Overheard/Underground is a music series presented three times a year at the Mills Gallery. This program has a broad scope aimed to showcase folk, classical and experimental music. In partnership with other institutions such as Boston's Non-Event, Overheard/Underground seeks to provide new underground musical talent the opportunity to reach out to new audiences.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
David Daniell and Doug McCombs | Pairdown | Glenn Jones
David Daniell and Douglas McCombs are both highly respected musicians within their circles and as a founding member of the experimental jazz band Tortoise, Daniell has collaborated with many notable musicians, including Loren Connors, Rhys Chatham, Tim Barnes, Jeph Jerman, Thurston Moore, Greg Davis, and Jonathan Kane, Tom Ze, Azita Youseffi, Will Oldham, Yo La Tengo, and Calexico.
David and Douglas’ collaboration is a delicate tapestry of spacious and ethereal guitar lines woven into abstract, slow-burning and multi-layered textural improvisations. The sounds blend and overlap to create richly faceted and thickly psychedelic passages, unveiling new layers of detail with each and every listen.
Pairdown
Pairdown is the collaboration of Pittsburgh-based singer-guitarists David Leicht and Raymond Morin. The two met and began performing together in 2005. Their eponymous EP, released on Sort Of Records in 2006, is a collection of six songs blending the duo’s inter-dependent acoustic guitar work with Leicht’s inventive writing. The opening title, “Nonlinear Lions” was coined in a passage of Mike Davis’ book, Ecology Of Fear, concerning the link between environmental fluctuations and outbreaks of “deviant” animal behavior. The song portrays exurban domestic bliss interrupted by emergent, predatory wilderness. A series of uneasy images are feathered with bits of satire, from the intro: “they love the taste of your lotion / ending your motion…” to dada-esque refrain, chanted in a bluesy, two-part harmony: “in this future, you’re furniture!” It becomes evident after experiencing one live show that their emphasis of building upon tradition with contemporary influence would fall short in anyone else’s hands, luckily it is in theirs.
Glenn Jones
Glenn Jones is a 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called “Takoma school,” Jones has written extensively on the steel-string guitar’s leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones during the five years before his untimely death in 1986. His music is described by the paramount experimental magazine The Wire as creating “gorgeous luminous settings . . . scored across a series of open tunings, which he threads with beautiful rolling melodies, his slide work soundings like the flutter of tiny metal butterflies . . . one of the best of the recent deluge.”
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Keith Rowe | Jason Lescalleet
8-10pm | $10
Presented by Boston Center for the Arts and Non-Event
Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960's with early influences of Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel. Eventually growing tired of what he considered the form's limitations and began experimenting. Soon after a New Year's resolution to stop tuning his guitar Rowe gradually expanded into free jazz and free improvisation, eventually abandoning conventional guitar technique altogether.
Rowe reports he was partly inspired by a teacher in one of his painting courses who told him, "Rowe, you cannot paint a Caravaggio. Only Caravaggio can paint Caravaggio." After considering this idea from a musical perspective, "trying to play guitar like Jim Hall seemed quite wrong." For several years Rowe contemplated how to reinvent his approach to the guitar, again finding inspiration in visual art, namely, American painter Jackson Pollock, who abandoned traditional painting methods to forge his own style. "How could I abandon the technique? Lay the guitar flat!"
Some accounts report that Rowe's guitar technique was an influence on Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett: "Taking his cues from experimental guitarist Keith Rowe of AMM, Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction."
Rowe developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pickups in unorthodox ways to produce sounds described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien. He has been known to employ objects such as a library card, rubber eraser, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, and common office supplies in playing the guitar. A January, 1997 feature in Guitar Player magazine described a Rowe performance as "resemble a surgeon operating on a patient." Rowe sometimes incorporates live radio broadcasts into his performances, including shortwave radio and number stations. Rowe utilizes this technique masterfully, mixing in random operatic and chance encounters with talkshow hosts, which serves to anchor the sound in humanity, amidst the vast abstraction.
Jason Lescalleet
Jason Lescalleet uses reel-to-reel tape decks to explore the textures of low fidelity analog sounds and the natural phenomena of old tape and obsolete technology. He is one of a growing list of master producer/musicians, whose skill lies as much in reworking, assembling and mastering the material available as in creating it. He has worked with a wide variety of artists including Ron Lessard, Joe Colley and Phill Niblock, and has released a string of solo discs such as Mattresslessness, Electronic Music and The Pilgrim. This is his second release for Erstwhile, after 2001's Forlorn Green (w/ Greg Kelley), and his third has just been released, a duo with Bhob Rainey.
Overheard/Underground : History...
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The Outer Circle | Duo Paginas
The Outer Circle is an ensemble of Pittsburgh composers and musicians that formed to present contemporary works in different forums, in different formats, and in different venues. The ensemble performs original works that involve the performer in the composing process through instruction-based pieces, graphic scores, and flexible compositional structures.
Lenny Young is an orchestral oboist with a background in jazz, improvisation and new music. Mezzo-soprano Raquel Winnica Young is a classically-trained singer with one foot in opera and the other in chamber music. Together, they form Duo Paginas, exploring the intersections of instrumental and vocal melody and the musical intimacy of the duet.
Mills Gallery at the BCA | Cost: $8 | Doors: 7:30pm
