GUEST BIOGRAPHIES:
Mark Templeton:Canadian artist Mark Templeton utilizes a background in acoustic music and instruments such as the guitar, banjo and accordion to compose electro-acoustic music using said instruments and a variety of effects processes. Since the release of his critically acclaimed Standing on a Hummingbird in 2007, his sound has been called "pastoral," but also "painterly" in an attempt to describe how his instruments are crumbled and reconstructed into new forms; a process further developed and realized on his 2009 release, Inland.
Templeton's works have been commissioned by organizations of contemporary dance, film and audiovisual disciplines. His live performances have at times been accompanied by Edmonton-based experimental filmmaker aAron Munson's visuals. In 2009 this ongoing collaboration resulted in the release of M. Templeton & aA. Munson: Acre Loss on CD and DVD.
Templeton has performed at international festivals and alternative spaces such as MUTEK Festival (Montreal), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Eat This Festival (Utrecht), Galapagos (New York), Latitude 53 (Edmonton) and Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival (Montreal).
A New York City native, and founder/label manager for the Anticipate and Microcosm labels, Ezekiel Honig concentrates on his idiosyncratic brand of emotively warm electronic-acoustic music. Using the loop as more of a tool than a rule, Honig paints outside the lines, nestling into a comfortable, shared space between melodic, event-driven ambient, muted techno and slowmotion house - using them as reference points from which to stray, rather than as steadfast frameworks. Drawing on the rich history of musique concrete, Honig looks to incorporate a material nature into his music by imbuing it with a host of field recording/found-sound sources in the search for a balance between digital software innovation and the physicality of the world around us. His music is one of contrast and contradiction, combining minimal, abstract tendencies with a core of timeless harmonics - pairing inviting, fuzzy chords with clunky and dirty "mishaps."
In addition to his studio releases and label work, Honig performs live consistently, and, in this setting, strives to push beyond the boundaries of the recorded material. His improvisational approach combines loops and elements from various songs with on-the-fly arrangements, editing and effects. Viewing the recorded material as a constantly shifting body of work leaves space for serendipitous moments and leads to each set being an individualized rework, referencing and reprocessing itself. As a result of this flexibility to tailor sets to the environment, Honig's performances have been known to take the form of deep after-hours techno, rhythmic near-ambient or heartbeat-driven installation.
www.ezekielhonig.com
www.anticipaterecordings.com
www.myspace.com/ezekielhonigmusic
USO Project
Milan/Rome based Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi are sound artists whose work spans from digital music to electro acoustic improvisation. Unidentified Sound Object is born from the desire to discover new paths and non-linear narrative strategies in both aural and visual domains. The project includes several collaborations with visual artists and performers. The U.S.O. Project is a continually evolving organism.
Matteo Milani is a sound designer and composer living in Milan, Italy. He started his career at the end of the 80’s in radio stations, cutting inches of music on analogue tape. In the mid 90’s he pioneered the rising of digital audio workstations. Now, he’s reflecting most of his creativity blending “synthetic” and “organic” sound materials and performing live electronics.
Federico Placidi is a composer and sound designer living in Rome, Italy. Since the year 1993, he's been working with several composers and performers as sound designer and live-electronics technician, thus developing his personal sound library and tools. He also worked as a sound editor / designer for numerous full-feature movies. His music ranges from “concrete” acoustic to experimental.
www.usoproject.com
www.synesthesiarecordings.com
Selfish
Giovanni Antignano is an italian video artist and visual designer.
His research ranges from video art to visuals and live performance. His live sets are centralized on an obsessive elaboration of the video loop, where the action is continuously replied and stratified until it reaches its fulfilment.
From the end of the nineties until today he has been a member of minor and important collectives. He's the founder, in 2006, of Zerofeedback videolabel.
www.selfish.it
TIND (this is not design)
Active since 2001, TIND is a video art group renowned on the Montreal scene for having developed their own techniques for live audiovisual creation. By hijacking common analog equipment such as the distortion pedal, TIND creates singular imagery that visually echoes the original sound material. In their most recent creation trame00, controlled improvisations meet prepared interventions and mastered errors in a laboratory for real time experimentation.
Francisco Lopez
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures on the stage of sound art and experimental music. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings covers a period of more than 30 years, during which he has developed an impressive sound universe that is completely personal and iconoclastic and based on profound listening to the world. He has performed hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings and sound installations in 60 countries all over the world, including the main international museums, galleries and festivals, such as: PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), International Film Festival (Rotterdam), Festival des Arts (Brussels), Darwin Fringe (Darwin, Australia), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Center of Contemporary Art (Kita-Kyushu, Japan), etc.
His extensive catalogue of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with more than 100 international artists) has been published by more than 190 recording companies all over the world and he has received the honorific mention of the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz) on three occasions.
http://www.franciscolopez.net
Magali Babin
Magali Babin is active on the experimental music and improvisational music scenes since the 1980s. Her artistic work is based on the playful amplification, sonic interaction and manipulation of everyday objects. One result of ongoing research is her first solo CD, on the Notype label, «Chemin de fer» (railway) a work realised for Radio-Canada radio by Mario Gauthier.
Starting with the amplification of the object, Magali develops an interest for the recording of environmental sounds and « sounds we no longer hear, since they are such an integral part of our routine ». Magali explores and archives this singular and very personal instrumentation with the use of electronic implements and contact microphones. The relationship with sound and « the gestural of object interactions » are important and characteristic aspects of Magali Babin's compositions. For the last ten years the artist has performed with unique and unexpected sonorities, both solo and in the company of musicians, dancers and performers. Magali Babin is spoken of as one of the central personalities on the high risk improvisation scene in Montréal.
Magali presented a concert, in the context of the international electronic music festivals of America (Mutek Mtl, Mois Multi Qc, New Music Festival- Vancouver, High Zero -Usa,) as well as in Europe (Hull Time Based Art- England, Transmédiales- Berlin).
She has also performed in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Hambourg, Besançon, and Bruxelles.
She has collaborated on many compilation albums produced by different labels (and/OAR, Intransitive Recordings, SK Factory, Oral, le son666).
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures on the stage of sound art and experimental music. His experience in the field of sound creation and work with environmental recordings covers a period of more than 30 years, during which he has developed an impressive sound universe that is completely personal and iconoclastic and based on profound listening to the world. He has performed hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings and sound installations in 60 countries all over the world, including the main international museums, galleries and festivals, such as: PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), International Film Festival (Rotterdam), Festival des Arts (Brussels), Darwin Fringe (Darwin, Australia), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Center of Contemporary Art (Kita-Kyushu, Japan), etc.
His extensive catalogue of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with more than 100 international artists) has been published by more than 190 recording companies all over the world and he has received the honorific mention of the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz) on three occasions.
http://www.franciscolopez.net
Magali Babin
Magali Babin is active on the experimental music and improvisational music scenes since the 1980s. Her artistic work is based on the playful amplification, sonic interaction and manipulation of everyday objects. One result of ongoing research is her first solo CD, on the Notype label, «Chemin de fer» (railway) a work realised for Radio-Canada radio by Mario Gauthier.
Starting with the amplification of the object, Magali develops an interest for the recording of environmental sounds and « sounds we no longer hear, since they are such an integral part of our routine ». Magali explores and archives this singular and very personal instrumentation with the use of electronic implements and contact microphones. The relationship with sound and « the gestural of object interactions » are important and characteristic aspects of Magali Babin's compositions. For the last ten years the artist has performed with unique and unexpected sonorities, both solo and in the company of musicians, dancers and performers. Magali Babin is spoken of as one of the central personalities on the high risk improvisation scene in Montréal.
Magali presented a concert, in the context of the international electronic music festivals of America (Mutek Mtl, Mois Multi Qc, New Music Festival- Vancouver, High Zero -Usa,) as well as in Europe (Hull Time Based Art- England, Transmédiales- Berlin).
She has also performed in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Hambourg, Besançon, and Bruxelles.
She has collaborated on many compilation albums produced by different labels (and/OAR, Intransitive Recordings, SK Factory, Oral, le son666).
Machinefabriek
Rutger Zuydervelt, better known asMachinefabriek, lives in Rotterdam,The Netherlands. Started as Machinefabriek in 2004, he released more then 40 small run home-made cdr’s as well as work forType Records, Lampse, Digitalis,Staalplaat, Dekorder and 12K. A double remix cd was released in 2007, with interpetations by Pita, alva noto, Mitchell Akiyama, Xela, Gert-Jan Prins and many more. Collaborations (live or recording) include Steinbrüchel, Jasper TX, Wouter van Veldhoven, Aaron Martin, Simon Nabatov, Frans de Waard, Stephen Vitiello and Peter Broderick.
Machinefabriek performed live in The Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Switserland, UK, Israel and Greece.
Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations have been presented internationally including the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Biennial of Sydney (in collaboration with Julie Mehretu) and the Marfa Sessions (in collaboration with Steve Roden) and in solo exhibitions at The Project, NY, Museum 52, London and Galerie Almine Rech, Paris. CD releases include Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records), Scanner/Stephen Vitiello (Audiosphere), Listening to Donald Judd (Sub Rosa), Box Music, a collaboration with Machinefabriek (12k) and The Gorilla Variations (12k). Originally from NYC, Stephen is now based in Richmond, VA where he is on the faculty of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
www.stephenvitiello.com
Heribert Friedl
born in Feldbach / Austria - lives and works in Vienna
Heribert Friedl lives in Vienna, and studied sculpture at the University of Applied Arts there. In his exhibitions he has been working with scents and its non visual phenomenons (installations, transient architectures, which are working with the topic of non visual phenomenons. Scents are the different information carriers.) - sometimes in combination with sounds.
He has had exhibitions, soundperformances and projects in cities of Hungary, Germany, England, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, USA, Israel, Cuba and Austria.
Heribert Friedl follows the kind of minimalist aesthetics that works with a few sounds, small events, nearly imperceptible movements. Despite seeming simple, this is a very delicate kind of music: each and every sound bears enormous significance and have to bear the responsibility for the whole work.
After more mp3-releases and albums on labels LINE, Trente Oiseaux and and/OAR he founded his label nonvisualobjects with Raphael Moser in 2005. The label releases works by such renowned minimalist artists as Steve Roden, Richard Chartier, Roel Meelkop, Bernhard Günter, among others.
www.nonvisualobjects.com
Jeffrey Allport
Vancouver-based percussionist Jeffrey Allport approaches the physical nature of his chosen instrument through a variety of preparations and implements to liberate a unique palette of sounds. Respecting each carefully extracted tone, thump and scrape in addition to the silence from which they are borne, his exploratory improvisations inhabit
minute sound worlds, eschewing the grand gesture.
In addition to solo work, Allport has enjoyed a lengthy collaboration with Tim Olive, releasing three CD’s since 1998. They have also toured in Canada, the US, Western Europe and Japan. Summer 2007 saw the LP release of his duo with Tetuzi Akiyama, recorded during a small tour of the Northwest in the summer of 2006. Frequently participating in once-only groupings has led him to performing and recording with a wide variety of improvisers from around the world including John Butcher, Otomo Yoshihide, Axel Dorner, Nate Wooley, Gust Burns, Andrea Neumann, and Keith Rowe.
Nate Wooley
Nate Wooley (b. 1974) grew up in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the space between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father, and after studying he moved to Colorado where he studied more with Ron Miles, Art Lande, Fred Hess, and improvisation master Jack Wright. His tenure with Jack began to break Nate out of self-imposed molds and into the sound world that he has embraced as his own.
Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as collaborating with such diverse artists as Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Marilyn Crispell, Joe Morris, Steve Beresford, Wolf Eyes, Akron/Family, David Grubbs, C. Spencer Yeh, Daniel Levin, Stephen Gauci, Harris Eisenstadt, Taylor Ho Bynum and Peter Evans.
"Nate Wooley is one of those rare players who seemingly pop up from nowhere, fully formed and confidently indicating the future of his instrument in contemporary music." - Bill Shoemaker, Moment's Notice
Ami Yoshida
Ami Yoshida strives to create a pure sound, abstracting her voice until it becomes almost completely unrecognizable. She created her unique style with no conventional training, initially inspired by Meredith Monk. Cosmos (with Sachiko M) and Astro Twin (with Utah Kawasaki) are her two longest-running projects, and their split release won the 2003 Ars Electronica award. Outside of Japan, Yoshida is solely known for her vocal work, but within Japan, she is a highly regarded writer, poet and comic book critic, with one novel and countless magazine articles to her credit.
John Coutanche
John Coutanche has been fascinated with sound since hearing 'Gerald McBoing-Boing ' as a lad of five in St. James, Manitoba. In later years, his basement hacking in sound included converting a failed Slinky and and empty oil drum into echo units. After studies in media production at Ryerson he worked for a many years as a radio producer. He is now a sound dabbler, designing and massaging sounds for short videos and films by others, and creating original soundscapes that are generally rooted in found sounds. He has devised and led workshops in sound technique at Video Pool and lectured in documentary and multimedia at Dublin University, Ireland.
Heidi Philips
Phillips obsessively sifts and searches through old films and found footage, lifting imagery and sound to recycle into her own layered and loosely structured narrative works. Her work has been screened in such festivals as Transmediale, Berlin and Images, Toronto. She completed her MFA from Transart Institute in Austria in August of 2008.
Her most recent exhibition, Revival, showed at Ace Art in Winnipeg, March 2009. Phillips took her well-known layered dreamlike style to another level, making use of a full palette of sounds. Words half-heard, momentary silences, sounds of technology and rhythmic repetition create a hypnotic, entrancing soundscape to echo extensively hand processed found film footage.
Robert Taite
Robert Taite completed his BFA at the U of M in ’09. It was here that an avid experimentation in inter-media works became the basis for his current studio practice. Robert first introduced audio to his video work in ’04 that combined rap beats and sampled loops. He began constructing large-scale sculptures that harnessed the sounds’ resonant potentialities. In April ’09, he completed a residency at aceartinc.’s Project Room working with form and colour to trigger feelings of nostalgia and hallucination. Robert has been collaborating with musicians/writers/artists, performing at various venues in Winnipeg and most recently composed a “haunting and ethereal soundscore” for Michael Dudeck’s Parthenogenesis; Toronto. A second soundscape will be on exhibit at Platform Gallery in Jan. 2010; Cathexis. He is currently performing with Kelsey Braun as noise/sound collage duo No Method. Works are constructed by collecting sounds from various sources (makeshift instruments, field recordings, samples, drums). Recontextualizing them through analog/digital regeneration, he composes lengthy, minimal “sound sculptures” comprised of drones reminiscent of Elaine Radigue/Phill Niblock and exploding rhythmic climaxes. His work is inspired by an inclination towards marrying organic/synthetic aural experiences into meditative glimpses of the fourth-dimension.
Garth Hardy
Garth Hardy is a cultural producer living and working in Winnipeg. He has studied composition with Rolf Boon, Ian Crutchley and Michael Matthews. He has been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World since 1998. As well as being engaged in the arts and culture industry and fighting the class war, he also pursues the yeoman task of reclaiming urban roadways for non-petroleum based transportation.
Daryn Bond
Performer, composer, writer, video hack under siege at landsLide hermitage studios, subsidiary of the Bond Institute, inventor of the harmonic hyper-cube [patents pending], mastermind of the 'Disposable Music Project' & THE FROZEN LIBRARY©. Studying & developing alternate musical devices, he constructs a multi-disciplinary project under the working title 'PLease DO not **use Wet Paint.'
Performer, composer, writer, video hack under siege at landsLide hermitage studios, subsidiary of the Bond Institute, inventor of the harmonic hyper-cube [patents pending], mastermind of the 'Disposable Music Project' & THE FROZEN LIBRARY©. Studying & developing alternate musical devices, he constructs a multi-disciplinary project under the working title 'PLease DO not **use Wet Paint.'
Conny Blom
Conny Blom (1974) is a Swedish visual artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden and Bukovje, Slovenia. He took his MFA at the Valand School of Fine Art in Gothenburg 2007, and has already had a long row of relevant exhibitions. During 2007 he participated in the 2nd Moscow Biennale (Matter & Memory Show), and in 2008 he has for example exhibited at Casino Luxembourg, (in Luxembourg) in the exhibition P2P together with amongst others Jonathan Monk, Rodney Graham and Nedko Solakov, and at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue de Delme in France, with Daniel Buren, Simon Starling, Elmgreen & Dragset, and more, in the show La Marge d’Erreur. In 2009 several solo exhibitions are planned in Sweden as well as in Slovenia.
In his work Conny Blom deals with defining issues of our modern society, our living conditions and the rights of the individual versus the society and the economical forces. Balancing between the poetic and the subversive, Blom uses material from pop culture as well as iconic pieces of contemporary art to comment, question and subvert established hierarchies. By focusing on the otherwise overlooked, the in-between, and the unseen, reediting it into new aesthetic experiences, Blom provides new perspectives and brings into light previously untold stories.
www.connyblom.com
Ken Gregory
Winnipeg artist Ken Gregory has been working with DIY interface design, hardware hacking, audio, video, and computer programming for over 15 years. His creative performance and installation work has shown publicly in Winnipeg, other parts of Canada and many international media and sound arts festivals. Anything is part of Gregory's palette, and by using cut-and-paste techniques, random juxtapositions, and careful manipulations, he crafts unique art works. These works are presented in the form of gallery installations, live performances, live radio broadcasts, and audio compact discs. Recent career highlights amongst others are the acquisition of 12 motor bells, a large sound installation by the National Gallery of Canada, Cheap Meat Dreams and Acorns, a touring solo survey exhibition to the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown PEI, and at the The Art Gallery of Hamilton in Hamilton Ontario.
http://www.cheapmeat.net/