High Mayhem Festival 2005 Performers

HIGH MAYHEM 4th ANNUAL Emerging Music and Arts Festival PERFORMERS and ARTISTS (As of September 24, 2005)

Click here to see the 3-day schedule.

A tentative program is available here - it's a two page PDF that prints to legal size so be prepared for all 7MB

Anarchestra
Anarchestra is a group (over sixty) of instruments (built by Alex Ferris), the people who play them, and the socio-musical ideas that inform their playing. The instruments are predominantly steel with a few adapted parts, such as tuning machines and mouthpieces. The instruments were built to encourage non-musicians to explore the making of sound, to allow experienced musicians to make sound unconstricted by their technical habits and preconceptions, and to provide an alternative vocabulary of musical sounds.

Basement Films / Summon the Meteors (Albuquerque)
This year’s performance will explore and test the boundaries and nature of public domain, copyright infringement, and fair use through the creative and near-endless possibilities of live performance. This project will potentially enrich the on-going and hotly-debated discourse that has torn the age-old concepts of art, culture, intellectual-ownership and technology in the digital age. Skiv Borealis, Salty R. and Bryan Konefsky will audio-visually sample other performers and events from the High Mayhem Festival, including audience, and manipulate and re-arrange the bits and pieces to come up with something completely new, thus exploring the very nature of fair use, creativity, and public domain.

Basement Films / You’ve Lost Your Magic (Albuquerque)
This performance is entitled “You’ve lost your magic” by Aaron Trail, Mike Schissell, Elena Agustin, Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher, Sarah Wentzell-Fisher, Colin Gabriel, Brian Gillespie, and Tyreell Cummings. We are the microphone stands, balloons full of milk interlocked counterpoint strapped on plastic audio visual madness, syncopated, trails making tails, SWF and T-Rex, safe Asians, frames per second narrated, looped blue vinyl, bad haircuts and pink fur for a goulash poured into your brown bag special with a big ol’ Basement Films’ stamp. And we are the audience. It doesn’t get more Amsterdam than this. You’ve lost your magic. We’re bringing it back.

Deirdre Morris “Snow and Ashes”
(Santa Fe)
Deirdre is currently a member of Wise Fool New Mexico were she administrates, teaches and performs with the company. She has studied various forms of aerial arts, fire dancing and circus including stilt acrobatics for the past eight years. Prior to this time Deirdre studied a variety of avant garde movement styles including post modern dance, Ritual Theatre with Diego Pinon of Mexico and Butoh, a Japanese form of movement, with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno. Deirdre’s style of movement has been cultivated over the years from many things but what most interests her is the ritual of improvisational movement. Her performance at the festival has been inspired by the sounds of WATIV and the journey she has been making around the idea of war (snow, as in being snowed, plowed over, lied too, the static on your tv or radio) and destruction (ashes, of fire, of disintegration, of rebirth) in these modern times.

D Numbers (Santa Fe) with the Public Image Delivery Service and special guests

Eftah (Cleveland, OH)
Eftah is made up of Jeremy Bleich and Andrew Stoltz. Bleich (who has worked with the band “birth”) plays the oud and bass, whereas Stoltz works with traditional instruments, spoken text, field recordings and digital audio and video. Jeremy Bleich plays oud and Andrew does live sampling of the oud. All sound source originates from the oud.

Extended Neural Network Ensemble
Joseph O. Evans III, composer and conductor, will gather together a team of High Mayhem and Santa Fe performers. This composition will include live sampling of male and female voice, two percussionists, strings, winds, and turn tables. The set-up of the performers mimics that of the neural network in the brain. As the group performs, the cartography of this neural system will be projected onto the performers.

Gary Mex Glazner (Santa Fe)
Gary Mex Glazner makes his living as a poet. (Max here: no way) Harper Collins, W.W. Norton and Salon.com have published his work. His work has been featured on NBC's "Today" show, NPR, Voice of America and CNN. He is the author of Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets. The book chronicles a year abroad in Asia and Europe, meeting poets, working on translations and writing poems. His latest book is How to Make a Living as a Poet, is on Soft Skull Press, Glazner is the director and founder of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project. He is the editor of Sparking Memories: The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project Anthology. Glazner recently started the APP in Wellington, New Zealand, where he was featured on New Zealand National Radio. Glazner is the coach of the Precision Poetry Drill Team at Desert Academy, in Santa Fe. Glazner is the host of "Poetry Talk," a bimonthly radio show on KSFR

Grilly Biggs (New Orleans, LA)
An electronically driven improvisational ensemble, this group fuses avant-garde, drums’n’bass, and electronic sounds into an acoustic setting that features two drummers. The group is comprised of acoustic and electric vibraphones, bass and drums. Together the members are completely intertwined into each other, allowing for total communication through art without words. At times the music is heavy with deep, dirty grooves, and at other times, a wash of cymbals, soundscaping distortion and bowed vibraphone fills the aural sensing. Grilly Biggs is live double drumming groove experiments. Features Matthew McClimon, Matthew Golumbisky, Quin Kirchner, and Milton Villarrubia III.
www.grillybiggs.com

Hypothetical Entity
This will be a two-screen video installation. Both screens with show video and sound of Hypothetical Entity performing vocalizations, guitar, horn, and other instruments. One screen will trigger the second endlessly through pitch tracking in a chaotic style of system performance call and response; one screen calls, and the other answers.

impacttestdummy
This group is comprised of two member’s, Gregor Visconti and Mt Head. They employ the use of computers, synthesizers, samplers and effects units to create recorded/real-time representation of noise. Using ideas influenced by both modern experimental performers and the futurist composer’s, impactetsdummy recreates experience that surrounds us all, as well as creating new noise from the combinations.

incus (Albuquerque)
Made up of Catie Berkenfield (poet, linguist), Mike Berry, Rufus Cohen, and Kevin Paul, incus is an electro-acoustic improvisational ensemble. Berkenfield chants, speaks, whispers, sings, and shouts fragments of texts, from Beowulf to Gary Snyder to her own writings, all processed through a laptop using software created by Berry. Berry also uses this same software to process his bass performance. Cohen uses a variety of tools and implements to extract cryptic, compelling sounds from his guitars. Paul’s primary instrument is a laptop, where he plays prepared samples (whose sources include water, birds, wind, coughs and sneezes, cars and airplanes), and, like Berry, often samples the other performers.

Last Chance for the Loneliest Kitten
This group consists of three improvising instrumentalists turned electronic musicians (Ava Mendoza, Kurt Kottheimer, and Josh Smith). Drawing from their acoustic backgrounds, the trio takes a distinctive, highly expressive and organix approach to electronic improvisation. They create abstract music that defies boundaries of “collage,” “lowercase sound,” “noise,” “soundscape” and general good taste, the group’s vocabulary enters widely varying realms of texture and barely audible hisses and crackles. The trio’s battery of mainly analog sounds is produced using cassette tapes, mixing board, feedback, and a few effects pedals.

MAD TRIO
MAD TRIO continues to balance on the edge of extreme experimental music with a new series of works featuring compositions by woodwind performer, Alan Lechusza. They explore sonic structures with a hybrid electronic and acoustic instrumentation (electro-acoustic cello, tuba, and woodwinds.) They utilize standard and non-traditional forms and notation to collectively express these new unpredictable compositions. MAD TRI is made up of Alan Lechusza, Carolyn Lechusza, and Mark Weaver.

Masnavi Dance Collective (Santa Fe)
Masnavi is a Romany Gypsy and Middle Eastern dance collective made up of Nancy, Shari, Jasmine, Diane, and Corrina. On Friday they will perform a piece called Revolution, and on Sunday they will perform Breaking Through the Veil.

Merchant
The performance work of Merchant seeks to underminephysical and artistic boundaries via absurdity,intervention, and a commitment to irreverence and irrelevance. Mostly physical, these performances are improvised and incorporate audience and environmental
participation both voluntary and involuntary.

Spindoctor: a public assessment project will tabulate reactions to Merchant. The reactions will be postedthroughout Santa Fe. This project is but one amongmany. On a more exciting note, Merchant and Orangeman have an uneasy détente-an artistic Glasnost. The tension may run high, but hopefully there will be no diplomatic disasters.

Molerat Noodles
An improvised trio of violin/viola, percussion and fabric aerial dance. Performers: Alex Sprout Guy, Saba Angel and Rain Jones

Saba Angel has been playing drums and percussion since grade school, most recently
integrating many styles together. She has performed in various forms in Montana, Maryland, Austin and Santa Fe. She is currently in her last year at the college of Santa Fe studying music.

Morgan Smith (Santa Fe)
Have your face dermama-braded by this not-epilleptic uttered verbage. Jacket and tie required.

Noisefold (Santa Fe)
Noisfold is a live video-sound performance utilizing interactive 3-D animation to explore chaotic audio-visual behavior. David Stout and Cory Metcalf perform this hypnotic study of folded space through a combination of remote sensors, image to sound transcoding, live cameras and video-noise streams to create a surprising array of endlessly folding, collapsing and expanding sonic-visual objects. The resulting vortices, radial planes, oblique spirals and cellular structures evoke images and sensations often associated with the direct stimulation of the optic nerve.

Ojo del Fuego (Santa Fe)
APPARATIKUS
an experiment in audio visual kinesthetics
an OJO DEL FUEGO project

What happens when welders, musicians, film artists and acrobats put their creative forces together? Apparatikus: an improvisation exploration of sound, light, and abstract architecture by means of metal, flesh, and sound.

collaborators
Live Electronics: Walker
Violin: Alex Sprout
Sculpture : Adam Rosin
Movement: Cohdi Harrell, Alessandra Ogren

The sculptor will create an apparatus that is either free standing on the ground, or can hang from the ceiling. Following basic, loose guidelines to ensure safety and mobility of the performer, while leaving the design and creation completely to the sculptors’ vision. The musicians will create improvisational works to accompany and interact with the performance. The dancer will then, upon entering the performance area having never seen the apparatus and never having heard the music, perform a 10 – 15 minute piece. The film artists will be projecting abstract images onto the performance area while all of this is going on. The idea of this improvisational experiment is to bring us back to a place of raw, pure artistic expression; to challenge us all to tap into the creative sea on the spot, in front of an audience. Using the master skills of all three mediums, and the unknown element of improvisation, this is sure to be quite amazing, and inspiring to keep us all exploring the unknown possibilities of the work that we have been taming and refining in our everyday lives. It is also an attempt to bring together and unify artists of all mediums, using talent from every corner to create something new, and create a community that challenges the current separation between modern artists of different mediums.

Ojo Del Fuego is a small collective of performance artists quickly emerging into the sea of Santa Fe culture. Coming from backgrounds of circus, eastern dance, martial arts, gymnastics, music, and the love of emotionally potent abstract imagery, Ojo Del Fuego is committed to creating innovative performance works, while exploring collaboration with artists of sound, sculpture, movement and light.

Orangeman (Tim Jag) (Santa Fe)
The evolution of Orangeman is an alter-ego personality, a role-player, a shaman, and trickster. Always part mime, absurdist theatre, silent film slapstick, the acts involve encoded symbolism and allegorical ideas. The performance art process is another way for him to push ideas about art making. The performances themselves are never scripted or choreographed; they are usually loosely set up ideas for action, using a variety of props and medias. Working within the High Mayhem Festival Arena forces him to rise to the occasion and do something interesting, something visual, using humor, slapstick, absurdity to relay a message.

Precision Poetry Drill Team (Santa Fe)
Gary Glazner’s Precision Poetry Drill Team performs multi-voiced original and classic poems. The group has performed at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York and was featured on NPRs “All Things Considered.” The group performs, among other works, Blake’s “The Tyger,” freestyle, hip-hop takes of Carol’s “Jabberwocky,” a chilling version of Szymborska’s “The Terrorist He’s Watching,” a jazzy version of Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” as well as original hip-hop. The ensemble draws inspiration from everything from jump rope rhymes, military chants, auctioneers of animals, gospel call and response to rap. It’s synchronized swimming with words and Modern Greek Chorus and motor-mouthed youth spilling over with teenage angst. These kids are lettering in poetry! The PPDT is a rah-rah free zone. The PPDT performed in front of 20,000 people at this year’s Zozobra.

Rob Brown
This performance will be a trio with Rob Brown (sax), Zimbabwe Nkenya (bass) and Dave Wayne (drums). Rob Brown was born in Hampton, VA in 1962. He has been playing the saxophone since the age of 11. He moved to New York in 1984 and since then has been actively leading groups with or working as a sideman with Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Joe Morris, and Whit Dickey. Others that Brown has performed and/or recorded with are Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Denis Charles, Bill Dixon, Butch Morris, Reggie Workman, Henry Grimes, Roy Campbell Jr., Hamid Drake, Fred Hopkins, et. al, as well as various dance groups, poets, and performance artists. He has toured Europe extensively. He is a 2001 CalArts/Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize winner and has received many Meet the Composer Fund grants.

Rob Brown’s discography includes over 40 recordings and fourteen CDs as a leader or co-leader. His latest release is The Big Picture – The Rob Brown 4tet with William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Roy Campbell. Soon to be released is his new 4tet with Steve Swell, Joe Morris, and Luther Gray, entitled Radiant Pools. Brown’s current trio with percussionist Satoshi Takeishi and cellist Daniel Levin, has been performing regularly and will record a new CD soon. Brown is also currently working with William Parker’s Quartet/Quintet and The Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, Stone House, Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes, Karen Borca’s Quartet, The Whit Dickey Group, and The Sound Vision Orchestra.

Sama’ Duo’: transcultural improvisations
Beyond the status quo of most world music projects, the Sama’ Duo’ retains an improvisational focus. combining a deep core of cutting-edge and ancient improvising methods within the musical traditions of India and the Middle East. The group takes as its name a nuanced Arabic term that describes the spectrum of relationships between intense listening, spirituality, and music-making itself. Sama’ Duo’ is made up of Mustafa Stefan Dill (oud, sarod) and Jefferson Voorhees (pakawaj, tar).

Santa Fe New Music Youth Ensemble
Formed in 2002, the SFNM Youth Ensemble is the nation’s first youth ensemble dedicated to the study and performance new music. They aim to provide youth the opportunity to enhance their study of traditional music in connection to contemporary music, offering the enhancement of an artistic involvement in the creative process. In so doing, it will bring about a more proactive, engaged, and intimate approach to learning.
www.sfnm.org/ed/youth/ensemble.html

Simulate Sensual (Santa Fe)
Simulate Sensual is a project spawned by DJ Ultraviolet and Betty Payne in February 2005. On the one hand, they mimic the ironies of pop culture itself – replete with danceable rhythms and bouncy melodies. On the other hand, their sound rejects (self-destructs) the ubiquity of pop culture with sardonic lyrics and minor chords…bizarre stylizations. Simulate Sensual explores the beautiful within the ugly, the ugliness of the beautiful: the pleasure of pain, the power of desperation, and the ecstasy of precision and associated vice versas. Simulate Sensual uses voice, “psycho-acoustic simulations”, bass and guitar, and samplers. 4AD wishes they had found them first.

Slaves to the Magnetic Field (Questa)
Slaves to the Magnetic Field is a magnet cult and a partnership of varying wavelengths, held together with blood and high tension wire. From their bunker in the woods of Nuevo Mexico del Norte, Barnmaster Scud and MD.S wield guitars, samplers, and an assortment of modern wizard tools, brewing an ether based stew, designed for traveling pleasure. Accompanying the group is long-time video collaborator, Sub Commandant Slack.

SoLoDiNo
“Dino” J.A. Deane has been performing on sampler and doing live sampling since the early 1980’s. Looking for a way as a soloist, to create large soundscapes to support dances by choreographer Colleen Mulvihill, he was drawn to the portability of the newly introduced “walkman” cassette players and 4 track cassette recorders. It’s interesting to see, 20 some years later, a revival of young sound artists working with cassette tape in live performance. Dino has developed as a Live Sampler, as the technology itself has developed, and strives in every performance to get past the technology, straight to the heart of the music.

Taiji Pole (Santa Fe)
Interstellar space is filled with extremely tenuous clouds of gas which are mostly Hydrogen. The neutral hydrogen atom (HI in astronomer's shorthand) consists of 1 proton and 1 electron. The proton and electron spin like tops but can have only two orientations; spin axes parallel or anti- parallel. It is a rare event for Hydrogen atoms in the interstellar medium to switch from the parallel to the anti-parallel configuration, but when they do they emit radio waves with a wavelength of 21 centimeters (about 8 inches) and a corresponding frequency of exactly 1420 MHz. Tuned to this frequency radio telescopes have mapped the neutral Hydrogen in the sky. The Taiji Pole seem to form arching, looping structures, stirred up by stellar activity in the galactic disk. Group members are J.A. Deane (flute and floor fx), Carlos Santistevan (bass and floor fx), and Matt Deason (bass and floor fx).

Tesuji Estella (Brooklyn, NY)
Tesuji: GO nomenclature for the best play in a local position, a skillful move. Literal Japanese meaning is the line in the palm of one’s hand.
Par-a-digm me-dia: 1. deals with human culture especially with respect to social structure, language, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology – compare. 2. A specific kind of technique or means of expression as determined by the materials used or the creative methods involved.

A mix of sampled music and video art.

Uninvited Guests (Santa Fe)
The Uninvited Guests’ main goal is to be involved in the performance at all times. Far from call and response, the music is made up of listening and responding, where each artist plays a part of an ever changing whole. The songs move in waves: the music is at first almost familiar, then rises to a frenzied peak, descends slowly into a quiet valley, only to be tossed upwards again into a world of oddly compiled sounds and rhythms. To perform as a “guest” one must become an active participant working with and around the sounds of their fellow performers, most of whom have never performed together before. Each artist is hi-lited, choosing the path the group will take, though the result is always unknown. To listen to the “guests” you must be prepared to shed any preconceived notions of what music is. Passivity is not allowed. For this performance the ensemble will consist of a double rhythm section. The artists are Carlos Santistevan (bass, electronics), All Faaet (drums), Joseph Sabella (drums), and Matt Deason (bass, electronics).

WATIV (New Orleans, LA)
WATIV, or William A. Thompson, IV, is an introverted musician, whose National Guard unit was activated on April, 27 2004. Upon deployment, and with permission from his higher-ups, Will took with him to Iraq a power book G4 and all necessary music production software. With MIDI, environmental samples, and imagination Will has begun and continues to compose music reflecting his experiences in this war. WATIV is Will’s transmission from Baghdad, his way of communicating his experience of war across the world. WATIV’s experienced background collides with the sampled sounds from Iraq, bringing us a mix of hard, industrial elements, or moving, aerie melodies. Varying shades of piano and stand-up bass mix with electronica, and are then layered with voices and mysterious environmentally sampled noise creating a somewhat chaotic element. This will be Will’s debut performance since returning from Active Duty in Iraq. Thompson will be performing with the III.IV.I Kollective: Milton Villarrubia (drums) and Matthew Golombisky (bass).
HIGH MAYHEM has released Will's debut album: Baghdad Music Journal; check out the virtual CD-ROM here. Visit the store here

ZIYA
Zimbabwe Nkenya performing the mbira, Dave Wayne on drums and Matt Deason on five-string bass. The mbira has been a powerful force in the African musical experience for hundreds of years. Recently, it has been making inroads into popular culture and Jazz, but its main function has been to add exotic colors to the music. Zimbabwe Nkenya has been incorporating the sounds of the mbira into his music for over 25 years. In ZIYA (the name derives from the first and last letters of the leader’s name) the mbira has assumed a front-and-center position.

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