February 29, 7:00 PM CDT
ESS YouTube
Attorneys General is project of Matthew Byars (Baltimore, MD) in which guest players send him sounds which he then attempts to manipulate into a cohesive—or uncohesive—whole. Guest players for this performance are Zach Rowden (Tongue Depressor/New Haven, CT) and Lucy Liyou (Los Angeles, CA), who will send their sounds to Byars remotely, and consecutively.
About Attorneys General
Attorneys General (Baltimore, MD) is a project led by Matthew Byars of NPR-distributed podcast Essential Tremors. A formative experience for Byars as a listener was hearing the work of sound engineer Martin Swope of Mission of Burma on their seminal 1985 live record, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in which Swope, using a reel-to-reel tape machine, captured, looped, manipulated, and destroyed elements of the band’s sound in spontaneous and unexpected ways. Byars has adapted this approach to having one-four people (different players every time, mostly) generate utterly improvised sound through a mixing board he controls, which allows him to capture, loop, manipulate, and destroy the sounds they create. A partial list of previous players includes David Grubbs, Haley Fohr, Ian Williams, Whitney Johnson, Alan Licht, Zoh Amba, Luke Stewart, Bill Nace, and Wendy Eisenberg.
About Zach Rowden
An experimentalist musician and sound artist, Zach Rowden (New Haven, CT) is known for his imaginative, and even groundbreaking, work with the acoustic and performative possibilities of the upright bass. Rowden’s collaborated with Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble (member/soloist), The Ghost (with Michael Foster, Derek Baron) Tongue Depressor (with Henry Birdsey), and Charmaine Lee, among others. He plays improvisations and noise, the noise/sounds often being due to his prepared double bass. He also experiments with studio electronics and modulating the sound of the double bass.
About Lucy Liyou
Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Liyou's debut project, A Hope I Had, was a sonic examination of hereditary depression in Asian families. Her latest record Dog Dreams (개꿈) is a rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but are rather interlocked in an affective dialectic.
