HIGH MAYHEM 8th ANNUAL Emerging Music and Arts Festival PERFORMERS and
ARTISTS (as
of August 25, 2008)
Alchemical Burn (Albuquerque, NM) –
Alchemical Burn explores the power and grace of pure sonic ferocity within the realms of analog noise and multi-textural soundscape. From guerilla style street performance to art galleries across the Southwest Ab seduces aural pallets and turns listeners on their ears at once!
Al Faaet (Santa Fe, NM) –
Al Faaet will be doing a short, solo percussion project. This will NOT be a trap set.
Atmospheric Diver (Santa Fe) –
Jordan glazer and Spencer Neale form the video/sound art collective Atmospheric Diver, which is based primarily in live performance, interactivity and installation works. AD contains ambient, thrash, and drone influences wile disregarding all conventions to create a unique audio-video synthesis of sub-aqueous tones that have been manipulated to new boundaries.
Atomic Bomb Audition (Oakland, CA) –
The ABA performs long compositions for quartet (guitar, bass, drums, live signal processing) which present tides of heavy guitars, processed percussion and voice while grand themes unfold unto the horizon. In this performance, solo guitars make way for discordant soundscapes: grand vocal proclamations of heart turn to folk melodies and doom ascends from the abyss in riff form.
Audible Whispering Half Quartet (Santa Fe) –
1. audible whispering ½ quartet – v. (a) opening into and accelerating through fits and starts to a lulling roar, fading reverbal (b) the industrial –harmonic textile sonic effect of combining 2 parts wonder-lust (disengaged) with 1 part impending cicada swarm.
2. audible whispering ½ quartet – n. (2004) an electro-acoustic half-quartet comprised of Gaspard Cabanes (an assortment of piezo-miced acoustic instruments, percussive and otherwise; altered electronic devices; electronically processed and sub-mixed) and Alex Neville (acoustic and electric fretted strings; percussion; vox; samples; electronically processed.)
Author and Punisher (San Diego, CA) –
Tristan Shone is a mechanical engineer, sculptor, and musician. He has combined these three elements in his newest body of work, Drone Machines, which draws heavily on aspects of industrial automation, robotics, and mechanical tools and devices focusing on the eroticism and interaction with machine. Drone Machines are interfaces for music, but also extensions of your industrial primate and a direct reflection of what they control.
www.myspace.com/authorandpunisher
Bull Seal! (Santa Fe) –
Bull Seal uses poetry & vocalization as a musical instrument, musical instruments & sound to create poetry, and a lot of drums to create the sound of a lot of drums. Bull Seal! boasts the talents of Damon Griffith, Sabrina Griffith, Michael “Smitty” Smith, and Roland Ostheim. A highly visual show, with costume and make-up creating a presentation of character on the stage.
DNA (Santa Fe, NM) –
Offering up a diverse, exciting display using fire and non-fire props, festive costuming, character/personality backed up by a live music ensemble and spoken word. The DNA Project, unveiling a mesmerizing, FUN and magical experience. A Fire dance extravaganza!
Elizabeth Lord – Personal Ad Lord (Olympia, WA) –
Storyteller Elizabeth Lord’s latest show concerns the rigors of the single life looking for love or rather the big affirmation that “I’m okay because someone else gives a damn about me.” It’s adult content that will likely involve audience interaction. Lord covers a range of topics, the content being bold, surprising, and funny.
esthöm (Santa Fe, NM) –
esthöm is a collaboration of Roland Ostheim and Vadi Grontis. They produce sounds and visuals with angelic overtones, with the clanging reds, blues, yellows and other hues over bottles and cans. They use circuits, strings, brass, and vibrations in this artistic exploration/love collaboration.
I Heart Lung (Los Angeles, CA) –
I Heart Lung is refined chaos. It is at once tribal drone, free jazz, whisper and rage, improvisation and predestination. It is the gestalt of guitarist Schlarb and drummer Steck. An organized/open duet of choke-like intensity and sometimes raging quiet.
Idris Goodwin Bullet Bite Man (Chicago, IL) –
Driven and inspired by hip hop culture, Goodwin strives to emanate a freshness, a living beat and rhythm, an improvisational flow. He’s interested in exploring beyond the current modes of spoken word and oriented “hip hop theater”. He is an award-winning poet, hip hop playwright, recording artist, and teacher committed to making art that incites, inspires, and engages.
Drawing Conversation with Max (Santa
Fe, NM) – Inspired by milenia of tectonic shifting
and lucid weaving of loomlike machinations firing in his mind, our
very own Master Switch prose-fighter offers a rare glimpse into the
monologue as a co-temporal rainbow wheel gloriously spun until white.
Miss Ginger (New Mexico, California, Hawaii) –
A solo project 7 years in the making, it’s the bedroom MC coming back! Lyrical style inspired by underground LA and Bay Area hip hop rhyme-sayers, the beats inspired by a healthy record addiction, and the story inspired by countless sleepless nights of rambling mind.
Novasak (Denver, CO) –
Novasak is Todd Novasad who has been making noise since 1997, using home-made electronics and found objects. Influenced by abstract, electro-acoustic, harsh noise and indirect forced participation upon he listener. The overarching concept is NOISE!
Nox(0) and Gang Clan Mafia – “Anthill of Mental Honey” (Boston, MA/Oakland, CA) –
This is a live improvised sound and videoscape. They’ll create a live electric anthill that will consist of audiovisual, old electronics appliances, TVs and found media. Live insects, plants, and other organisms will be blended in the network of energy. All of this will converge, bringing the audience something they have never experienced before.
Occasional Detroit (Albuquerque, NM) –
Originally from Detroit, Towondo and Demetrisa form a duo that is part hip hop, part performance, and part noise. Inspiring, enlightening, confusing, confounding. It’s good performance art that you can move and dance to.
Page 27 (Denver, CO) –
Page 27 is a noise/experimental group that has been active in Colorado since 1994. Utilizing computers, samplers, synthesizers, modified electronic toys, drum machines and effects pedals, they create an improvised sound collage ranging from harsh noise to ambient drones.
Persephone – An Improvised Opera (Arizona and New Mexico) –
The performers are Deirdre Morris, Molly Sturges, John Flax, JSA Lowe, Jeremy Bleich, and Peter Breslin. This is a ritualized, eerie overlaying of randomly accreted bits of text (obituaries, the botany of flowers…); minimalist music of gestural whispers of hair-raising, roaring, rending floods; voice incanting, invoking winter. It’s narrative constructed through a multimedia mix of sound, language, gesture, and silence.
Pillars and Tongues (Chicago, IL) –
This trio is focused on the abstraction of form and language. They’ll perform a set of primarily improvised music, conceived of by the performers as abstracted meditations on gospel and blues forms. Playing bass, violin, harmonica, melodica, organ, hand bells, percussion, cowbells, wind chimes, energy chimes, glass gongs and vocals, they employ no electronic devices to manipulate sounds (except for amplification).
Scott Moore Circumstances of Quantum Proximities (Taos, NM) –
Moore’s work has resided in the heart of improvisation, exploring the intersection of action and object. The particular sonic fallout of these performance situations varies greatly with regards to instrumentation and implementation. This year Moore will be performing solo with sculpture and sonic implements.
Simulate Sensual (Santa Fe) –
“Biological matter forms the make-up of us two. We hail from our instruments in very precarious increments. After the meteors shattered, we rained down to create venomous clatters. As long as thoughts are spilled out, well then nothing else matters. I write this before you, Ultraviolet in virtue. The only pain to be had in life is Betty projecting into her mic. Understand the nomenclature and other lovely things of that nature. How often in life do you see a white woman and a black man creating art together, circulating notes for the beautiful jams? We listen to sensual music to simulate galactic movements. Bliss is the ultimate goal, it permeates from our souls. But that’s another story told when time permits for now we hold.”
WATIV (Chicago/Brooklyn/Jackson) –
With a deep rooted heritage in the improvised music of New Orleans, bandmates William A Thompson IV, Milton Villarrubia III and Matthew Golombisky originally united as a jazz piano trio that had no fear of exploring sounds not commonly associated with jazz. This band’s intensity, whether it be an explosion of sound or slow movements of color, can only be described as true, with abundant resources to draw from.
www.myspace.com/wativ
We Drew Lightning (Santa Fe, NM) –
It is the goal of We Drew Lightning to transcend genre. WDL utilizes different timbres and styles such as psychedelic rock, experimental, and electronic, creating complex textured soundscapes performed in conjunction with live visuals by Vadi Grontis to bring the audience member on a journey.
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