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.
Friday Line-up
Listed in order of appearance
Pamela Z
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working primarily with voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Julia Bullock with SF Symphony, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can (NY), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal). She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, United States Artists, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Lauren Tosswill
Lauren Tosswill is an experimental performance artist working with sound, site, and movement to explore improvisation and vulnerability. She uses language and voice as a means to complicate and undermine comprehension, construct absurdity, and engage in live, relational exchange with collaborators and the audience.
Buh Records presents
Ale Hop
IMA (Amma Ateria + Nava Dunkelman)
Noijzu (Shuyue Zhao + Luis Sanz)
Manongo Mujica & Terje Evensen
Gurun Gurun
Mauricio Moquillaza
Noijzu (Shuyue Zhao + Luis Sanz)
Bass Clarinet, Computer Music, Electronics, Noise, No Input Physical musicality is evoked by a habitat, which foreshadows diverse sound spaces. A musical examination focuses on recognition of domesticated and undomesticated sounds, ideologies, networking senses and physical entities. Each sound identifies itself, through varied behaviours.
Noijzu is a Swiss experimental unit formed by Shuyue Zhao and Luis Sanz. The duo focuses on acoustic sounds and computer-generated sonic entities. Noijzu blends bass clarinet with digital signals, the result consists of extreme acoustic dynamics, complex and hyperreal textures, ranging from minimal to extreme and confrontational sound expressions. Noijzu's sound has been described as "a symphony of fragmented noise".
Gurun Gurun
The Czech group Gurun Gurun is made up of Tarnovski, Tomás Knoflíček, Federsel, and Ondřej Jezek who took their name from the fictional planet in the old school Slovak children's TV show She Came Out of the Blue Sky. Since the beginning, it has been clear that apprehending their working and reflecting it would be a tough nut to crack. Is this even a band? Do they play compositions or is it all improvised? On the stage, you see four men hunched over tables overflowing with strange objects, hard-to-identify electronic devices, musical and non-musical instruments, and a chaotic tangle of cables, producing slow, constantly developing melodies and a hypnotic atmosphere that works a little like falling through a strange wormhole full of sounds, noises, and soft female vocals, mercilessly sucking you in, forcing you to collapse into yourself and enter a parallel universe.
IMA (Amma Ateria + Nava Dunkelman)
IMA is the electro-percussion project of electronic sound artist Amma Ateria (HK) and prcussionist Nava Dunkelman (JP), based in California and New York. Through restraint and release, IMA depicts expressionistic noise music of Japanese poetry with the meticulous industrial and serene. Striving for a balance between precision of instrumentation, filmic transitions between silence and densities are driven to brinks of breakage, situated by beautification in between. IMA marches forth with starkness and surrender into the aftermath of destruction, and attempt for transformative regeneration of beauty through catalysts of pleasure. Their debut release 炎の中で死にゆく花 - The Flowers Die in Burning Fire (2019), tells an anecdote of the inevitable notion of time, change, decay, the vanished, and rebirth. The duo were presented in residency at The Stone, NYC (2016), San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, SF (2016), San Francisco Art Institute (2018), CCRMA, Stanford University (2018), Other Minds:Latitudes (2019). Performed and collaborated with Ikue Mori, Pauchi Sasaki, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Matmos, Zeena Parkins, Erik Friedlander, Brian Chase, and many others. Amma Ateria is a sound artist / electroacoustic composer, her practice examines the behaviour and physicality of sound in the human experience. Nava Dunkelman is a percussionist and improviser born in Tokyo, her sonic palette spans the globe from classical to contemporary to the avant-garde.
Manongo Mujica / Terje Evensen
Manongo Mujica is a Peruvian Percussionist, composer and visual artist. He was a member of the psychedelic rock band Los Mad’s (1970), founding member of Perujazz (1984), the first band connecting Peruvian rhythms to jazz. Pioneer of free improvisation in Peru in the mid ‘70s. Manongo Mujica has given concerts in diverse stages round the globe, he has composed diverse soundtracks for films and presented shows which bring together music, visuals and dance. Manongo Mujica has collaborated with artists such as Terje Evensen, Acid Mothers Temple, Richard Pinhas, João Pais Filipe, Alan Courtis, Martin Joseph, etc.
Terje Evensen is a Norwey drummer, electronic musician, composer and producer. Specialist in improvised modern jazz music combined with electro elements. He is adept in working with acoustic samples/recordings and mixing them together on an electro palette. He is always experimenting within a wonderland where different genres cross over – where jazz meets ambient, and electronica – creating spacious and dramatic soundscapes of profound intensity.
https://studioabstractgoat.com/
Mauricio Moquillaza
Mauricio Moquillaza is a Peruvian composer and improviser. He has performed in various branches of experimental music, sound art and improvisation, mainly with electric bass, double bass and objects. He is currently exploring composition and improvisation with semi-modular synthesizers. At the beginning of 2019 he founded the collective “Dehumanización”, where he works as a cultural manager, performing experimental music concerts. In 2020 he founded 1049 together with Marcelo Mellado and Diego Faucheux.
https://mauriciomoquillaza.bandcamp.com/
ALE HOP
Ale Hop is a Peruvian-born artist, researcher, and experimental musician based in Berlin. She began her career in the 2000s in Lima’s experimental and underground scene. In 2012, she started her solo project after performing alone for the first time in Boiler Room, during her residence at the Red Bull Music Academy New York. Her live performances merge the physical qualities of music with raw emotional states and unorthodox instrument procedures. She builds layers of sounds by blending a complex repertoire of guitar techniques processed by synthesis devices, to create a music of deep physical intensity. Ale Hop has performed and exhibited work internationally at institutions and festivals, such as CTM Festival (2022), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2021), New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (2021), Australia Independent Film Festival (2021), Stockholm City Film Festival (2021), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020), Somerset House Studios (2019).
C. Spencer Yeh
C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for interdisciplinary activities as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well as for his music project Burning Star Core. This past year Yeh has broadcasted live for The Kitchen NYC, ESS Chicago IL with both The Renaissance Society and Vox Effusis (organized by Lou Mallozzi), Casa del Lago UNAM MX (with Jacob Wick and Bonnie Jones), and both solo and in Luke Stewart/Leila Bordreuil’s Feedback Ensemble for Roulette NYC. Additionally, Yeh premiered new video works with ISSUE Project Room NYC, and the Bemis Center Omaha NE, and exhibited with Loong Mah NYC, Carriage Trade NYC, 5th Floor/Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, and Bánh Mì Verlag. In 2019, Yeh received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award.
Aaron Dilloway
Aaron Dilloway is one of the most creative, prolific, and revered figures in the Midwest American experimental/noise scene. His performances and recordings incorporate rhythmic loops from eight-track tapes, vocal improvisations, found sounds, and field recordings. He uses contact microphones in order to generate harsh, feedback-laced noises, sometimes placing microphones inside his mouth in order to create bizarre, ogre-like distorted voices. While he channels some dark, violent energies into his sonic constructions, there's also a crucial element of playful, absurdist humor to his work, making his performances confusing yet highly enjoyable spectacles of Dadaist performance art. While Dilloway is perhaps best known for his involvement with Michigan noise group Wolf Eyes, he's had an extensive solo career, issuing hundreds of recordings (usually limited cassettes) under his own name as well as Spine Scavenger.
Sarah Davachi
Sarah Davachi is a composer and performer whose work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. Her compositions span both solo and chamber ensemble formats, incorporating a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation. Similarly informed by minimalist and long-form tenets, early music concepts of intervallic and modal harmony, as well as experimental production practices of the studio environment, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and the distant.
Website: www.sarahdavachi.com
Photo: credit to David Reiman
The Wire 40 x ESS Streaming Fest is supported by ESS's generous individual donors, including significant support from Zach Smith.