tickets

Doors: 7:30 pm

First set: 8 pm

A unprecedented confluence of creative voices from California and beyond, tonight’s audiovisual offerings substantiate diverse angles of approach to the fundamental questions of how to listen and what to do about it.

–

Kevin Corcoran, Adam Lion & Wilson Shook

Improvising as a trio for the first time, but with overlapping collaborative histories, Kevin Corcoran, Adam Lion, and Wilson Shook bring a deep appreciation for the irreducible complexity of moment and place, a fine attunement to its possibilities and constraints, and an abiding commitment to chucking it all and doing something completely different.

Kevin Corcoran works with sound and listening through percussion and place.

As a percussionist he is focused on techniques which emphasize texture, friction, sympathetic vibration, sustained tones and the use of found materials. Whether working with a single drum, an electro-acoustic approach, or playing drum kit, improvisation is crucial to his practice as generative method and non-hierarchical exchange of ideas.

In fieldwork projects, noticing tensions between land use and disuse, infrastructure and open space, contamination, weathering, and remediation guides his place-based practice of recording and composing with sound, image, object, and text.

Based in San Francisco, California, Kevin collaborates across disciplines with musicians, dancers, filmmakers, writers and visual artists. He has performed in North America, Europe, and East Asia, exhibited audiovisual work in the US and Taiwan, and published internationally on small labels dedicated to experimental music.

Adam Lion is a percussionist dedicated to experimental music rooted within the traditions of composition and improvisation. Valuing idiosyncratic techniques, Lion explores new sonic frameworks involving agency, perception, immediacy, and constraint. Through composition he explores larger philosophical concepts such as the creation of structure through chance, cohesion through independence, and the borderlands between the raw materiality of sound and human cognition. At the core of this approach is a full embrace of the objective properties of instruments and sound itself. Of equal importance are the social, emotional, and metaphysical relationships that naturally arise during collaboration between performers, objects, and spaces. Lion creates systems which navigate these dynamics, uncovering unique sonic environments grounded within the immediate moment. This dichotomy between material constraint and autonomy reflects a dialectic which continually points to the same question- how can we use music to research these ideas?

Wilson Shook is an improvising saxophonist and manual therapist living in Pasadena, CA. His approach to music has been shaped by collaborative relationships with Gust Burns, Paul Hoskin, Ben Bennett, Greg Kelley, Carol Genetti, Ted Byrnes, and others, as well as an ongoing sonic exploration of the resonant void spaces of American hydrologic and automotive infrastructure.

A self-taught musician, Wilson approaches improvisation, study, collaboration, and performance as sites of radical experimentation with modes of being, relating, and perceiving. Wilson’s practice cultivates an awareness of human vulnerability and technological fallibility; embraces excess, fragmentation, and incompleteness; and pursues the chaotic, queer, and interdependent imperatives of an aleatory existence amidst a crumbling, toxic culture.

Attentiveness, transformation, commitment to the materiality of the musical act and its consequences; radical presence as the only avenue of escape. Always mindful of the axiom, via Éluard—There is another world, but it is in this one.

Music Research Strategies

Music Research Strategies performs “Throwin’ Hands” – a solo double bullroarer and traps vector from “Ebonics Native Land Acknowledgement: Floating Signifier.” “Throwin’ Hands” is microtonal, socio-legal communication praxeology for theorizing critical and ethical social contracts with Indigenous Knowledge Systems (De-Center for UNKNOWING).

Music Research Strategies is known for SIGE Records (Seattle) releases such as White People Killed Them, Black Spirituals (defunct), Eleven Postures (solo), and more; releases on Weird Cry Records (Ojai); plus, numerous Creative Improvised Music partnerships with international players; and, international Insurgent Learning Workshops (ILWs) for reimagining the UGRR quilt block codes for today’s political landscape. Music Research Strategies is grateful for support from COTFG, Charlotte Street Foundation, FCA, Center for Indigenous Studies @ Bard, Borealis Festival, Sonic Acts, PRO ARTS COMMONS, Intercultural Leadership Institute, High Desert Soundings, Yucca Valley Materials Lab, East Side Arts Alliance, NAKA Dance Theater, In Defense of Memory, Blues Detection Agency, No Idea and so many more. Thank U!

Music Research Strategies will also perform with trumpeter Lemuel Marc for High Desert Soundings.

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu & Michael Pisaro-Liu

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice draws on experimental literature, the conceptual avant-garde, and philosophy. Liu’s work concerns materiality across different contexts and eras, including its transformation, symbolism, decay, and emotional resonance. For Liu materiality includes both living and inanimate matter. Through film, poetry, painting, sculpture, and other media, she reflects the light and darkness of the world she lives in. Her films have been shown at international film festivals and museums, including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum Festival at the Museum of Kyoto, CROSSROADS at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M+ Museum, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Belvedere 21, the Barbican Centre, among others.

Michael Pisaro-Liu is a guitarist and composer and a long-time member of the Wandelweiser collective. While, like other members of Wandelweiser, Pisaro-Liu is known for pieces of long duration with periods of silence, in the past fifteen years his work has branched out in many directions, including work with field recording, electronics, improvisation and ensembles of very different kinds of instrumental constitution. Much of his current work takes the form of mixed-media assemblages, in collaboration with filmmaker/artist/writer Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu.

Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music the California Institute of the Arts.

A ∩ D

Angela Frances Wilson (modular synth) and Devin Sarno (bass + electronics) combined to form A ∩ D (or: A Intersects D), a mostly-musical project that emphasizes the experience of music – which always goes beyond. Instead of thinking about microphones and amps, elevate: discover the difference between a hiss of regret and the fuzz of desire. A lot of music (some good) is just sounds. A ∩ D’s music extends the subconscious, our natural experiential always-mode. Seeming contradictions between booms and delicacy become moot: the ambience is in the music, creating the music, and a simple vice versa. A smell is a vista is a ritual is in the air. The light of being-outsideness echoes in the core of their intimate sonic actions. Space and time’s immateriality has never been so palpable. (Andrew Choate)