Tuesday Sept 22
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland
7:00pm
FREE ADMISSION
Elliott Sharp
Annea Lockwood & Tom Buckner
Never Work
BLK w/BEAR & VJ Poppins
Elliott Sharp is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer, central to the avant-garde music scene for over 30 years. He has released over 200 recordings and pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory and genetic metaphors to musical composition. His collaborators have included Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt, Debbie Harry, Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples, Jack deJohnette, Sonny Sharrock, Arthur Blythe, Oliver Lake, Billy Hart, Christian Marclay and Bachir Attar. Sharp’s CD releases include Octal, Concert In Dachau, Cryptid Fragments, Commune and String Quartets: 2002-2008 with the Sirius String Quartet. Sharp’s music-theater work Binibon was premiered at The Kitchen in May 2009. He has composed for video artists and choreographers. His film scores include The Salt Mines (Susanna Aikin and Carlos Aparicio) and Daddy and the Muscle Academy (Ilppo Pohjola.). Sharp is also an in-demand curator and installation artist.
Annea Lockwood was born in New Zealand where she received her early training as a composer. She studied at the Royal College of Music (London), the Darmstadt Ferienkurs fur Neue Musik and the Musikhochschule (Germany). She is presently on the faculty of Vassar College. During the 1960s, Lockwood collaborated frequently with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and created a number of works, such as the Glass Concert (1967). During 1969-72, Lockwood created Piano Transplants, in which pianos were variously burned, “drowned” and partially buried. Lockwood turned to writing for acoustic instruments and voices in the 90’s. Her music is available on Lovely, XI, What Next/OO Discs, Rattle Records (NZ), Harmonia Mundi, CRI and Finnadar/Atlantic.
For over three decades, Thomas Buckner championed music of the avant-garde as a performer, producer and promoter. A former student of the legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone, Martial Singher, he was trained in
the classical tradition and has continued to broaden his vocal styles. He has made solo appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Edinburgh Festival, the Prague
Spring Festival and the Biennale Festival in Venice, presenting more than 100 compositions. Buckner has participated in over 40 recordings, including five solo albums. The entire discography features works by an impressive array of composers including Annea Lockwood, Somei Satoh, Alvin Lucier, Muhal Richard Abrams, Blue Gene Tyranny, Brian Smith, David Behrman and many others. For the past eighteen seasons, Buckner has curated the Interpretation series with the World Music Institute in New York City. He also has created the Mutable Music record label and reissued some important historic recordings, previously unavailable in CD format.
Never Work is a duo of Kenneth Yates and Cory O’Brien playing electronic-free improv with no-input mixing and custom software. All timbre and composition happen in the immediate situation. The sounds
are variously tolerable and intolerable. Sometimes it will be beautiful, and sometimes you are checking the path to the exit. In this respect a Never Work concert is just like anything else in life.
Initially a solo project, BLK w/ BEAR has developed into a full band, championing delay and decay through the physical manipulation of vinyl recordings and broadcast interference. Their warm drones and ambient
loops have accompanied film/video projects in NYC and London, with selections from Wish for a World Without Hurt used in the Discovery Channel’s, Emmy-nominated The Flight that Fought Back. The four-track
Version 3 extended play is available for download at the Long Division with Remainders “14 versions of the same EP” project site and will be released in a box set later this year. New material is available from Ultra-red’s Public Record audio-advocacy project (Los Angeles) and Trace Recordings (London).
VJ Poppins is an installation and performance artist who embraces the phenomenon of synaesthesia. Drawing from archival footage, she manipulates video output through live, spontaneous editing. Like a DJ,
she scratches through multiple layers of moving images searching for that perfect mix to create visual juxtapositions and non-linear narratives.
