SONIC CIRCUITS

PRESENTS

 

QUEERING SOUND 13

FIN DE SIÉCLE

AN EVENING OF SOUNDS + SPOKEN WORD + DIGITAL ARTS FROM LGBTQ ARTISTS + ALLIES

 

SATURDAY 01 JUNE

7:00 PM

 

PYRAMID ATLANTIC ARTS CENTER

8230 GEORGIA AVENUE

SILVER SPRING MD 20910 USA

 

QUEERING SOUND gathers together artists – with a non-exclusive curatorial focus towards gay, lesbian and post-gender-identified participants – who explore alternative avenues of expression through audio, the digital arts, performance art and spoken word. The annual event – now in its thirteenth year – features live performances from established and upcoming local and touring talents as well as seeks to introduce Washington DC audiences to new sounds and challenging visions from across the globe through digital contributions.

 

LIVE PERFORMANCES + SPOKEN WORD

 

ARTHUR LOVES PLASTIC    BLK w/BEAR + BERNARD WELT    TUĪ PIÀN DUÀN    JOSEPH ROSS    DAN VERA 

 

DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS

 

NICK LOPATA    LOWERED    NOWHEREIANS    O.F.F. STUDIO TORINO + ALMAGEST!

 

 

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© Intangible Arts

ARTHUR LOVES PLASTIC is Bev Stanton, who was born in the Bahamas and raised near Walt Disney World. She has won over a dozen Washington Area Music Awards in the Electronica category. Her music has appeared in shows on the Discovery Channel, VH1, MTV and other cable television networks. Stanton is one of 24 female electronic artists and deejays profiled in Pink Noises: Women in Electronic Music and Sound (Tara Rodgers; Duke University Press, 2010), alongside Anne Lockwood, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Le Tigre and Mira Calix. Stanton recently released a 30-minute download EP influenced and created with iPhone apps. She has also made loops of her music available as themes for the Mikrosonic SPC sketchpad app for Android.

 

[ LIVE PERFORMANCE ]

 

  ARTHUR LOVES PLASTIC online

 

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© Intangible Arts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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© Grace Bauer

 

BLK w/ BEAR – JS Adams; Doug Poplin; Renée Shaw; and PD Sexton – first garnered glowing reviews and international airplay for the thought-provoking and moving ‘Wish for a World without Hurt’ collaboration with London's Rothko and the limited edition ‘fahrenheit_drafts’ 12-inch single (Trace Recordings). Their audio has accompanied film/video projects in NYC and London and selections from ‘Wish for a World’ were used in the Discovery Channel's poignant ‘The Flight that Fought Back’ program. The four-track 'Version 3' extended play is available for download at the Long Division with Remainders ‘14 versions of the same EP’ project site and also available in a box-set collection with all fourteen versions plus an additional digital-download outtakes EP including a 21-minute remix of BLK w/ BEAR’s Version 001. The mini-album ‘Sorry about your (remixes)’ was released on Front & Follow (UK) in 2011. Additional material has been released through Ultra-red’s free download site Public Record, Little Red Squirrel Collective (UK), Cohort Recordings and Sonic Circuits’ District of Noise imprint. In 2013, the group contributed two remixes to ‘Total Fears: Bronze Eye Reinterpreted’ (Ōnyūdō). Future releases include a remix/reconstruction project for Cracked Rabbit (UK) and contribution to a planned compilation of musical interpretations of William Blake's poetry.

 

“...like Basic Channel at their most abstract, and after a severe nervous breakdown” – Wire Magazine

 

“...representative of the modern experience, of commercial horror and the machines that drive it”
– No Pictures

 

[ LIVE PERFORMANCE ]

 

  BLK w/BEAR online

 

  BLK w/BEAR promo film by Renée Shaw

 

Bernard Welt joins BLK w/BEAR as a special guest. Welt is Professor, Arts and Humanities at the Corcoran College of Art + Design and author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art (Lammy Award nominee). He has contributed to art catalogues including Splat! Boom! Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art and Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, and to poetry anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2001. His poem, “I stopped writing poetry...” was selected by a reader poll at poets.org as the best American poem of the year 2000. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in Writing. A former member of the board of directors of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he contributes a continuing series of essays on classic dream-related films to its member magazine, Dream Time, and has recently written the article on cinema and dreams for The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams (Deirdre Barret and Patrick McNamara, eds., Praeger Press, forthcoming January 2012). With co-authors Kelly Bulkeley and Phil King, he has recently completed Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education (State University Press of New York, 2011), the first major academic study of the use of dreams in education.

 

[ SPOKEN WORD ]

 

 

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© Mei Mei Chang

TUĪ PIÀN DUÀN / 遞推片段 (“Recursive Frame Fragmentation”) is a collaboration between Mei Mei Chang (live video, light, objects) and Cory O'Brien (snare drum, electronics). Recursion is presented as infinite audio and video feedback. Fragmentation is the alteration and destruction of objects, sound and light. The subject of fragmentation is the internal perception, mental frame, memory, or idea. Performances are real-time and improvised, using snare drum and infrared CCTV camera as the main instruments. Sustaining textures and motifs allow close inspection of the viewers own perception of the work. The result is simultaneously visceral, organic, frightening, and encompassing.

 

[ LIVE PERFORMANCE ]

 

  TUĪ PIÀN DUÀN online

 

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© Hibernate Records

 

LOWERED – a duo of multi-instrumentalist Katie English (Isnaj Dui) and guitarist Chris Gowers (Karina ESP) – began at the start of 2012 and ended the year with a live debut performance at Café OTO for a Hibernate show and now, a debut album called ‘Lost Seas.’ Work on the album began in February during a wind-swept afternoon sourcing field recordings on Brighton beach. The majority of the album was then recorded using cello, piano, and cymbal during a single day in March at both a London studio and an empty church. In the months that followed gongs, clarinet and field recordings from the beach were added.

 

Lowered create pared-down arrangements using reductive playing processes and avoid using digital effects, instead relying on experiments with microphone placement and naturally reverberant spaces. The resulting sound focuses on the pure tonal qualities of the instruments, and the narrative of the album, which references Donald Crowhurst in the opening track title, is reflected through its slow, melancholic cello drones, dark swells of piano and sparse melodies.

 

"…a sombre and pensive meditation for remote seashores and abandoned lighthouses" – Fluid Radio

 

“…a masterwork of textural drone, and is, perhaps, the perfect soundtrack for darkest nights on the empty sea” – Futuresequence

 

[ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS ]

 

  LOWERED : HIBERNATE RECORDS online

 

  ISNAJ DUI online

 

  KATRINA ESP online

 

Lopata_Graves_Restless Night Music ‘Restless Night Music’ video still
Queering Sound 2008, Pyramid Atlantic
© Nick Lopata

 

NICK LOPATA creates and edits video for Blowoff, the popular deejay event thrown by Bob Mould and Richard Morel, first staged in Washington D.C. and now held across the nation including residencies in NYC, San Francisco, San Diego, Provincetown and Chicago. In addition to his video work, Nick’s other projects include photography, lighting design and independent film. QUEERING SOUND will present his video to “Let’s Go Back to Morse Code” by Elite Barbarian.

 

[ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS ]

 

  BLOWOFF online

 

  ELITE BARBARIAN online

 

CB_Photo copyright Diana Jarvis

© Diana Jarvis

 

NOWHERIANS is the solo ambient, drone project from London-based sound engineer/ editor and bassist Crawford Blair. He performs in Rome Pays Off formed by original Rothko members Mark Beazley and Blair in February 2010, with Chris Gowers from Karina ESP now joining them on treated electric guitar. Blair: “All Nowherians music is created as quickly as time will allow, and destroyed immediately after mixing. Nowherians music makes me think of the patterns I see when I close my eyes and push my eyeballs in slightly, not the actual dots drifting past but the warmth and childlike familiarity of that feeling.” His debut solo EP “that is not an acceptable lullaby” comes out in May on Trace Recordings.

 

[ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTOR ]

 

  NOWHERIANS online

 

  TRACE RECORDINGS online

 

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© Giorgia Mannavola

SOUND INSTALLATION DESIGNED BY O.F.F. STUDIO TORINO, MUSIC & SOUNDS BY ALMAGEST!

 

In 2007 the “artiste extraordinaire” Ernesto Tomasini and fellow Italian musician Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo – a.k.a. ( r ) and member of the cult band Larsen – released the album “Canes Venatici” (for US label Blossoming Noise and sporting on the front cover a picture by award winning photographer Giulia Caira).

 

An alternative mix of “Trattato Sulla Natura Delle Stelle Per Voce e Harmonium”, one of the tracks from the album, was then used as soundtrack for a touring exhibition on Klaus Nomi.

 

The following year, with Evor Ameisie (NG / Northgate and Camerata Mediolanense) and Paul Beauchamp (Blind Cave Salamander), they took a live version of the album to several European music festivals including shows at the Auditorium Serralves in Portugal, historical locations in Italy and the Torino LGBT film festival. More concerts were staged and in 2011 they toured Germany, performing at The Volksbuhene in Berlin, the Kampnagel in Hamburg and the Dortmund Schauspielhaus.

 

At the end of 2010, Italian experimental label Chew-z released their first album as a four piece band, “The Hunting Dogs of Boötes the Herdsman”, a live and revised version of “Canes Venatici” featuring remixes by Khan, Andrew Liles and 9cento9.

 

The band spent most of its life without a name, billed mainly as “Palumbo/Tomasini's Canes Venatici live” and in 2010 they progressed to “Palumbo/Tomasini's Almagest!” and in 2012, with the release of their new full length studio album “Messier Objects” (composed and performed by all band members and produced by Marco Milanesio) they will officially become Almagest! (named after the 2nd-century mathematical and astronomical Ptolemy treatise on the apparent motions of the stars and planetary paths but with a final exclamation mark just like Neu! and John Foxx's Ultravox!).

 

“Messier Objects” will be released by Texas-based label Tourette Records in 2013 with an original cover artwork by London artist Dan Hillier.

 

“...traditional dances from a place that does not exist”

– Baby Dee

 

“...like peering out of a window of Doctor Caligari's Cabinet” – Maurizio Blatto

 

[ DIGITAL CONTRIBUTORS ]

 

  ALMAGEST! online

   

  O.F.F. STUDIO TORINO online

 

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© Intangible Arts

 

JOSEPH ROSS is the author of two poetry collections: Meeting Bone Man (2012) and the forthcoming, Gospel of Dust (2013) His poems appear in many anthologies and literary journals including Poet Lore, Tidal Basin Review and Drumvoices Revue. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and is the winner of the 2012 Pratt Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Prize. He teaches English at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C.

 

“Not too many people are residing on the same floor with Ross when it comes to writing about race...The words of Ross demand a sacred place. His poems honor the dead and instruct the living.” – E. Ethelbert Miller; Director, African American Resource Center, Howard University

 

[ SPOKEN WORD ]

 

  JOSEPH ROSS online

 

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© Intangible Arts

 

DAN VERA is a writer, editor and literary historian living in Washington, D.C. His areas of academic study have included history, anthropology, theology, and justice & peace studies with abiding interests in history, art and architecture. After working in church-based homeless and LGBT non-profit work, he's edited the gay culture journal White Crane and its Gay Wisdom project for the last ten years.

 

He is the author of two collections of poetry Speaking Wiri Wiri, inaugural winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize (Red Hen, 2013), and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books, 2008). His poetry has appeared in publications and outlets including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Delaware Poetry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Naugatuck River, the anthologies Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses, Full Moon On K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C., Dog Blessings, and D.C. Poets Against the War. Vera has been a featured reader at poetry readings around the country and his work has been featured on the Library of Congress's broadcast Poet and the Poem, Pacifica Radio's nationally broadcast Peace Watch and Sirius Satellite Radio's Writers on Writing. Vera has been a frequent panelist on literary history, literary diversity, alternative publishing, political poetics, LGBT history and LGBT writing. He's had writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Soul Mountain Retreat

 

He's also curated poetry readings and community events in the Washington area through the poetry incubator Poetry Mutual of America. He's the co-creator of the literary history website, D.C. Writer's Homes and serves on the board of Split This Rock Poetry. He's published the work of other poets through Vrzhu Press and Souvenir Spoon Books and served on award juries for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Arlington County Cultural Affairs Division.

 

[ SPOKEN WORD ]

 

  DAN VERA online

 

DC-Sonic-Circuits-LOGO

SONIC CIRCUITS is a Washington D.C. area promoter for experimental music. Sonic Circuits seeks to expose audiences to cutting edge contemporary music that defies genres, and offer artists new platforms to present their music and opportunities to network and collaborate with artists from around the world. In addition to organizing an annual festival since 2001, Sonic Circuits programs performances year round. Sonic Circuits is presented in part by Improv Arts Inc., a non-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to supporting the artistic and career development of artists and creating new markets for contemporary music.

 

  SONIC CIRCUITS online