The Fuse Factory | Columbus, Ohio

Our February Frequency Fridays show features instrument inventor Skip LaPlante (NY), experimental musician Michael Wall (CMH), and computer musician Joe Panzner (CMH). Date: Friday, March 2, 2012. Location: Wild Goose Creative (2491 Summit St. 43202). Admission: $8, $10 for 2. Doors open 8pm. Our Frequency Fridays 2011-2012 season is supported by a generous grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

About the performers:

Skip LaPlante invents, builds, composes for, performs on and teaches with musical instruments built from trash. He co-founded MUSIC FOR HOMEMADE INSTRUMENTS in 1975, has built over 200 instruments., and has composed music for over 100 modern dance and off-off Broadway theater presentations. He appears regularly with the American Festival of Microtonal Music Ensemble and has appeared in over 1500 performances in elementary schools with Bash The Trash. His instruments have been exhibited at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Contemporary Crafts, the Memphis Pink Palace Museum, The Utah Arts Festival, The Capital Childrens’ Museum, New Music America, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, and he has played his instruments on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. He will be performing his piece Aurelia Insulinda on a set of pipes that take a subset of 31 pitch per octave equal temperament, written for Palindrome Dance Company about 30 years ago, along with several improvisations on a variety of instruments made from scrap material.

Other factoids about Skip include: his favorite food is wild raspberries; he has presented lectures on music from Carnegie Hall to the University of Northern Sumatra; he has played traditional Javanese court music with Gamelan Kusuma Laras from 1985-2005, and is currently playing with the experimental gamelan ensemble Gamelan Son of Lion; has received a summons for taking trash out of a garbage can; his favorite place for listening is the James River Face Wilderness in Virginia any mid-August evening; he last shaved in 1972, last wore matching socks in high school, and has worn a necktie exactly twice since 1977.

Michael Wall began collaborating with dance and other art forms at an early age and continues to work with artists internationally. He has made work for the Jose Limon company, Mark Haim, Lisa Race, John Evans, Lucky Kele, David Dorfman, David Grenke, Rudy Perez, Pam Pietro, Pat Mayer, K.J. Holmes, Paulette Sears, Julia Ritter, Randy James, Martha Tornay/East Village Dance Project, Jenn Nugent, Wally Wolfgruber, Heather McArdle, Everything Smaller, Incidents Physical Theater, Merge Dance and many others. Michael and designer Jamie Karczewski have formed the company asimplesound, llc that produces music and resources for dance, film and other media. Michael works full-time in the Department of Dance at Ohio State University and accompanies at the Bates Dance Festival and the American Dance Festival.

Joe Panzner draws on the live electronic music of John Cage and David Tudor, the long-form memory experiments of Morton Feldman, and the digital extremism of Peter Rehberg, Florian Hecker, Zbigniew Karkowski, Dion Workman, and Julien Ottavi. He records and performs with scenic railroads (alongside Mike Shiflet), and has performed with David Reed and Larry Marotta. Panzner works with live electronics and within an ethos of musical materialism, preferring visceral sound experience to representation. He uses treated natural and instrumental sounds, digitally processed analog synthesis, frequency extremes, acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena. His most recent album “clearing, polluted” is a three-part reflection on sensation, contrast, and loss and is dedicated to Stephen Lionel Caynon (1979-2003). He has also recently completed his doctoral dissertation in Musicology.