RHA concert 24 November 2013 edit

The Nihilist Spasm Band & Sun Plexus 

Gig recorded on May 17, 2008 at Festival International de Musique Actuelle, Victoriaville, Québec

The Nihilist Spasm Band : John Boyle (Kazoo, kalimba, electronics, drums), John Clement (Bass, drums), Bill Exley (Voice, pan) Murray Favro (Guitar) Aya Ohnishi (Drums, pipe, electronics), unfortunately Art Pratten was ill and did not play

Sun Plexus : Laurent Berger (Drums, electronics), Sébastien Borgo (Guitar), Remy Bux (Bass, electronics)

The Nihilist Spasm Band & Sun Plexus - Full gig at FIMAV 2008

Voici les cordes ! D’un côté trois cordes basses à percuter ou à frotter. De l’autre une douzaine de cordes montées sur un cylindre , rappelant le valiha de Madagascar et s’accordant dans toutes les gammes possibles.  

Dit is het snaarinstrument in de familie! Enerzijds drie bassnaren die met een strijkstok of met fingerpicking bespeeld kunnen worden.
Anderzijds een twaalftal snaren die een cilinder bespannen, en doen denken aan de 'valiha' van Madagascar. Dit twaalfsnarige instrument kan gestemd worden in alle mogelijke toonladders. 


Fujistring

Jay Needham and Eric Leonardson, recorded in Carbondale, Illinois on July 15, 2012. Sound sources include amplified gramophone horns, Springboard (a self-built instrument), and field recordings from Antarctica. The gramophone horns are played with bows, brushes, and various mallets. Chronography: animal is conceived of as a bridge to connect practices of improvised music and sound art that evoke a sense of place. More info about the project is on Jay's website: http://www.jayneedham.net/recent-news/2012/7/16/performance-in-germany-chronographyanimal.html

Chronography:animal (Selection)

ritual for multiphonic alphorn performed by the monks of dreamland. (David Samas, Ash Ritter, Grace Renaud)

Chase the Devil

Crystalithaphone 4 hands with David Samas and Grace Renaud

Dance of the Bones- Music for the Puppet Opera

Pet the Tiger (David Samas, Marshall White, Tom Nunn) play steel plates and bells.

Beyond the Mind

solo improv on invented instruments featuring the free cage, tree harp and flightless egg tabla.

Free cage

Pet the Tiger plays gamelan piano to the night chorus of jungle insects. David Samas performs both vocal parts in the drama, the whistling and keybar. Grace Renaud, gamelan piano.

The Chase

I contributed anonymously, via phone, to one of a number of tapes of voicemail messages on the Automatic Confessional Project initiated by Hal McGee.
Because of the lo-fi quality of the finished product, I can't really tell where my contribution is among the compilations he made. See if you can find it amongst that lo-fi weirdness, if you can recognize it from this original that was recorded at EMS at the same time, during live playing in the phone call – the compilations are embedded in my discography, with more information: http://bergmark.org/disc

The Automatic Confessional

David Samas is a composer, cosmologist, poet, painter, performer, philosopher, farmer and father of 4; he is a practitioner and professor of arcane healing technologies and traditional magics- a field which includes massage, herbalism, hypnotherapy, psychoacoustics and shamanism. He has a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art and studied poetics at the New College of California, Vassar, Bennington and S.F. State. As a young man he performed with the SF Boys Chorus, the SF Opera and the SF Symphony with which he won a GRAMMY for the “best classical recording” of 1994. He also makes sacred geometry amulets and talismans, is an excellent cook, and self publishes small editions of hand bound art books.

Lately, he focuses on inventing instruments and extended vocal techniques. He is the creator of the Superb Metaliphone, the Gamelan Piano, the Crystalithaphone, Glassilalia and a number of musical paintings which serve as sets, orchestras and characters for his inventive operas and shadow plays. He uses Tuvan overtone singing and Tibetan deep chanting along with a host of birdsongs, whale songs, howling and polyphonic split tones to weave a dense tapestry of unusual sounds.

David has performed everywhere from the altar of Grace Cathedral on Easter, to the Art in Nature Festival in the Oakland woods, to guerilla audience performances of “orchestrated applause” at the Other Minds Festival and Davis Symphony Hall. David has performed and been interviewed on local and national radio (KALW-2012, PRN-2011, KQUD, Fifi?) on topics as diverse as organic farming, historical shamanism and healing song. His chamber opera “The Green Wood” premiered at Berkeley Arts Festival in Oct. 2012 and will be performed at shotwell studios in march 2013.   His collaborative trombone concerto premièred at Meridian gallery’s Composers in Performance series Nov 2012 and will be performed tellamatically (bicoastaly) with Pauline Oliveros at CCRMA Stanford and Reinssleir Polytechnical simultaneously . He has performed invented instruments at the Exploritorium (2000) and the SF Art Institute (2001) and received honorable mention form the NFA (1997).

check out his invented instruments on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.383195125039619.110511.100000474044278&type=3
or listen to him on soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/david-samas 

David Samas is also the impresario and host of the Turquoise Yantra Grotto-
a house concert series for avant improvisers and invented instrumentalists with a focus on ethno-modernism and extended techniques. TYG holds a monthly event which is part concert, part art opening and part social club, with Chinese tea service, near Glen Canyon in San Francisco. In that context has recently collaborated with Joe Lasqo, Bart Hopkin, Bob Marsh, Laurie Amat and Tom Nunn. 
Check out tyg on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Turquoise-Yantra-Grotto/284577768269213
or listen in at sondcloud: http://soundcloud.com/turquoise-yantra-grott

He currently plays with and composes for Pet the Tiger, an improvised acoustic collective for invented instruments with Grace Renaud (keyboards and percussion), Ash Ritter (idiophones and aquatiphones), and Peter Bonos (horns and explosives).


Improvised musical performance art with amplified objects and instrument inventions.

Johannes Bergmark makes, among many other things, surrealist musical object theatre with an evolutionary meta-instrument or amplified stage called the Platform. With his main activity as an improvising musician, experimental musical instruments, sound sculptures/-installations/-environments maker and electroacoustic- and text-sound-composer, he has developed over butoh, jester theatre and performance art into a kind of audiovisual object theatre performed as a concert but with a setting as a surrealist puppet play of toys, tools, kitchen utensils, materials, weird and kitch decorative things and junk found on streets and flea markets. The objects bring their history and connotations as well as their often microscopic sound potentials on the little stage, made from a cupboard door with a hidden contact microphone under the floor (usually amplification without any electronic treatments), suspended over the table with a clamp like a springboard into a poor man's utopia where the junk dances the funk on its own terms!
JB has been an increasingly touring free lance musician since he graduated as a piano builder 1996. He also lectures, makes pedagogical projects and workshops, usually focusing on untraditional acoustics, traditional crafts and basic sound technology, hoping to unfold a world where knowledge, skill, inspiration and surprise can meet and develop together and to inspire people to create their own poor man's utopias out of available resources.

In his attitude a skeptic as well as a surrealist, not an artist.

He resides in Stockholm, where he is active in the association for radical and experimental art, Fylkingen (chairman twice), at the Electronic Music Studio, in the swedish skeptics' association Vetenskap och Folkbildning and The Surrealist Group in Stockholm.

Check out my web site for a proper presentation, with texts of all kinds, lots of pictures, film and sound, and all other info that doesn't fit into the format here.

Pet the Tiger is an improvised acoustic collective for invented instruments with David Samas (composer/inventor/extended technique vocals), Grace Renaud (keyboards and percussion), Ash Ritter (idiophones and aquatiphones), and Peter Bonos (horns and explosives). We explore new concepts in friction bowing and split pics, with a special interest in unusual multiphonics and interference patterns. We play a wide assortment of invented, found and re-purposed instruments in order to create landscapes and tell stories in sound.


"Unforeseen" improvisation project with Anthony Kelly Fergus Kelly David Lacey David Stalling & Paul Vogel.

Since the late eighties Sebastien Borgo aka Ogrob has been exploring noise experiment in the most varied of forms through numerous projects, collaborations and records : field & heterodyne recordings, low-tech, noise improv, anti drone, industrial, shamanoise, prepared guitar, guitars installation, no wave, musique brute, post punk, cheap electronics ...

As of today, he is involved in 2 collective projects : L'Autopsie A Révélé Que La Mort Etait Due À L'Autopsie (with Aka_bondage, Anla Courtis, Franq De Quengo), and Micro_penis (with Carl_Y, Claude Spenlehauer, François Heyer)

He also is one of the founding members of experimental post-punk trio Sun Plexus (1993-2010) and neocybernetic unit Ich Bin
(1988-2008)

From the start a subscriber to the DIY ethos, attached to his independency, working self-sufficiently, away from decision makers and institutions, unsubsidized. He was born in 1969, originally from and currently living in Mulhouse, France.

More stuff to listen to: Check the links below

Leonardson is a composer, radio artist, sound designer, instrument inventor, improviser, visual artist, and teacher, who has devoted a majority of his professional career to unorthodox approaches to sound and its instrumentation, with a broad understanding of texture, atmosphere and micro-tones. As a practicing artist and educator he has an interest in the elusive lines that separate art media and disciplines; the promise of technology to enable new possibilities in art, discovering connections between physical action, sensory perception, and ideas.

Leonardson performs regularly on the Springboard, an electroacoustic percussion instrument made from readily available materials. Applying his percussion skills and a piezo pickup to coil springs, wood, plastic combs, and rubber bands he creates rich tones and timbres that, in the words of Nicolas Collins, “evoke the sound world of a Balinese Gamelan orchestra.” Others compare these sounds to industrial vibrations and animal voices. 

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