SOUNDLAB: Saturday, September 9, 9pm an evening of cutting edge electro-acoustic improv feat. JACK WRIGHT, SABASTIEN CIROTTEAU, MICHAEL JOHNSEN + special guests t.b.a. -Pay what you can ($6 suggested donation).
MICHAEL JOHNSEN was born in 1968 to two German immigrants in Pittsburgh, where he continues to live. Over the past several years he has wired together an melange of analog electronic devices for live performance, whose highly idiosyncratic behaviors are revealed through their complex interactions. As an antidote to all that wire, he is equally devoted to the saw, a simple folk instrument. He is especially fond of putting himself in difficult, confusing situations. Most of what he might have learned has come from the so-called natural world, like watching robins run. “My favorite sound is the one that’s over.” He has played widely in the eastern US in improvising, electronics, and “noise” contexts. Recent and important partners have included Michel Doneda, Margaret Cox, Michael Zerang, Joe McPhee, Jack Wright, Tom Djll, and Greg Pierce.
“Michael thinks near or beyond the edge of the routine organization of cognition – a true outsider. His work with original electronics, acoustic instruments, unusual film methods, language, and other media, reveals a brilliant mind that confronts phenomena with relatively little of the inherited world view but with a tremendous clarity and poetry. The entrance to Michael’s work is a withdrawal from “meaning” and a focus on aspects of perception and communication that are usually excluded – the rich universe of thoughts we habitually ignore but which are ultimately as palpable as our delusions of meaning.”
—John Berndt, Hi Zero Festival
Over the past twenty-five years JACK WRIGHT has been a bold saxophonist, as well as an influential musical personality. Either on tour or organizing the next one, he has played in virtually every venue available to experimental improvised music in the US, and many in Europe as well. In 1982 he began Spring Garden Music as a vehicle for organizing an improvisational music community, which continues to grow through regular No Net weekend sessions. As a musical explorer as well, his music passes through radical shifts of style and approach from one year to the next, yet always somehow identifiable as his own. These days he is playing mostly alto and soprano saxophones, in every possible direction, sometimes even recognizable as such.
The Washington Post says, “In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king”. And a German publication, Bad Alchemy, had this to say of his solo: “Wright does not make music, he embodies it, he transforms it with a naivete of another order. It grows into a sound river, he is part of the diaphragm through which the heterogeneous whispers.”
SEBASTIEN CIROTTEAU, French trumpet player and sound artist. Born in 1977, Paris, France. Lives in Toulouse. Began studying the trumpet at the age of ten, first at the National Music School of Le Mans, then at the National Conservatory of Rennes, where he diplomed a second cycle. He then studied sound recording techniques and semiology in Toulouse. This brought him a new sensitive approach on how listening the surrounding sonic world and modified his own perception of the trumpet techniques, influenced both by electroacoustic music and soundscapes. He now focuses his practice on improvisation and sound recording. Discography and sound extracts on the web page http://s.cirotteau.info/
Soundlab (dedicated to the music, media & performance of Big Orbit Gallery) * 110 Pearl St, corner Pearl/Swan (entrance behind building) * 716.440-5907 * http://www.bigorbitgallery.org