Come to this great show of four great acts!
#1. TETUZI AKIYAMA-JOHN KRAUSBAUER DUO (Japan/California)
Tetuzi Akiyama (Tokyo, Japan)
Akiyama is primarily recognized for his work in the field of improvisatory music. An instrument-builder, guitarist, electronic musician, and organizer of monthly improv meetings at Tokyo’s Off Site, Akiyama has built a decades-long reputation as a highly inventive musician in the field of electro-acoustic music. On the acoustic guitar, Akiyama is introspective. Each note on the crooked trail throbs with intention—charged by preceding silence. His electrified foray into boogie and blues may seem totally irreconcilable. But much like the late drone-blues master Junior Kimbrough, or the Art Brut fiddler Henry Flynt, Akiyama’s vision for boogie set its sights on a monistic devotion to an interminable groove. Through the distorted chug of his guitar emerges a powerful narcotic state hinting at the work of 60’s and 70’s minimalist pioneers but without a loss of vigor from the attendant over-intellectualization.
John Krausbauer (Oakland, CA)
“Down, down, he swam till his arms and legs grew tired and hardly moved. He knew that he was deep. The pressure on his eardrums was a pain, and there was a buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush…This hurt was not death…Death did not hurt. It was life, the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him. His willful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him.”
Like Martin Eden’s final moments in Jack London’s eponymous first novel, the music of John Krausbauer navigates a numinous crevice between physicality and annihilation. This is dangerous music—a pilgrimage through dolmens to be submerged in the warm catalepsia of trance minimalism but not before nearly drowning in the blistering liquid skree.
#2 KAORI SUZUKI (Oakland CA)
“one of the best academic composers in the country at generating long-form pieces that rivet and then blow your mind with a few scrupulously chosen tones and modulations…the results make you feel as if your ears have become op-art paintings and are somehow hypnotizing themselves”
— Dave Segal, The Stranger
“Musicians such as Kaori Suzuki exist for the same reasons new religions do”
— Inna Fable, Boston Hassle
#3 VICTORIA SHEN
Victoria Shen is a noise musician, visual artist, and instrument-maker native to San Francisco but working out of New England.
Shen’s sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Shen’s music floods its location acting as a form of sculpture. Her music features analog modular synthesizers (Flower Electronics), contact microphones, and other self-built electronics. These instruments are designed to electronically reproduce chaotic systems, systems which are highly sensitive to small changes in their initial parameters. The resulting music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of the extreme textures and gestural tones.
Shen’s live video performances produces visual palimpsests and digital residues. Shen achieves this by using software she has authored in order to generate visuals combining real-time video with found footage thematically linked by sexuality, violence, and art history through a process of exaggeration/effacement.
Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe as Victoria Shen and Evicshen and as half of the duo TRIM in North America and the UK. Some notable venues in which she has performed include Boston City Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ISSUE Project Room NY, DOMMUNE Tokyo, and Petreon Sculpture Park Cyprus. Shen has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm Sweden, WORM Rotterdam Netherlands, and Kurimanzutto New York.
#4 CHRIS STRUNK
CHRIS STRUNK is a Boston based percussionist and drummer. His solo work focuses on cymbal overtones, friction, and the vibration and rattle of non traditional objects used as percussion instruments. He has been an active show promoter and musician in the Boston area for the past sixteen years. He has been active in many groups such as Los Condenados, Avoidance, Taps, Phantom Rides, Sheer Anxiety, Conversions, Baja Blatz, Sleeper Cell, and many more. His first full length cd No Chart Could Map My Constellations is soon forthcoming on the newly minted, Philadelphia based label Killing Time Between the Ice Ages.