboration over reproduction/interpretation, the festival added vital new repertoire to the trumpet canon. He has been a performer of French-composer Eliane Radigue's OCCAM Ocean since premiering her OCCAM X for trumpet in 2014.
Wooley is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American, both of which are dedicated to broadening the definition of American music through their online presence and the physical distribution of music through Sound American Records. Sound American is approaching its 30th issue and has made the leap from online to print media while maintaining its commitment to plain-spoken dissemination of information about experimental music by those who make it in a form that is available to all.
He also runs Pleasure of the Text Records (POTTR), aimed at releasing music by composers of experimental music at the beginnings of their careers in rough and ready mediums. POTTR recently launched its boutique label, Tisser Tissu Editions, which publishes music and words in beautifully designed chapbook/download formats.
Wooley received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award in 2016. He was the recipient of the Instant Award for Improvised Music and the Spencer Glendon First Principles Award in 2020.
Photo by Peter Gannushkin
Luis Fernando Amaya & Carolina Vélez Muñiz
Carolina Vélez Muñiz (1997) is an artist from Mexico City. Her research is focused on the ways tradition is reinvented in popular and expansive arts through textiles, food, dance, and music. She is currently developing explorations surrounding material, landscape, and body in relation to ancestral and current technologies.
https://carolinavelezmuniz.com/
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Born in Aguascalientes, México, Luis Fernando Amaya is a composer and percussionist currently based in Barcelona. Topics such as collective memory and the relationship between humans and non-humans (such as plants, animals, or environments) are commonly present in his work. He studied composition and music theory at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Musicales (CIEM) and holds a Ph.D. in composition and music technology from Northwestern University.
As a performer, Amaya is a member of the collective composition and free improvisation trio Fat Pigeon.
His scores are published by BabelScores.
TVLRuido presents Javier Areal Vélez, Violeta García & Genosidra
RUIDO is an experimental music series active in Buenos Aires since 2017. RUIDO specializes in new, atypical, and risky performances by Argentine musicians and visitors from all over the world. Its programming focuses on the convergence and clash between multiple currents of contemporary music, covering diverse genres such as free improvisation, free jazz, electronics, noise, experimental song and other unclassifiable worlds; dissimilar styles that share an ideal of breaking with the established, in which free artistic search is the main objective and sound experimentation is the ultimate goal. TVL REC is a South American digital label dedicated to the production of experimental and improvised music. It was founded in 2017 by Violeta García (Argentina), Carlos Quebrada Vasquez (Colombia) and Camilo Ángeles (Peru). The label has produced more than 50 releases by the most representative artists of the South American underground music scene.
Since the pandemic of 2020, RUIDO and TVL REC produce the STREAMING FEST, an international online festival in which more than a hundred artists from all over the world played from their homes.
Javier Areal Vélez (Buenos Aires, 1985) is a composer, improviser and curator, who performs mostly on electric guitar, with or without objects stuffed between its strings. His musical approach relies heavily on a primal technique that emphasizes timbre and rhythm, avoiding traditional forms in favor of intensity and dynamic contrast. The physicality of his interactions with the guitar create estranged sonic entities that evolve haphazardly outside of specific genres. In the later years, his solo work has included also the development of AI entities that listen and improvise with Javier via the use of samples, synthesis and mechanical robots. Javier has performed concerts in Argentina, America, Europe and Asia, and has released recordings in a dozen independent labels worldwide as a soloist, band member, and through collaborations with artists such as Chris Pitsiokos, Audrey Chen, Brian Chase, Shayna Dunkelman, Nicola Hein, Ryoko Ono, Jorge Espinal and Violeta García. Javier is the founder and director of RUIDO experimental music festival since its inception in 2017. Since 2021, he is also the coordinator of the Sound Arts Center (CASo) of the Ministry of Culture of Argentina.
Violeta García (31) is a cellist, composer, improviser and curator from Buenos Aires, Argentina based in Bern, Switzerland. She has a degree in Music Performance Arts specialising in classical cello at Universidad Nacional of Arts (U.N.A), and currently is doing an MA in Music Composition Creative Practice at Bern University of Applied Sciences. As a performer in many art forms, including free improvisation, contemporary and trans-media experimental repertoire in violoncello and electronic music. In 2015 she founded a digital label and music series called TVL-REC devoted to publishing new music, experimental groups and collectives from Latin America and other countries, and making concert cycles and festivals of noise and extreme music (Latin America/Europe). She has been supported by recognised foundations like ProHelvetia, Ibermusicas, Fundación Williams, amongst others, to make international residencies at Konvent-Zero (ES), Art Omi (US), Art Basel at Faena Art Center (AR), etc. In recent years she has been touring around the world with different labels such as KitRecords (UK), BuhRecords (PE), and Relative Pitch (US), and has taken part in more than 50 albums published in different formats (tapes, vinyl, cd, fanzines, books).
Carlos Eduardo Quebrada Vasquez, is a Colombian music producer, bass player, vocalist, composer, electronic musician and curator settled in Buenos Aires in 2009. As a composer and performer I have a wide range of formats for my music, sometimes I compose for solo instruments, electronics, unusual chamber ensembles and noise rock/jazz ensembles, or perform solo with processed voice and bass or electronics and also as bass player in different harcore punk projects. And under the name of Genosidra I develop an experimental electronic aesthetic mixed with latinx dance music and transdisciplinary performance.
The Wire 40 x ESS Streaming Fest is supported by ESS's generous individual donors, including significant support from Zach Smith.