Saariselka is a duo from Oakland, CA, United States, "inspired by the meeting of earth and light, where slowly moving land masses merge with enveloping light fields."
This sonic collaboration between composers Marielle Jakobsons (Fender Rhodes, organ, synthesizers) and Chuck Johnson (pedal steel guitar and treatments) is as expressive as it is enigmatic. On their début album, 'The Ground Our Sky' (2019), a kind of new ambient Americana is unearthed and explored.
Born in the East German city of Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1968, Olaf Bender's creative work began with the casual finding of 16mm film equipment during school time. From that moment on, he started experimenting with the medium "film" as well as the raw material "film".
Technical limitations forced special methods: he scratched and painted directly on the footage to create geometrical figures; the results were archaic motion patterns. As a consequence of his experiments, he came into contact with the East German underground avant-garde band ›AG Geige‹, initiated by Frank Bretschneider and Jan Kummer, of which he became a permanent member in 1988. By working with this group, he also got into musical aspects. The home computer made it possible for autodidacts like him to work multimedially without formal musical training.
After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Bender worked in music distribution. The experiences he gained there led him to the idea of publishing his own music by himself. Together with Frank Bretschneider, he founded the record label ›rastermusic‹ in 1996 which later merged with Carsten Nicolai's sublabel ›noton‹ to form ›raster-noton‹ in 1999. Bender not only managed the label, but is also responsible for it's distinctive cover design.
Since the founding of rastermusic, Bender has been part of the groups Produkt and Signal and produced music solo under the moniker Byetone, but it was not until 2008 that he released his first full length record on raster-noton. In 1999, he contributed an EP to the Prix Ars Electronica award-winning »20' to 2000« series and later in 2003 recorded the album »Feld« for Bine Music as the label's debut release. His EP »Plastic Star«, released in 2008, defined his signature sound, presenting a minimalist rhythm-based music with a rock attitude that can do without too much processing and decoration; an archaic, rebellious music full of energy. May 2008 finally saw the release of the highly acclaimed »Death of a Typographer«, whose follow-up »Symeta«, released in 2011, even entered several "record of the year" lists.
In the wake of his own records, Byetone has also produced remixes for artists like Modeselektor and VCMG (Vince Clark and Martin L. Gore), as well as sound works for fashion designers like Rick Owens, Nina Ricci or NikeLab. He is also part of the duo Diamond Version (together with Carsten Nicolai) that released a series of EPs and a full-length record on Mute Records in 2014.
In May 2017, raster-noton dissolved, with Bender running the newly formed ›raster‹ label, handling the r-n back catalog, and realizing installations like Raster. Labor, premiered during CTM Festival in January 2019, or Raster. Schwellen, premiered at TodaysArt Festival in September 2019.
Using a filtered and treated electric guitar as the starting point for his lush soundscapes, Fennesz has created a personal and groundbreaking discourse throughout his career. Perhaps sculpting the last truly unique vision for the guitar, his luminant compositions are anything but sterile experiments. Fennesz’s world of sound unfolds and resembles sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. In addition to his prolific output as a solo artist, and his ongoing investigation of the limits of noise, automatic composition, field music or contemporary classical, Fennesz is also a frequent collaborator with other luminaries of the scene. These include artists such as Alva Noto, Oren Ambarchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keith Rowe, Peter Rehberg, David Sylvian, and Jim O’Rourke.
Spider Compass is vulture feasting experimental noise performance art music from San Francisco. Andrew Goldfarb plays keyboards and drum beats while his vulture friend grinds, crashes, and destroys the melodies with harsh electronic effects. It's a beautiful combination of elements, featuring studio and live recordings.
San Francisco Bay Area, the Mediterranean of the West, has nurtured its own world-changing cultural renaissance always placing a premium on imagination, ideas, innovation, and risk-taking, with practicality, business development, and publicity/marketing/branding left to the likes of New York and London. So it should come as no surprise that the birthplace of the countercultural sixties, San Francisco, has for years boasted the world’s first (yet little-known) LSD museum dedicated to archiving any and all material evidence of the effects of this vision-inducing chemical on cultural production. The visionary behind this “Institute of Illegal Images” is one Mark McCloud, a photographer, sculptor, painter, art teacher, amateur comedian, and the preeminent collector of LSD blotter paper art (he owns an estimated 33,000 sheets of paper bearing miniature artworks). His archive also includes a collection of LSD license plates (!), rare periodicals, and books having to do with psychedelia, surgical instruments, apothecary bottles, paintings, posters, antiques—the list goes on and on. He has had several art shows of his LSD blotter art, most recently at Ever Gold Gallery in San Francisco. Sadly, Mr. McCloud has twice (1993, 2001) had to prove to a judge and jury that he collects and makes art, not LSD.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7b7kv4/mark-mccloud-collects-acid-as-artwork
https://thebolditalic.com/dropping-into-acid-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-96de89d48208
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/inside-the-lsd-museum-that-the-dea-somehow-hasnt-torn-to-the-ground/
http://sfaq.us/2015/03/mark-mccloud-in-conversation-with-v-vale/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/04/mark-mccloud_n_5087179.html
The collaborative work of Jonathan Borges and Shannon Kennedy of Pedestrian Deposit could be described as highly composed and detailed abstract sound textures combined and contrasted with more established musical forms to create dynamic experimental music that draws on the duo’s distinctly contrasting auditory obsessions. Borges’ use of crude, disciplined electronics, tape loops, field recordings, and controlled feedback manipulation merges and contrasts against Kennedy’s use of cello, self-designed stringed instruments, bowing techniques on amplified metal and physically activated apparatuses constructed out of materials such as wood, metal, water and ice resulting in music that is both raw and refined, and charged with tension and focus. Pedestrian Deposit bears elements of electro-acoustic sound, musique concrete, classical, industrial and harsh noise, but cannot be confined to any one genre within experimental sound.
Jonathan Borges began Pedestrian Deposit in the Winter of 2000, with the concept of combining layers of electronic sound with no pre-determined relation to one another until mixed. The project slowly evolved to incorporate elements and hybrids of harsh noise, tape collage, field recordings and ambient music with a focus on extreme contrast, resulting in a prolific few years of rich and dynamic compositions on such labels as Hospital Productions, Hanson Records, and Borges’ own Monorail Trespassing label, to name a few.
After a two-year hiatus, PD returned in the fall of 2008 with the addition of multi-instrumentalist and visual and performing artist Shannon Kennedy; and her elements of cello, and amplified, bowed and physically activated objects. They have consistently toured the United States nearly every year since, throughout the US and Europe, placing an emphasis on the development and evolution of physical, psychological and organic live performance.
PD has appeared at such events as the 2009 No Fun Fest in Brooklyn, New York; the 2010 ’Activating The Medium’ festival in San Francisco, CA; the 2013 Milwaukee Noise Festival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the 2014 and 2015 Ende Tymes festivals in Brooklyn, NY; the 2015 LUFF festival in Lausanne, Switzerland; and the 2016 Click Festival in Helsingør, Denmark , MAPS festival in San Francisco 2017, and recently at Pioneer Works in New York as part of their Grand Ole Opera series— in addition to innumerable venues, galleries, halls, bars and makeshift spaces throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Friday, October 13th 22:30 – 01:00
Jeff Carey is a self taught computer programmer, educated in Audio Technology (American University, DC) and Sonology (Institute for Sonology, Royal Conservatory, The Hague, Netherlands), who makes hardcore digital music using a joystick, a gamer keypad and occasionally an array of strobe lights. Computer based synthesis, noise and improvisation combined with a no-safety-net approach to gestural control makes his music totally physical and visceral. No overdubs and no backing vocals.
Precursor to Hypercube is an installation side chain experience for four people that lasts roughly 4 minutes in duration and hovers between a thrill heist and a fever dream. This is a hard boiled mini chamber; an extremely intimate perceptual distortion tank that envelopes the perceiver with high intensity, full spectrum input. Sign up for a special appointment online or in the lobby if you dare! Not for the faint at heart either! For those seeking some harrowing Halloween...
In a genre known for its randomness and chaotic maneuvers, Daniel Menche has established himself as a musician with an uncharacteristic sense of focus and determination. Rather than creating only waves of “thunderous noise," he strives for order and cohesiveness. Aural intensity is not a representation of the frenzied or the chaotic, but a concerted effort to provoke and stimulate the listener’s imagination by generating purpose and power thru dramatic sonorous energies inside the music. His projectiles of sonic formations is analogous to the way a writer might depict a story: from the sound source an allegory emerges; through the imaginative process, restless complex dins are tempered into symbol and structure while maintaining an underlying and gravitational harbinger menace.
Daniel Menche's platform originates from the no rules code that there is no restriction barriers or biases to potential sound source styles or types.
His subtler and sublime compositions rely on arcing, dense layers of droning detonations, while Daniel’s abrasive explorations build upon amplified propagations and processed to extreme cliffs & valleys, pushing the full spectrum of frequencies to the threshold. Fierce percussive passages accentuate a persevering rhythmic tumult while gracefully reaching towards something quite beyond the sheer implied pandemonium. Through this kind of dedicated concentration, Menche bridges a measured gap between frequencies and listener, a one-on-one, personal impact with pure aural optic incision that is the crucial ingredient in creating a sensually impulsive emotional force of the kind that at times biologically resembles the blood rising in heat and tempo through our bodies.
Today, Menche continues his extensive live performances throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Saturday, October 14th 22:30 – 01:00
Daniel Menche makes noise. Loud. Clattering. Ritualistic... but altogether thoughtfully constructed deconstruction. The Portland, Ore.-based musician's discography goes back nearly three decades, a jagged line of antagonism that's simultaneously become more extreme and more meditative over those many years.
Menche released six albums last year alone, including a few under his Beast moniker, which includes sounds from his ferocious pet chihuahua. But at the very tail-end of the year, Menche stepped out of the harsh realities of conscious life and into the realms of waking life. Originally released digitally via Bandcamp, Sleeper now comes to a triple-CD box set. This is ambient music built from field recordings and a broken Farfisa organ, manipulated into the deepest recesses of dreams.
Strange sparkles of light flicker and swim across our eyelids as they are chased by darkness," Menche writes in his description of Sleeper. "Subtle abstract films play every night, even in our deepest slumber, projected on the movie screens found inside our eyes. Sleeper is a soundtrack to these internal films."
At sixteen-plus minutes, the opening track from this record serves as a good introduction to a sonic behemoth. An organ drone penetrates the core, as rumbling bass tones and darkly shimmering bells lurk and swirl like bats in the nethermost caves of slumber. Find a nice pair of headphones and a good place to lay your head, and fall into Sleeper's dank, dream world.
American musician and the instrumentalist Martin Rev - one half of the legendary electronic proto-punk duo Suicide whose influence has permeated thru the subsequent decades of techno, industrial, abstract, and punk musical circles. His independent career has released several solo albums for a number of labels, including ROIR and Puu. Rev's style varies widely from release to release, from no wave to melodic pop to heavy synth induced rock.
Alongside late vocalist Alan Vega, Martin Rev comprised one of New York’s most provocative and game-changing acts - When Suicide played in England during the later 1970s they were pelted with bottles. The punk audience was very dismayed by this weird minimalistic band. This wasn’t punk or ‘popular’. This wasn’t New Wave. It wasn’t. This was a glimpse of the future during the days of “No Future”. Their incredible and unclassifiable music went against every possible grain.
Taking inspiration from the confrontational performance style of bands like Iggy And The Stooges, Suicide had no qualms about upsetting audiences both with its noisy, drum machine-driven sonics and its notoriously provocative stage antics, In 1977, the duo released its self-titled debut album, a record which is still widely recognized as not only the group’s most notorious, but as one of the decade’s most important LPs followed by other seminal releases and EP’s into the 2000’s.
Alan Vega was also a painter and sculptor but sadly died in 2016, aged 78. This leaves us with Martin Rev, the composer of Suicide’s legendary music, who has agreed to perform a customized Suicide oriented set in addition to a killer cross section from the Rev record repository the night before.
Martin Rev will play two sets at Recombinant Festival 2017:
Friday, October 13th, 22:30 – 01:00, Martin Rev plays Live Solo with selections from his extensive discography including his newest release "Demolition 9", his first new record in seven years. Supported by Pedestrian Deposit, and a Special Guest TBA.
Saturday, October 14th, 22:30 – 01:00, Martin Rev plays SUICIDE supported by Daniel Menche, and a Special Guest TBA.
Also, on Sunday, October 15th at 20:30 Martin Rev talks Suicide in a discussion moderated by Marcus Herring & Tom Fitzgerald.
Michaela Grill studied in Vienna, Glasgow and London and has created, screened and performed numerous film and video works, installations and live visuals since 1999. Her performances and screenings span five continents and include venue such as MOMA NY, National Gallery of Art Washington, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, La Casa Encendida Barcelona, ICA London and many cinematheques worldwide. Her video work has screened at over 150 festivals and Grill is the recipient of the Outstanding Artist Award from the Austrian Ministry of Art and Culture in 2010. She currently lives and works in Montréal.
Kuroshio is the collaboration between musician Philip Jeck and filmmakers Karl Lemieux and Michaela Grill. Together they create atmospherically dense worlds for the perceiver to get lost in. Using analogue and digital means in producing their work, they build layered currents of images and sounds.