High Zero 2015
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Musicians from Afar »

Asimina Chremos (dance) Philadelphia

Ruby Fulton (trumpet, flugelhorn, violin) Idaho

Anne-F Jacques (motors, objects, amplification) Montreal

Rosie Langabeer (piano) New Zealand

Julius Masri (percussion, keyboards, oud) Philadelphia

Liew Niyomkarn (electronics, found objects) The Hague

Laura Ortman (amplified violin) New York

Marshall Trammell (percussion) Bay Area

Maia Urstad (sound art) Norway

Zachary Watkins (electric guitar) Oakland

Walter Wright (drums, electronics, objects) Massachussettes

N.N.K. (saxophone) Japan

Marta Zapparoli (reel to reel, tape recorders) Berlin

Musicians from Baltimore and DC »

Eames Armstrong (electronics, dance, performance)

CK Barlow (guitar, sampling, electronics)

John Berndt (saxophone, electronics)

Tom Boram (thocolate tynapple panipulator)

Samuel Burt (daxophone, bass clarinet)

Jeff Carey (computer)

Owen Gardner (cello, guitar)

Layne Garrett (guitar, objects, self-built instruments)

Hanna Olivegren (voice)

Jimmy Joe Roche (voice, modular synthesizer)

Thomas Stanley (electronics)

Noelle Tolbert (dance)

Jenny Moon Tucker (C melody saxophone, alto saxophone, electronics)

 
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Eames Armstrong
electronics, dance, performance
Baltimore

Eames Armstrong (they/she) works in performance, noise, language, and time. Eames is based in Washington, D.C. where they organize performance events and exhibitions. Eames received a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2010, and completed an MFA in studio art with an unofficial minor in dance from George Washington University in 2016. Eames likes challenge, art that is difficult, complicated gestures, softness, and the ritual celebration of confusion and illegibility.

www.eamesarmstrong.com

photo credit: Phil Freyer

CK Barlow
iPad-based sampling, guitar
Baltimore

A recent transplant from the rich experimental scene spanning Albuquerque and Santa Fe, CK turns real-time and field recordings into performable pieces using a variety of hardware controllers. CK spent 14 years with the acclaimed avant-orchestral conduction-improv ensemble Out of Context (OOC was led by live-sampling legend Dino JA Deane). CK currently uses an iPad-based live-sampling setup. CK also composes for film/TV, with placements on more than 100 different series.

www.ckbarlow.com

John Berndt
saxophone, invented instruments, electronics
Baltimore

Nearing fifty, John Berndt has been a Baltimore musician, visual artist and writer whose primary subject matter has generally been "disorientation as substantive content"---a subject he approaches with an unusual sensibility, and through an unbelievably wide range of different vehicles and media. He is a longtime saxophonist, free improvisor and electronic musician; and also he was founder of High Zero Foundation.

johnberndt.org

Tom Boram
thocolate tynapple panipulator
Baltimore

Boram/BORAX is a musician and multi-media artist born in Baltimore, 1974. He has been playing, building and modifying synthesizers since 2001. His music and art involves awkward, over-complex and absurd systems and scenarios. Areas of interest - synesthesia (especially the smell and taste of sound), instability/chaos, so-called "low brow" aesthetics, sci-fi tropes, synchronized dance sequences, pictures of the sun.

tomborax.tumblr.com

Samuel Burt
daxophone, clarinets
Baltimore

Samuel Burt is a composer and improviser who teaches electronic music at Goucher College. He holds two M.M. degrees from the Peabody Institute. He studied composition with Lewis Nielson and Christopher Theofanidis, amongst others.

A board member of the High Zero Foundation, he helps to organize the High Zero Festival, the Red Room series, and worlds in collusion. He has been running the ongoing first-Sunday-of-the-month improvisation workshop known as the Volunteers' Collective.

He composes orchestral, chamber, and solo music. Recordings and score of compositions, electronic music, and improvisations are available at his website below. He also builds, plays, and sells daxophones, friction idiophones originally designed by Hans Reichel.

samuelburt.com

Thomas Stanley
electronics
District of Columbia

Bushmeat SoundSystem is Dr. Thomas Stanley creating and performing sound art as mental prosthesis. With largely improvised, mostly electronic music, Bushmeat attempts to emancipate its listener from the noxious residue of a dying civilization. "Glass Harmonica versus the Panopticon seems a near perfect metaphor for where I find myself these days," asserts Stanley. "The music of the glass harmonica was purported to render its listeners insane and the Federated Panopticon is, of course, the carceral voyeurism of late capitalist consumer-culture." Thomas Stanley is the author of The Execution of Sun Ra and his eclectic mix of interdimensional music, Bushmeat Jams, is heard every Thursday at midnight on Pacifica affiliate WPFW-FM. Dr. Stanley is assistant research faculty at GMU/Virginia Serious Game Institute where his focus is immersive sound and virtual reality.

https://soundcloud.com/bushmeat
https://eatbushmeat.bandcamp.com

photo credit: Bushmeat FilmWorks

Jeff Carey
computer
Baltimore

Jeff Carey is a self taught computer programmer, educated in Audio Technology (American University, DC) and Sonology (Sonology, Royal Conservatory, The Hague, Netherlands), who makes hardcore digital music with a joystick, a gamer keypad and occasionally an array of strobe lights. Computer based synthesis, noise, and improvisation combined with a no-safety-net aspect of gestural control makes his music totally physical and visceral. No overdubs and no backing vocals.

He has CDs and records available from projects 87 Central (Staalplaat, JDK Productions, Univeral/NoTV), with MoHa! (Jeff Carey's MoHa! 7"), Office-R(6) (Lampse, +3DB), and SKIF++ (Fridgesounds, LINE/12k). Recordings of his solo work are available via record labels Forwind, Banned Production, IO Sound, Sonig and CWnil.

jeffcarey.foundation-one.org
facebook.com/jeffcareynoise

Asimina Chremos
dance
Philadelphia

Chremos began her dance career as a teenager in the corps de ballet of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater in the 1980's under the direction of ex-New York City Ballet luminary Patricia Wilde. A reading of Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" during that period sent her on a search for less hierarchical modes of dance-as-art and in due time she found her way into a summer workshop at Naropa University with artists who pioneered approaches to dance improvisation and postmodernism in the 1960's and beyond (Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, and Nancy Stark Smith). She continues to explore dance as an unfurling, unplanned flow guided by sensation and experience, often in the company of improvising musicians. Having celebrated her 50th solar return in 2016, she is interested in the aging process as it relates to dance. The peaceful martial art of Aikido and Contemplative Dance Practice have emerged as her main forms of training and study in recent years.

asiminachremos.com

Ruby Fulton
trumpet, flugelhorn, violin
Moscow, Idaho

Musician and composer Ruby Fulton (b.1981) writes music which invites listeners to explore non-musical ideas through sound. Her musical portfolio includes explorations of mental illness, Buddhism, philosophy, psychedelic drugs, addiction, and chess strategy; and profiles of iconic popular figures like the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and musicians Syd Barrett and Ringo Starr.

Fulton is a multi-instrumentalist, performing on and writing for violin, flugelhorn, and keys. Much of her work falls into the category of concert music, written for ensembles ranging from duos and trios to full orchestras, choirs, and wind ensembles. Fulton also writes music that she performs herself, using loops and samples to become a one-person orchestra. Whatever musical genre or instruments Fulton chooses, her music reflects the rhythms and pulses of daily life, and the world around her.

In addition to composing, Fulton works as co-artistic director of the experimental vocal collective Rhymes With Opera, a 5-piece vocal/composer ensemble now in their eighth season. She studied composition with Julia Wolfe and Christopher Theofanidis, and holds degrees from Boston University, the San Francisco Conservatory and the Peabody Conservatory. She has taught in the past at the Shenandoah Conservatory, the Peabody Conservatory, and Towson University, and she started a new job teaching composition and music theory at the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID this fall.

Layne Garrett
guitar, objects, self-built instruments
Takoma Park, Maryland

Layne Garrett is an improvising musician and instrument builder based in Takoma Park, MD. He works with prepared guitars, found objects, and self-built instruments. He plays in the improvising duo Weed Tree with drummer Amanda Huron, as well as in regular and irregular collaborations with a spectrum of players from across the DC and Baltimore sound universe. He is an active promoter of the musical culture, hosting house shows for the past decade and recently as a founding member and curator for Rhizome DC. He leads instrument building and sound exploration workshops and camps for kids at various educational institutions around town. He has traveled to play at places like XFest in Massachusetts, Voice of the Valley Noise Rally in West Virginia, H-O-T Series of Improvised Music and Dance in Philadelphia, and Frantasia Festival of Out Music and Arts in Maine. Other activities have included facilitating a large-scale tape-loop intervention in Rock Creek Park, constructing participatory installations for the Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music and for the DC Listening Lounge's annual Sound Scene event (including this year at the Hirshhorn Museum), and building a playable gong-map of the USA out of found car metal. In reference to a particular large freestanding sound structure he built, a collaborator commented: "man i would really love to play that big baby for 12 hours straight it is obviously a meditation key."

questionthetruth.com/noise/

photo credit: Intangible Arts

Owen Gardner
cello, guitar
Baltimore

Owen Gardner's work in composition and improvisation is informed in equal measure by his involvement in Baltimore's musical underground and by his study of Medieval European and certain non-Western musics, aiding in the development of an ever-widening sonic and emotional language. Toward this end, he has worked almost exclusively in Just Intonation, applied primarily to 'cello and modified electric guitar, since 2006. He has been a member of the Red Room Collective since 2009. Owen has worked in a wide variety of collaborative contexts, being or having been a founding member of Horse Lords, Black Vatican and Teeth Mountain and a performing member of Matmos and Second Nature, among other projects.

Anne-F Jacques
motors, objects, amplification
Montreal

Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, erratic sound reproduction devices and construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects and unpolished sounds. She performs regularly, presents sound installations and makes soundtracks for Julie Doucet’s animated films. Anne-F is also involved with Crustacés Tapes, a postal sound distribution project.

anne-fff.tumblr.com

Rosie Langabeer
piano
New Zealand

Rosie Langabeer is a composer/performer/musicologist from Aotearoa New Zealand who works with evolutionizational approaches to music in the performing arts.

A regular performer of spontaneous piano music, she also sings, plays various instruments and experiments with original pop music and covers. The rest of the time she works on collaborative arts projects. Highlights include: an award-winning eccentric big band, Zirkus, founded in 2002 featuring many of NZ’s top experimental and jazz musicians, a critically acclaimed contemporary classical ballet, Sunset o639 Hours, created in 2014 based on the true story of the inaugural airmail service between NZ and the USA and Shakespeare’s, 12th Night, (2011) featuring near constant onstage accompaniment by five piece Balkan gypsy band, winning her two Barrymore awards, for music and musical direction.

She has been heard throughout NZ and the US and also in Sri Lanka, Japan, Mexico, France and Great Britain, recent festival appearances include Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, (MA, 2016), Borderline Festival, (Auckland, 2016), Joyce Theater Ballet Festival (NY, 2015) and Bowerbird’s John Cage Festival (PA, 2013) Her list of collaborators include Neil Feather, BalletX, Maiko Matsushima, Andrew Mars, Kate Porter, Jeff Henderson and Chris O’Connor and she is this fall’s composer-in-residence with the Boyer School of Music’s electro acoustic ensemble BEEP.

www.blog.rosielangabeer.com

photo credit: Bob Sweeney

Julius Masri
percussion, keyboards, oud, manacheh
Philadelphia

Julius Masri is a Philadelphia based multi-instrumentalist and performer/composer for the city's dance community at large. Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, he moved to the States in 1990 and studied with Philadelphia instructors Carl Mottola and Elaine Hoffman-Watts. As an undergraduate at Bard College, he studied with AACM's Thurman Barker, Richard Teitelbaum, and Joan Tower. Besides drumset, Julius also performs on circuit modified Casio keyboards, Oud, and Kamancheh (aka Rabab, Spike Fiddle). Current and previous ensembles include metal band Night Raids, Hasidic band Electric Simcha, Erik Ruin's Ominous Cloud Ensemble, Archer Spade Spectrum Ensemble, Trombone & Synth duo Superlith, Sirius Juju (with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra), as well as performances with musicians such as Keir Neuringer and Henry Grimes. He is currently a performing musician with the Graffito Works dance group.

juliusmasri.com

Liew Niyomkarn
electronics and found objects
The Hague, Netherlands

Liew Niyomkarn is an artist who manifests sound as a medium into a form of performance, sculpture and installation. Liew's work is known for its ecstatic and surprise events, often expresses a sensory of flexibility and impermanence of sound and objects. Also, Her composition appears in films and advertising. Liew currently moved her base from Los Angeles to The Hague, Netherlands.

www.liewniyomkarn.com

Hanna Olivegren
voice
Baltimore

Hanna Olivegren is a singer and composer from Stockholm, Sweden born in 1987. She started studying music at the age of ten at a choir school and from there went on to study voice more individually in high school, pre-collage school and took her bachelor degree in 2014 at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Hanna’s passion has always been to explore the different colors and textures of her voice and works with both improvised and composed music. Currently she is a member in three different groups, composes, arranges concerts, workshops and freelances.

The groups are ZOMES, H.O.W and Silence Blossoms. ZOMES is a duo based in Baltimore, with Asa Osborne (former member of Lungfish). This collaboration is also the reason Hanna moved to Baltimore in November 2015. H.O.W is Hanna’s solo project where she is both the composer and producer. She is releasing solo music under this name and recently started a group in Baltimore with Zach Branch, Matt Lampart & Ines Nasarra. Silence Blossoms is a group based in UK and Sweden that works with poetry, improvisation and British folk music. The other members in group in Gus Loxbo and Sam Andreae.

www.hannaolivegren.com

Laura Ortman
amplified violin
New York City

Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn composer, musician, and visual artist. She continually collaborates with artists, filmmakers, dancers and musicians from New York, New Mexico, Italy and Canada. She has performed, recorded and toured with New York bands Stars Like Fleas and The Dust Dive.

In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble performing the 1914 original score live accompaniment to photographer Edward Curtis's film "In the Land of the Head Hunters" to sold-out audiences at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Ortman has been awarded a 2016 National Artist Fellowship and has completed artist residencies at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, New York.

Ortman releases her third solo album My Soul Remainer in 2016 recorded and co-produced by Martin Bisi.

thedustdiveflash.bandcamp.com

photo credit: Laura Ortman

Jimmy Joe Roche
voice and modular synthesizer
Baltimore

Jimmy Joe Roche is a professor of Film and Media at Johns Hopkins University. His work encompasses video, sculpture, and performance. Video screenings include the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Museum of the Moving Image. Roche has had five solo exhibitions in New York, Texas, and Colorado. His artwork is in the permanent collection at the the Baltimore Museum of Art. Roche has created commissioned work for Adult Swim, Dazed and Confused Magazine, Incubate Arts Festival and Harvestworks. He is a long time collaborator with the arts group Whamcity and electronic musician Dan Deacon. He runs the cassette tape label Ultraviolet Light and is a member of the High Zero Collective.

Noelle Tolbert
dancer
Baltimore

Hailing from Philly, Noelle has blossomed her artistic journey in Baltimore and has become a ruby inside of this small city. Noelle is movement explorer with an ongoing practice spanning hip-hop, popping, house, modern, ballet, and movement research technique. Her evolving practice is fed by poetry, improvisational writing, and performance art. Locally, her performances have been commissioned by EMP Collective’s Pulse series, Transmodern, Labbodies, bb, and more.

Her talent has graced the stage with Rennie Harris Puremovement, Colleen Hartman, Music and Motion Dance Company and more. Noelle has taught in different schools in Baltimore City and Baltimore County to influence children of all ages in developing their inner artist voice and to help others graduate their technique invested. Currently the Dance Director at Chesapeake Arts Center and active co-collaborator with Alex D'Agostino. Noelle is a woman of courage, fight, understanding, versatility, and instinct. She always looks forward to the next step of her journey to be fulfilled.

Marshall Trammell
percussion
Oakland, California

Marshall Trammell is an Improvisor, Conductor and Chief Investigator at Music Research Strategies (MRS), a platform for critical ethnographic investigation, culturally situated design, Solidarity Economics and social engagement. Raised in Oahu, Hawaii and based in Oakland, CA, Mr. Trammell studied under Ron Eglash, Pauline Oliveros and Tomie Hahn as an Electronic Arts fellow at Rensallaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) in 2006. He is the new Music Instructor for Urban Promise Academy in the Fruitvale District of Oakland, CA.

As the percussionist in the electro-acoustic duo Black Spirituals (Sige Records), Mr. Trammell performs internationally at the Jazz Haus in Copenhagen, The OCCII (Amsterdam), Islington Hall in London, Heritage Hall in Guelph, ON. Also, Issue Project Room (NYC), the Exploratorium Resonance Series (San Francisco) and will return to Europe this Fall. He has performed with Roscoe Mitchell, India Cooke, John Tchicai, Marco Eneidi, Dohee Lee, Dylan Carlson, Genny Lim, Jon Jang, Francis Wong and many more after 23 years in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His a former board member of Merced County Arts Council (2014-2016), co-founder of Merced Youth Drum Corps, curator of Heavy Discipline series in Oakland (2012-13) & producer of "Economimesis: Drummer's Secret Handshake," "Economimesis: Black Fighting Formations" and "Decolonizing the Imagination: Arts Practicum."

So many people have been beaten and deprived as we, but none of them was real estate. --Du Bois
They surprised when they bring out the beast in us --Fela Kuti
The only places where Negros didn't resist is on the pages of capitalist historians --C.L.R James

photo credit: Otto Oppi Christiansen (Oslo, Norway)

mrtrammell.wix.com/researchstrategies
blackspirituals.com
www.linkedin.com/pub/marshall-trammell/28/98b/629/

Jenny Moon Tucker
C melody saxophone, alto saxophone, electronics
Baltimore

Paddling around with piano and clarinet as a youth, Jenny Moon Tucker found herself as a college sophomore with a Minitmoog (not sic), a record player that could go 16 RPM, and a four-track tape recorder. After making certain sonic realizations, she soon met some comrades in the Washington DC area, proceeding to record, tour, and release a dozen LPs with Twilight Memories of the Three Suns. Shuffling around the eastern coast of USA and inland to Atlanta, she collaborated with folks young and old, noise and jazz veterans alike. Marshall Allen told her to always follow her dreams and take care of the internal conflicts before the external, Jack Wright told her he was perplexed by the way she hit the keys a way he hadn't seen before. Settling in Baltimore a few years ago she now makes jam and paints pictures for a living, while allowing music and improvisation to guide her along in life, in hopes of bringing the infinite healing light to more humans who need it. Jenny Moon Tucker plays C-Melody Tenor and Alto Saxophones, and anything else that could possibly make a sound. She performs and records by herself, with her partner as Pony Moon, and in various collaborations in the Baltimore and DC area.

Maia Urstad
electronics, radio signals
Norway

Maia Urstad is an artist working at the intersection of audio and visual art, predominantly with sound installations and performative sound projects. She was educated at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, and has also a background in rock music. Her work interrogates the history and methodology of communication technology; from Morse code, VHF radio, telegraphy and other long-range signals, to digital terrestrial networks and the use of fibre optics. Radio is a central theme in her work, using the medium for its auditory, visual and conceptual possibilities. Maia is an active contributor to the Norwegian and international contemporary art scene, she is a member of freq-out, and was a co-founder of Lydgalleriet (sound art gallery in Bergen Norway). Her sound work is published by Touch Music, London (MCPS).

www.maia.no

photo credit: Sharon Bailey

Zachary Watkins
electronics
Oakland

ZACHARY JAMES WATKINS is a sound artist who has earned degrees in composition from The Cornish School and Mills College. Zachary has received numerous grants and commissions and presented works in festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe. He releases music on the labels Important Records, Cassauna, Touch, The Tapeworm, Confront, Land & Sea and Sige. Zachary has enjoyed artist residencies at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi and the Headlands Center for the Arts. His 2006 composition Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition and has been performed as part of the 2nd Annual New Music Marathon in Seattle, WA the Labs 25th Anniversary Celebration and the Labor Sonor Series at Kule in Berlin.

www.zacharyjameswatkins.com

Walter Wright
amplified drums, electronics, objects, modular synthsizer
Massachussettes

Walter Wright’s practice includes computer programming, electro-acoustic music, and video performance. He focuses is on "improvisation as a way of being present in the world."

Walter was one of the first video animators. At Computer Image Corp he animated letters, words, and titles for Children’s Television Workshop. As artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center, he pioneered video performance touring public access centers, colleges, and galleries with the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer.

Walter plays a Bugbrand Board Weevil, contact mics, drums and percussion. He is developing an AVSynth. He performs in several groups including LOS CONDENADOS, Egregoros, and ensemble inédit ?!.

nohtv.wordpress.com

photo credit: Matt Samolis

N.N.K.
saxophone
Hokkaido, Japan

N. was born in 1987 in Hokkaido, Japan. She studied classical piano from the age of three, and began playing the saxophone as her main instrument at age 10. In 2006, she moved to New York where she experienced a life-changing encounter with the Downtown Music Scene. Since then, she has been learning music in streets from the underground musicians themselves, attending concerts, rehearsals, recording and mastering sessions and seeing the mechanics of making music first hand. Her band project SSSS (Super Seaweed Sex Scandal) played at Moers Festival in Germany in 2010 and had their first Europe tour. Her latest band project Pet Bottle Ningen has toured in Japan four times and released two albums from Tzadik Label. Her most recent collaboration includes Cyro Baptista's Banquet of the Spirits, and Ron Anderson's PAK with Yoshida Tatsuya. She has been working on sax solo project, released solo album "Lotus" from her own label, and toured Canada in 2015. Moved back to Japan in December 2015.

Marta Zapparoli
reel to reel tape machine, tape recorders, self made tape board
Berlin

She is a prolific and very active Italian experimental sound artist, improviser, performer, and musician. She works and lives in Berlin since 2007. Her sonic work is developed by self recorded sound from the external world using a wide of devices and self-made microphones with out borders and many unconventional techniques and body experiences.

She is interested on the boundaries and relations between acoustic ecology, vibration sound, noise pollution, natural radio, wireless communication and more. In the past two years , her new ongoing research and project it is an investigation focused on “Inaudible Sound” and the multiple effects of its spectral side which shape our sense and perception of the reality. With all the recordings she capture around the world, She builds strongly narrative and imaginative sonic pieces through live improvisation with real-time tape manipulation.

From 2010 She is a member of the 24 pieces “Splitter Orchester” in Berlin and She is involved in many different projects. She performed in Festivals all over Europa and Turkey, Norway, Sweden,Denmark, U.S.A, UK . Playing with many highly regarded musicians and bands, and involved in many different projects in Berlin.

photo credit: Corinna Harl

martazapparoli.blogspot.de