Our April 2017 Frequency Fridays show features interdisciplinary artist/improviser/composer Lea Bertucci (NYC), ambient/drone/noise duo embral (Adam Holquist (PA) and Charles Shriner (IN)), jazz improviser Gerard Cox (CMH), Steve Wymer (CMH) industrial/noise/experimental techno solo project Tactil Vision, and violinist/improviser Mike Khoury (MI). Date: Friday, April 7 2017. Location: It Looks Like It’s Open (13 E. Tulane Rd., 43202). Admission: $10, $15 for 2. Doors open 8pm. BYOB, all ages. Our Frequency Fridays 2016-2017 season is supported by a grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
About the performers:
Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser working with installation, sound, and projection. As an instrumentalist, she focuses on an electro-acoustic preparation of the bass clarinet that heavily utilizes speaker feedback. In recent years, her projects have expanded to site-specific compositions for electronics and instruments, multichannel sound installations and music concrete collage. Her new album, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is being released on NNA Tapes at the end of March 2017.
embral is the duo of Adam Holquist (Erie, PA) and Charles Shriner (Indianapolis, IN). Beginning in 2012, the pair have released three critically acclaimed studio albums and given dozens of live performances, first under their combined solo monikers of onewayness + dRachEmUsiK, and continuing from 2017 as embral. Their music draws influence from ambient, drone, dub, noise, electroacoustic music, modal jazz, non-idiomatic improvisation, and a variety of other musical and non-musical sources.
Adam Holquist is a composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist from Erie, Pennsylvania. He uses guitars, pianos, analog and digital synthesis, spoken word and field recordings, and a variety of hardware and software tools to create atmospheric and textural music. Adam tours regularly, perfoming at festivals, galleries, cafés, dive bars, art spaces, basements, and the occasional laundromat throughout the US and in Canada, and has released over a dozen albums and EP’s. In addition to recording and performing solo as onewayness, Adam regularly performs in both composed and improvised group settings with a variety of local and global collaborators. Adam is also the curator of the electroFLUX experimental music series, which presents creative music from local, regional, and international artists at various Erie venues.
Charles Shriner is a musician, sound designer and producer from Indianapolis, Indiana. During his 40+ year career, he has worked as an arranger, session player and instrumentalist touring with numerous international performers and has played on over 50 independent and major label recordings. He has been a guiding force in many projects including The Genes, Mr. Presto, dRachEmUsiK and Faux Pas Quartet, and has produced artists in diverse genres including jazz, techno-industrial, classical, country, hip hop, and everything in-between. As a composer and sound designer he has created the music and sound design for AMA award winning world-class museum installations, art installations and planetarium shows in addition to work for video games, film, video, dance troupes, and theater. Additionally, Charles is owner of MCSD Studio and NetLabel and has created a series of workshops on free-form improvisation which incorporate his training and facilitation skills in Jungian based experiential emotional work.
Piano is properly considered to be a percussion instrument, but the typical association of piano is with smooth, legato playing like Chopin or Keith Jarrett. Gerard Cox’s all-improvised solo performances situate piano as a percussion instrument more than just in-name. Deeply influenced by the percussive approaches to piano developed by Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Cecil Taylor and others, he has opted to literally integrate the piano into a drum set concept- manning a hi-hat cymbal and bass drum with his feet, so playing simultaneously and in conversation with what he plays on piano; various cymbals and other percussion are also available for a hand that isn’t occupied at the time. This is a coordination challenge but it affords him the chance to do orchestrated piano and drum playing together that would be very difficult to pull off with another person and without a score.
Cox favors a philosophy of improvisation that has been dubbed “total improvisation”. While very taken by both the spirit and content of free jazz and avant-garde music, he recognizes that playing in rejection of convention as a rule can simply and ironically create its own orthodoxy that serves to box the improviser in. Total improvisation then allows the musician to bring all of his/her musical influences to bear upon an improvisation; it is less about ideological purity and more about maximizing the improviser’s creative freedom. In his case, while he favors an abstract, angular approach as his base, he also likes to actively engage the bedrock of American music– blues, as well as distilling the influences of bebop, stride, 20th century classical music, reggae, and sludge/doom rock through his own sensibilities. He also likes to take simple, familiar pop songs, TV/movie themes and jazz standards, and re-contextualize or deconstruct them in ways that are surreal, humorous, or which make improbable connections between genres. Everything is fair game, and yet whimsy or cleverness is never the end goal; at the heart of his improvisations is a real desire to integrate so much that he loves and appreciates in music into a cohesive whole that speaks as a “composition”. Indeed, improvisation is his method but spontaneous composition is always the ideal he strives toward.
Cox’s performances are physical, visceral, and quite playful. He believes in the solo performance as a way to achieve catharsis and it shows in the way that he really “goes for it” in a set. He hopes to not only engage and entertain but to reflect something essentially human and feeling back to the audience.
Tactil Vision has been creating underground electronic music since 1995 in various forms, and currently as experimental techno, IDM and dark ambient. Self-releasing various CDrs, digital mixtapes, Bandcamp albums, compilation appearances as well as a number of associated artwork, live performances have consisted of abstract electronic noise to hybrid-DJ-performances of original material to the current exploration of live PA MIDI jams.
Palestinian-American musician Mike Khoury (1969) was raised in Mt. Pleasant, MI. He studied violin in the local school systems with instructors Kerry Goodwin and Nancy Smith. During his formative years, Khoury also played electric bass in several rock groups. Exposure to the visual arts, especially abstract expressionism, played a large role in Khoury’s early years. Khoury is a firm believer in learning the rules in order to break them, although the learning and breaking sometime happen simultaneously. His studies in improvisation parallel his work in studying traditional violin technique and music theory. He cites Halim El-Dabh, Lata Mangeshkar, Bill Dixon, Lucia Dlugoszewski, and Charlie Patton as influences. As a trained economist, Khoury’s approach to improvisation and music theory is informed by his knowledge of statistics, mathematics and the behavioral sciences. Khoury has also curated a long standing Detroit creative music series and has composed or contributed to music for film, television and radio. Today, Khoury conducts both ethnographical, sonic and historical research from his laboratory and studios in Redford, MI.