Saturday, August 16
JOZEF VAN WISSEM
AERO MIC'D
Composer and lutist Jozef van Wissem first attracted attention by deconstructing Renaissance lute music. He has since applied retrograde, palindrome and Burroughs' cut up techniques to further abstract the canon as he builds "a time bridge which links the 17th and 21st centuries". Dubbed the “Anton Webern of the electronica underground” by The Wire, San Francisco sound collagist Aero Mic'd fuses turntable aesthetics and musique concrete with the studio tradition of ambient music. The result is petite yet dense "noisette miniatures" which captivate and intrigue.
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MP3 sample:
Josef van Wissem - Thelema
Jozef van Wissem probably plays and composes for the most unlikely instruments in the world of contemporary improvised music: the Renaissance and Baroque lute. He has accomplished the strange feat of bridging the idiom of seventeenth century lute literature and twenty-first century free improv of the silent type. Although Van Wissem uses subtle electronic sound manipulation, he has largely stayed faithful to the particular timbre, resonance and playing technique of the lute.
Van Wissem first came to be noticed a few years ago because of his radical conceptual approach to Renaissance lute music: he deconstructed existing compositions, for instance by playing them backwards. He discovered that from the Middle Ages on, a common technique in lute composition was the backwards performance of the melody. In general van Wissem's work takes the classical ideas and techniques of lute composition such as retrograde melodies and the application of mirror images, another technique idiomatic to lute tablature of around 1600, and brings them in to the 21 Century. He also composed his own pieces for lute, using palindromes and mirrored structures. In addition he has applied the cut up technique of writer William Burroughs and cut shifted, mixed and pasted the parts together so that a new entity arises. His music therefore does not have a traditional linear progression, nor leads to a climax, it rather stays on the same level of intensity. His music is quiet and not so much demands concentrated listening, as it will bring the listener in a state of concentrated listening - an aspect that makes Van Wissem a natural ally of the current post-reductionist improvising musicians.
Van Wissem also runs the Incunabulum label, and performs regularly around the world in duo with guitar-wizard of Captain Beefheart-fame, Gary Lucas. He also works with M.B. / Maurizio Bianchi., Tetuzi Akiyama and Elliot Sharp.
Aero Mic'd aka Wayne Smith is a visual and sound artist who lives and works in San Francisco. He received a BA in Painting and MA in Sculpture from San Jose State University. Working in a variety of media including drawing, installation and video, his work has been shown locally and nationally.
A one-person show of drawings and scanner-manipulated prints took place at Gallery 16, San Francisco in 2004. He recently collaborated with Berlin-based artist D-L Alvarez on a sound and video installation loosely based on Joan Didion’s The White Album that was show at the Derek Eller Gallery, NY in April 2007. Having collected cassette field recordings for many years , Smith began assembling these recordings into musical pieces in the late nineties. These were used for much of his first CD as Aero-Mic’d in 2001. Utilizing combinations of these field recordings, improvisation and digital manipulation, he generally creates short 2-3 minute songs that alternate between being melodic and noisy, often in tandem.
All of Aero-Mic’d’s recorded music has been created in SoundEdit 16, a now defunct sound software. The limitations of this software and a preference for relatively primitive recording methods have, to some extent, determined the nature of Aero-Mic’d’s sound. While these recording are clearly a product of the studio, Aero-Mic’d has also evolved into a live unit, with Smith playing laptop and Moog. He is joined by an alternating group of other musicians that have included Cliff Hengst on percussion (Troll, Tussle), Scott Hewicker on guitar (Troll, The Alps), William Fowler Collins on guitar and electronics (Mire), Cory Vilema on electronics (with whom Smith recorded the collaborative Cloud Mama CD) and Anne McGuire on vocals (Wobbly).
Smith has also been a long-standing member of San Francisco’s Poet’s Theatre, writing three plays with author Kevin Killian over the past ten years, and performing in over twenty of them. He has also created sound and video effects for many of these productions.
In 2003, he co-produced and performed on the CD After Low with artist Rex Ray, as part of the exhibition Fascination at Gallery 16. The CD, a reworking of David Bowie’s Low album, featured performances by Matmos and Tom Recchion, among others. Smith is currently an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA.
Performance begins at 7:30 p.m.
Doors open at 7p.m.
Location:
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, L.A.
Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
sound. 2008 is co-curated by Cindy Bernard, Jeremy Drake, Danny Gromfin, Joe Potts and Tom Recchion; produced by SASSAS.
The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) is supported in part through grants from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the West Hollywood Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission, a special donation from Amoeba Music and the generous contributions of our members. For further information on SASSAS: www.sassas.org or contact us at 323.960.5723.
Contribute to SASSAS at the $50 level and receive discounts for sound.
Special thanks to Djego Padilla, graphic design for the 2008 website (email).
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