The Fuse Factory | Columbus, Ohio

Our April Frequency Fridays show features circuit-bent hacker-space rock trio CMKT4 (IL), acapella electronica musician Kate Westfall (OH), experimental electronica band Highly Funktioning Kult (OH), and artist Doosung Yoo, who will be lecturing about his latest project Vishtauraborg v. 2.6. Date: Friday, April 6, 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 and presenter:

The circuit-bent/garage rock trio CMKT 4 hail from DeKalb, IL. Their band is comprised of the holy trinity of rock, guitar-bass-drums, that has been slathered with a nice dollop of synthesizer and circuit-bent toy textures. Their music is comprised of straightforward anthems and crunchy, bluesy numbers that bleed into electronic, semi-improvised Kraut rock. Be sure to pick up one of their hand-made bottle-cap contact microphones at the merch table!

Kate Westfall performs as a solo vocalist, layering digital loops to create styles steering from primitive to tribal to pop to lounge. Sometimes aggressive, sometimes soulful, it can be heard that her range of musical travels has begun with a confident footing. The music for Westfall’s debut album, “VoKate”, was created by layering a series of looping vocal melodies and sound effects, all of which were created organically by her. Rhythms were made through body-actions of the feet, hands, arms, mouth, collarbone, and bracelets. The exception to the organic purity is “Private Scientist” which includes Westfall’s keyboard and pencil scratchings among other aural teasings, with assistance from audio technician Eric Barnett. The “VoKate” album was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Eric Barnett. Kate Westfall’s live performances include live vocal looping and digital rhythms, and occasional hand drums and spoken word. The appearance of digeridoo, washboards, or marimba is not to be unexpected.

The Highly Funktioning Kult is a trio that insists on on-the-spot spontaneous, only slightly controlled anarchy. They evolve and morph, move and change, from restful ambient to out and out train wreck. They never know what’s going to happen and neither do you. But isn’t that just life in a nutshell?

Doo-Sung Yoo is a new media artist from Seoul, South Korea. He explores hybrid art, synthesizing scientific research within artwork and interweaving interdisciplinary media between different professional fields, which find and discover the aesthetic possibilities for new art form. His current focuses are on surpassing the human body form and its biological limitations with technological augmentations, which are illustrated in his ongoing project series, the Organ-Machine Hybrids, in which disembodied animal organs are combined with electronic devices within mechanical bodies and the human body. His experimental ideal hybrids have been shown in many exhibitions such as Darwin’s Bicentennial: Art, Science and the Origin of Species, Columbus Ohio and art festivals such as the International Digital Arts Festival, Prospectives.09, at Reno, Nevada with many scholarship awards such as Fergus Gilmore Art Scholarship. One of the organ-machine hybrids, Aqua001.c02: Robotic Pig Heart-jellyfish, was introduced in Russian popular art magazines, such as Iskusstvo and OpenSpace.ru, and used in the framework of lectures by Russian curator Dmitry Bulatov. The other hybrid, Lie: Robotic Cow Tongue, was reviewed on the popular web blog, Boing Boing, and interviewed on We Make Money Not Art, a popular new media art website. The other hybrid, Pig Bladder-clouds was also mentioned in Northern Lights and Rhizome at the New Museum.