Urban Honking

Wednesday, June 15

8:30pm Grouper, Sarah Dougher, Seth Nehil, More @ Holocene

Wednesday 15 June

TIME
8:30pm

COST
$5.00 day of show

Grouper
Sarah Dougher
Seth Nehil
Bryson Hansen
Flash Choir

This edition features Flash Choir in collaborative sets with special guest composers Grouper, Sarah Dougher, Seth Nehil and Bryson Hansen!

Portland’s famously fertile musical community has a really hard time setting healthy creative boundaries for itself. It’s a big part of what keeps our city’s music scene teeming with such an enviable array of new and exciting musical projects and prospects: experimental composers and sound artists frequently dip their toes into populist waters, just as pop musicians brazenly borrow from the annals of the avant-garde. From all five quadrants, the realms of sonic possibility are giddy with cross-pollination and unabashed genre-b(l)ending.

To capitalize on this unique confluence of creativities, Holocene and 66 Records presents NEW MUSICS, a quarterly series which invites Portland’s most exciting sound scientists and pop adventurers to collaborate with some of the city’s under-sung traditional music ensembles, in an evening of sonic experimentation on the grand scale.

Each edition of NEW MUSICS highlights a single musical ensemble to serve as the house band for a rotating cast of local composers, musicians, and songwriters, who will each be invited to tailor their singular compositions in exploration of the particular qualities of the night’s given ensemble.

With its latest installment on Wednesday, June 15th, NEW MUSICS is proud to present a night of collaborations with eclectic voice collective, Flash Choir, who are set to debut new compositions by ambient noise maker Grouper (Liz Harris), songwriter Sarah Dougher, sound artist and recent RACC recipient Seth Nehil, and experimental installation artist Bryson Hansen. In addition, DJ Yeti (Mike McGonigal) will provide the evening’s musical interludes, all for a mere $5.

A PREVIEW OF WHAT THE NIGHT HAS IN STORE:

PART – GROUPER
PART is the third installment in an ongoing tape collage series by Grouper. The piece, and series, are centered around exploration of the transitive spaces that exist in the divide between two objects: worlds, pairs, opposites. PART focuses particularly on the divides between our own interiors and those of others, the paradoxical nature of a personal interior populated by ephemera that we are universally united in experiencing, but experience alone. The composition will pair tape collage and live processing by Grouper with vocals by members of Flash Choir.

Fin de Siecle I, – Sarah Dougher
Commissioned by the estate of the late poet, Leslie Scalapino, this work stages the first of three experimental poem-plays using piano, violin, cello, trumpet, trombone, percussion and five voices. This work is departure from Dougher?s folk-rock solo material and compositions for large choir, and in it she transliterates the difficulty of Scalapino?s language and conceptual framework through an exploration of repetition and voicing. The full piece will premier September 14 at the TBA Festival.

Games #4 and #32 – Seth Nehil
Seth Nehil, in collaboration with Taryn Tomasello, Gabi Villasenor and members of the Flash Choir.
This piece for six voices, live processing and sound, is a work-in-progress version of fragments from the multimedia performance, Children’s Games, premiering in late October 2011 at the mOuth.

Ghost Yard – Bryson Hansen
Ghost Yard tells a short nonlinear story of a character who is haunted by a phantom or ghostlike apparition, depicted through a blend of choral heavy pop music and live sound collage. The piece consists of previously recorded material, live vocal performance, and some live instrumentation. The sound in the performance is multichannel and is composed for the space.