Tones Intimate Tumult and Shige Moriya + Jeremy D. Slater ( ) and WvS + Nick Lesley

Sunday, July 5
Admission: $5, $10 minimum
Showtime: 8:30pm
reservations are recommended

Tones Intimate Tumult Bangs Mind Into Dream is a new piece by Gregory Reynolds. It is akin to a ritual environment and contrasts/conflates/juxtaposes field recordings made in japan(2005) with an improvising electro acoustic group. The title is from a passage in Finnegans Wake. Some of the field recordings include a pachinko parlor in Shibuya, water aquaducts in Nasu, raucous frogs in a flooded rice field and an ancient train ticket dispenser in Zama. For this special Monkeytown performance, the group is joined by the video artist Shige Moriya, whose absorption of organic elements into his digital video work creates a sublime gestalt with the sound.

Ann Adachi: Flute, Piccolo
Richard Kamerman: Guitarron, Mechanical Parts, Found Objects
Gregory Reynolds: Field Recordings, Violin, Harmonium, Percussion, Contact Mics

Shige Moriya : Video
http://shige.moriya.googlepages.com/

onkyo no on wo mokusou suru is an “onkyo” inspired contemplation about the inerts of sound – synthesized and recorded - at the borderline of noise and silence. Recently emerged from the Japanese Noise scene, the improvisational genre of “onkyo” is typically characterized by the use of reductionist or minimalist techniques, performance practices and sound choices, producing sound results that border on the existence of sound itself, but are not silence; have a certain zen-like emptiness embodied, yet could be best described as the faint echoes and resounding of sound barely imagined.

In this improvisation ( ) and WvS reveal the internal resounding and echoed essence of each meditated about sound by applying intense signal processing and de/re-constructing analysis to fully synthesized sound materials that are based on the pythagorean tuning scale of the “sho” (a primary reed instrument of “gagaku”, Japan's imperial court music) and elements of raw field recordings and video from various locations in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, and Takamatsu City recorded in 2006-2007.

The drones, soundscapes, near-silences and impulsive events created by processing these sound materials are counterbalanced with ambient and reactive video created with custom-written software and modules that respond to the sound results through processed and layered improvised stills and video.


Jeremy D. Slater ( )
http://www.jeremyslater.net
http://www.parenthesismusic.com

WvS
http://www.myspace.com/thesoundofwvs
http://iwvs.am

Dreaming in Cartoon Pornography multichannel video w/ sound
Nick Lesley is a video artist and musician. Here he presents a short series of multichannel video works which explore how our idea of "play" changes as we age. The works are experiential and playful themselves, making use of the unique set-up at Monkeytown.

Nick Lesley: Video and Sound
http://www.nicklesley.com

BIOS:
Gregory Scott Reynolds believes that the activities of making and listening to sounds have the potential to aid us in achieving focused, sublime and beneficial states of mind. He finds something alchemical in the physical act of bringing objects into vibration and, after many years of playing the alto saxophone in a variety of contexts, has switched to violin, harmonium and percussion in an effort to further his experience with vibrating bodies. The last year has found him fruitfully collaborating with the dancer Mariko Endo and performing with a variety of electronic and acoustic musicians, dancers and video artists.

Ann Adachi is a flutist, pianist and multi-media performer, working with sound, the moving image, and performance. Compositions involve through-composed music for one or more acoustic instruments, and in some pieces, interaction with video and light as sculptural and environmental element. Ann is a member of the Eidolon Ensemble which performs original compositions monthly in New York. Education includes Berklee College of Music (B.M.), and Massachusetts College of Art (course work).

Richard Kamerman prefers small sounds to large sounds but that doesn't mean they are always performed as quiet sounds. He also likes accidental sounds and collecting his instruments from people's trash on the street. He has no time for cigar breaks.

Shige Moriya, born in Kyoto, Japan, is a video artist and curator. He has been in New York since1993, initially working as an assistant curator at Cast Iron Gallery in Soho. In 1996, Moriya moved to Williamsburg and opened CAVE, a grassroots not-for-profit arts organization and artist collective in Brooklyn. He has presented his video pieces locally and in Germany, Japan, Finland and Vietnam. Moriya’s artistic work includes video installations, ambient boxes (which involve creating an atmospheric mixed-media visual/sound installation), and collaborative work with dancers, musicians and visual artists. His video work has been used in several theater and dance productions, and a substantial amount of his work is performed live in an interdisciplinary environment. Recently, Moriya has been working on a series of two-dimensional drawings and print works while continuing his primary work as a video-based installation artist. His installations are often sculptures made of the movements of light. Currently Moriya is the co-director of CAVE, co-curator of the New York Butoh Festival and core member of performance companies LEIMAY and CAVEnsemble.

Jeremy D. Slater ( ) is a sound artist essentially, but also works with video and sound in performance and installation settings. He uses his laptop computer to create a variety of sound, image, and interactive work. His sound work consists of field recordings as a base to create processed drones with tabletop guitar, toys, circuit bent items, and ambient noise. Performances include live performed video that is ambient and reactive. Video work also includes single and multiple channel videos for screening and installations with sound and ephemeral sculpture.

WvS is a New York City based sound organizer and software engineer, who studied computer music composition, classical composition and music theory in Europe with composers Jolyon Brettingham-Smith, Morton Feldman, Gyoergy Ligeti, Roland Pfrengle, Luigi Nono, Wolfgang Rihm, Mathias Spahlinger and in the US with John Cage. Apart from having been the General Manager of "Knitting Factory Records" and running his own record label "noharmdone" for many years, he was Artist-in-Residence at Harvestworks, toured all over Europe & and performed in New York City at Roulette, the Knitting Factory, the Generator Sound Gallery. His recent work emerges from collaborations with leading experimental video and audio artists such ( ), Richard Garet, Chika and Lady Firefly and has been performed at {R}AKE, FLOW, Flux Factory, Video as an Instrument, Good Bye Blue Monday, Warper, Goliath Visual Space, and other venues. A selection of these A/V collaborations has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art Barcelona and at the COSMONOISE 2009 festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. WvS his currently working on two DVD projects and otherwise keeps himself intellectually inspired through the study of contemporary concepts of AI, cellular automata, chaos theory and analog systems modeling. His current improvisational electronic work is inspired by the contemporary noise, experimental electronic, ambient and Japanese 'onkyo' genres.

Nick Lesley is a video artist and musician.