TIM FEENEY percussion and electronics Ithica, NY
NEWTON ARMSTRONG electronics Hanover, NH
NATE WOOLEY trumpet New York, NY
Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the timbral possibilities inherent
in everyday found and built objects. He treats his percussion setup as a
friction instrument, using bows, scrapers, and rosined drumheads to capture
and amplify frequencies that go unheard when an object is struck with a
traditional mallet. He supplements this acoustic console with an electronic
instrument, arranged from no-input mixers, contact microphones, and
effects pedals, that synthesizes and alters the spectral characteristics of
low-fidelity sine tones, feedback, and noise.
Tim works within Boston's "lowercase" improvising community, a group of
musicians interested in unstable sounds and silences, exploring austere
combinations of sound and the otherworldly ripple effects that pulse through
a silent space and alert ears. He has performed with musicians including
thereminist James Coleman, cellist/electronic musician Vic Rawlings,
tape-deck manipulator Howard Stelzer, Lebanese free improvisors Christine
and Sharif Sehnaoui, saxophonist Jack Wright, and the trio ONDA. His
concerts have been held at experimental spaces such as the Red Room in
Baltimore, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, Firehouse 12 in New
Haven, Connecticut, the Knitting Factory New York, the inaugural Counter
Fit Festival in Rochester, New York, and the August 2005 NoNet workshop
and series in Philadelphia.
Tim's double life as an interpreter of contemporary compositions has led him
to venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Zankel Hall, and the
Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and his work has been featured on WNYC
Radio's New Sounds. A member of Boston's Callithumpian Consort, Tim has
appeared on the Musica Nova series at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany,
and at New York's Tonic, as part of its 50th birthday celebration for John
Zorn. As a founding member of the So Percussion Group, Tim appeared in
concerts and masterclasses at Columbia University and Williams College,
and commissioned David Lang's The So-Called Laws of Nature, premiered
at the 2001 Bang on a Can Marathon. He is a co-founder of the duo
Non Zero, with saxophonist Brian Sacawa, which has performed American
and world premieres of works in concerts at MIT, NYU, the University of
Michigan, the Kerrytown Concert Hall, New York's Tenri Cultural Institute, and
Eastern Nazarene College.
An active educator, Tim has given workshops on improvisation, chamber music
and solo percussion performance, and Balinese gamelan at the University of
Miami, Longy School of Music, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and
the Peabody Conservatory. He earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree
from the Yale School of Music in 2007, and currently teaches at Cornell
University.
Newton Armstrong: "I'm a composer and performer. I'm also a teacher, writer, hacker, and occasional builder of electronic musical instruments. I'm interested in how we listen, how we make sense of sound, and how we negotiate issues such as listening and sense-making when we decide to push sound about in time and space. I've found that other people have very different notions and experiences of time and space, and that these differences are part of what makes other people fascinating. This has led me to work with all sorts of musicians, writers, dancers, choreographers, scientists, engineers, philosophers, and film, video, and installation artists. Sometimes I think that art is only about asking questions. But it's not just a matter of asking profound or beautiful questions, it's a matter of asking the right questions. Or maybe it's that the right questions are always and inevitably profound and beautiful. I don't know, but there are some important questions still waiting to be asked."
Newton Armstrong, originally from Australia, recently joined the faulty of Dartmouth University after obtaining his doctorate from Princeton University. At both Dartmouth and Princeton, Newton has been active as a composer, teacher, performer, and organizer of new and experimental music, and has been responsible for bringing many musicians of different generations and nationalities together for the first time. He recently participated in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company residency at Dia: Beacon with Brooklyn based turntablist Maria Chavez.
One of the most in demand in creative music,
Nate Wooley (b. 1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon. He began his professional career on trumpet with his father at the age of 13. After a brief stay in Denver, Nate moved to Jersey City in 2001. He has developed a highly personal style, mixing his knowledge of jazz and classical trumpet tradition and context with a very healthy bit of experimentation. His solo album, "Wrong Shape to be a Storyteller" on Creative Sources Recordings from last year was a culmination of this kind of thinking and was critically acclaimed as a benchmark for solo documents in the lowercase/reductionist tradition. His main thrust is still the trio, Blue Collar, whose sophomore cd "Lovely Hazel" on Public Eyesore was voted one of the top 10 jazz and improv cds by the Philadelphia CityPaper in 2005. Besides these projects, Nate does a great deal of work as a sideman with figures as diverse as John Butcher, Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Olsen of Wolf Eyes, David Grubbs, Daniel Levin, Stephen Gauci, and the Sound/Vision Orchestra.
JESSE KUDLER guitar, electronics, synthesizer
IAN FRASER radio, electronics
Jesse Kudler, born 1979, improvises on guitar, synthesizer, tapes, radios and electronics, and he makes music on the computer. His work often operates on the extremes of volume, demonstrating an interest in the subtleties that can arise from intense softness or loudness.. All of Kudler’s work is marked by special attention to the stereo field. Recent interest has focused on both internal (electronic) and external (microphone/speaker) feedback, from radios/transmitters and microphones, allowing dynamic textures to arise in concert with the space in which they are played.\
Kudler attended public school until Wesleyan University, where he studied music with Ron Kuivila, Alvin Lucier, and a little bit with Anthony Braxton, among others. He eventually became active as an organizer and performer in improvised, experimental, and electronic music, forming a regular duo with fellow student Jonathan Zorn and leading the large electronic improvising ensemble Phil Collins. Kudler has also worked as a recording engineer for various projects.
In his various travels, Kudler has performed with Matt Bauder, Kyle Bruckmann, Gene Coleman, James Coleman, Tim Feeney, Marcos Fernandes, Brent Gutzeit, Horse Sinister, Bonnie Jones, Jason Kahn, Mazen Kerbaj, Pauline Oliveros, Bhob Rainey, Vic Rawlings, Christine Sehnaoui, Mike Shiflet, Jason Soliday, Howard Stelzer, Christian Weber, Matt Weston, Jack Wright, Jason Zeh, and many others. He has toured the United States several times.
Jesse Kudler lives in Philadelphia. Current projects include: Benito Cereno (with Dustin Hurt, Chandan Narayan, Tim Albro, and Ian Fraser); HZL, an electronics duo with Tim Albro (and sometimes Dustin Hurt, as HZL BRD); Tweeter, a treble-intensive noise trio with Alex Nagle and Eli Litwin; solo performance and recording; and various ad hoc groupings.
Ian M Fraser (b.1980) is a performer and composer of electronic music. His playing uses a wide palate of digital and analog means to create long-form improvisations involving patience and restraint. Collaborations include the electro-acoustic quintet Benito Cereno with Jesse Kudler, Tim Albro, Dustin Hurt and Chandan Narayan, and Common Senses with Tim Albro. He is also a contributing member to the band Relay.
