On Thursday, May 18th we are proud to present Pillars of Decay, project of Wisconsin-based composer Jeff Harriott (percussion, electronics) and percussionist Trevor Saint (glockenspiel, etc.), David Reed’s experimental/electronic/dark ambient solo project Envenomist (CMH), and experimental electronic harpist Nathan-Andrew Leaflight’s solo project Shred van Winkle (CMH). Date: Thursday, May 18 2017. Location: It Looks Like It’s Open (13 E. Tulane Rd., 43202). Admission: $5. Doors open 7:30pm. BYOB, all ages.
About the performers/projects:
Pillars of Decay, created and produced by the Skewed and Such duo Jeff Herriott and Trevor Saint, is a setting of music created for post-consumer instruments fabricated from salvage and scrap materials, realized and enhanced with technology. A concert-length show comprised of original works written for the project, Pillars of Decay is touring to both traditional concert spaces and rehabilitated venues in cities across the Midwest, in places like Buffalo, Detroit, and Milwaukee, where many of the old buildings and structures have been either forgotten or abandoned. The project is designed to celebrate the local individuals and communities that have found new purposes for the abandoned buildings, facilities, and materials in their neighborhoods.
Music for the project is composed by Amanda Schoofs, Matt Sargent, and Saint and Herriott, and blended together into a seamless concert. Instruments include a rebar forest, with hanging pieces of rebar on metal trees; speakers embedded inside oil drums; sonified steel plates, fed with sine tones and other processed sounds; a table of threaded rods; a handmade metal quilt; bullet casing chimes; and various tubes, pipes, bowls, and other hanging metals. The performance includes 11 connected segments of music, totaling 75 minutes. These segments consist of a combination of fully-composed pieces and highly structured improvisations. One of the primary formal ideas is canon, which is embedded in Matt Sargent’s pieces Ash and Waves (there are multiples of each) as well in some of the structured improvisations such as Woven Fields, for threaded rods. We are also exploring connections to memory and loss, notions that are particularly related to Amanda Schoof’s work, such as in Emergency for bullet chimes, emergency paper, and metal quilt.
Some people equate Envenomist with science fiction film scores, and others envision solitary nocturnal travels through bleak urban settings, but a fundamental strength of Envenomist is that these illusory backdrops remain open to interpretation.
Nathan-Andrew Leaflight (Shred van Winkle) began his studies of keyboards, electronic music, and ethnomusicology at Oberlin College’s Conservatory in the early 1980s. By the mid 80s, he was combining various world musics with both rock music and electronic compositions. He began studying pedal harp in the early 1990s, under the tutelage of Jane Cauffiel Thompson (a student of Carlos Salzedo’s). The primary rationale for this? His feeling that there were already just too many great pianists. He began his experiments with amplified harp and effects pedals in the mid 1990s. In 2000, he joined Philadelphia avant-prog band The Red Masque as a founding member. In the mid 2000s, he switched to playing the electric lever harp. Time passed. Seasons changed. The world went on its way, as it does…
Shred van Winkle is an attempt at metaphorical autobiography. He is a character who has slept too long, and now feels separated from his natural time, in surroundings surprisingly unfamiliar. The persona and the music are a means of addressing modern society’s staggering pace of development, which has far outstripped any meaningful changes in its most basic component: the individual person.