Sarah Hennies performs Gather & Release her exploration of the vibraphone in synthesis with her experiences of identity, obsession, anxiety, tension, grief, and loss.
Over the course of an hour, Hennies entangles highly focused percussion playing with field recordings, sine waves, signifiers from her personal & family history (including a 20+ year old recording of her grandfather reciting poetry), and bilateral stimulation, a tool for anxiety release and a major component of EMDR therapy (a branch of psychotherapy that focuses on relieving the patient of disturbing memories as a treatment for psychopathology).
Jeph Jerman & Tim Barnes
Across a dozen years and the distance from Cottonwood, Arizona to Louisville, Kentucky, the duo of Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes has offered powerful, minimal music rooted in a shared dedication to the creative act of listening.
Ikue Mori and Steve Noble first played together in 2010 at London's Cafe Oto. It was immediately evident to everyone in the room that something had clicked and a very special combination had emerged.
Apparently operating according to some sort of shared dream logic, Mori and Noble’s music is always unpredictable but never incoherent, switching suddenly between ominous abstract soundscapes and exuberant rhythmic interplay, peppered with strange recurrences, idiomatic fragments and vertiginous changes of perspective, and characterized by a strong sense of forward momentum.
From her beginnings drumming with the seminal no wave unit DNA, Mori has always had a distinctively percussive sensibility, and her deft electronic manipulations merge perfectly with Noble’s fiercely physical handiwork. Drums and their digital double: the similarities and differences overlap and interrupt, crystallize and dissolve, split and converge into a fast-flowing torrent of compelling musical activity. — FATAKA
"from the very beginning hits you with complex percussive elements that will perplex you while you silently mouth WTF! . . . makes me think that Igor Stravinsky's "Rites Of Spring" was spliced with Edgard Varèse's "Densities". . . . Hands down one of the best records of 2013 thus far!" - Chuck Bettis, Downtown Music Gallery
"bombards the listener from every direction, leading to fever-pitch moments where the border between live drum kit and digital sound file disappears, amounting to what sounds a hybrid of The White Noise, Evol’s Punani Rubber and Stockhausen’s Kontakte all on 78 rpm, playing forwards and backwards at random." - Christopher Olson, The Liminal
“a stunning, adrenalin-inducing tour de force." John Eyles, All About Jazz
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist currently residing in Ithaca, NY. Her work is primarily concerned with an immersive, psychoacoustic presentation of sound brought about by an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice that Nathan Thomas of Fluid Radio described as "a highly sophisticated and refined performance technique...that starts and ends with listening and encourages a different way of listening from its audience."
Jeph Jerman’s experimental roots run through the creative music scenes of Denver and Seattle, the 1980s cassette underground, and in more recent years a thorough sonic investigation of the desert Southwest where he lives and works.
Tim Barnes’s resume as a percussionist, engineer, and curator is studded with collaborators that outline the entire cosmos of avant-garde music from the 1960s onward, including Tony Conrad, Sonic Youth, Ken Vandermark (who appears here as a guest), Royal Trux, and Tower Recordings.
Ikue Mori was raised in Tokyo and moved to New York in 1977. Soon after, she started playing drums and formed the experimental no wave band DNA with Arto Lindsay. In the mid ‘80s John Zorn introduced her to the NY downtown-improvising scene and she began performing using drum-machines, a very unlikely choice in the context of improvised music, forging her own unique approach.
Since then Ikue has collaborated with numerous musicians in diverse genres and styles throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, while continuing to produce and record her own compositions. She received the award for Prix Ars Electronics Digital Music in 1999 and shortly after started using a laptop computer to expand her vocabulary, not only playing sounds but creating and controlling images.
Ikue Mori was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.
Steve Noble is London's leading drummer, a fearless and constantly inventive improviser whose super-precise, ultra-propulsive and hyper-detailed playing has galvanized encounters with Derek Bailey, Matthew Shipp, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Stephen O'Malley, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Rhodri Davies and many, many more.
In the early eighties, Noble played with the Nigerian master drummer Elkan Ogunde, Rip Rig and Panic, Brion Gysin and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, before going on to work with the pianist Alex Maguire and with Derek Bailey (including Company Weeks 1987, 89 and 90). He was featured in the Bailey's excellent TV series on Improvisation for Channel 4 based on his book ‘Improvisation; its nature and practise’.
He has toured and performed throughout Europe, Africa and America and currently leads the groups N.E.W (with John Edwards and Alex Ward) and DECOY (with John Edwards and Alexander Hawkins).
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