WWW.TRAUERMUSIKFESTIVAL.ORG
DATES
1 August 2009
Soft-Boiled Eggies I Geneva Jacuzzi I Oscar “Sister Mantos” Santos
15 August 2009
Indian Jewelry I John Webster Johns I Julia Holter I Im Kino
29 August 2009
William Basinski I Jason Grier I Mark So I Sound Installation by Lucky Dragons
$7 per night I $15 full pass
TRAUERMUSIK is a three-part concert series curated by Los Angeles neo-nonprofits eighteen-thirty and HumanEar. It is an extended meditation on the purpose, function and power of sorrow in music. The curators selected three historical texts to convey three profound notions of melancholy, attempting to create a kaleidoscopic experience of sadness that is far from the dreary monochrome that might come to mind. The project sets aim for an understanding of sadness as colorful and paradoxically complex as rain on a sunny day. By challenging their artists to create original works outside their comfort range and by pairing artists from genres as diverse as experimental classical, ambient electronica and avant-pop, it would seem they are attempting to break the uniform gray into a dizzying spectrum of subtleties.
Its title – borrowed from German romantic composers' favorite term for "Mourning Music" – is a clue to the overarching plan. Three concerts, devoted to the melancholy of longing, the melancholy of excess and the melancholy of contentment, respectively, are titled only by the historical quotations used as "instruction sheets" to the artists involved. Ultimately, it may be Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Claude Baudelaire, who with their inscrutable notions of pain and suffering guide the course of these starry nights.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
eighteen-thirty and HumanEar represent an emerging arts leadership born from Los Angeles' unique millenneal cultural habitat, one which saw the rise of both native and expatriate subcultures blending freely with critical, social and political traditions commonly held in sway by museums and educational institutions. For more information, visit www.eighteen-thirty.com I www.humanearmusic.org.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
SOFTBOILED EGGIES consists of local cultural entrepreneurs Janet Kim and Benjamin White. Kim led what might well turn out to be one of the most influential art spaces in Los Angeles. Over the course of its three years, her Tiny Creatures gallery de-balkanized a fragmented landscape. Benjamin White is at the forefront of the Los Angeles cultural landscape as a DJ and party promoter for the popular Part Time Punks at the Echo and Punky Reggae at La Cita. He has recently expanded his musical contribution through his involvement in Hollywood’s new Space 15Twenty. Listen to their music here.
GENEVA JACUZZI, like many of her kindred spirits in LA's "avant-pop" scene, obsessively renders a fantastical world of sound in an absurdly compressed medium: cassette tape. Where she stands apart is in the emotional depth, sonic inventiveness and sheer personality evinced in every second of her live performances. Listen to her work here.
OSCAR ‘SISTER MANTOS’ SANTOS is an active and hyper-active proponent of underground experimental dance music. His high-energy performances and fractured beats often belie his thorough grounding in installation, sculpture and performance art, and in LA's ever-resplendent queer counterculture. Listen to his music here.
INDIAN JEWELRY consists of legendary performers and songwriters whose intense live performances straddle the divide between droning vision music and seizure-inducing stage show. Listen here.
JOHN WEBSTER JOHNS is a remarkable and rare example of the uncompromising artist. His work traverses emotional songwriting and classical orchestration, precision and chaos, dissonance and consonance in a way that only truly visionary art can: by retaining what satisfies the purpose, and discarding the rest. View his work here.
JULIA HOLTER, composer, songwriter, polymath and student of medieval psychology, is largely responsible for creating HumanEar. As comfortable composing delicately scored ensemble pieces as she is pop anthems, she possesses a graceful understanding of the unities underpinning orchestration and emotion in music. Read about her here.
IM KINO consists of two classically trained musicians who graduated from the Los Angeles County School of the Arts. As life-long friends, they collaborate to combine classical composition with pop sensibility.
WILLIAM BASINSKI is an internationally acclaimed performer and composer in avant-garde electronic sound who developed his meditative style while experimenting with short looped melodies played against themselves creating feedback loops. His haunting, long-duration soundscapes portray decay, nostalgia and rejuvenation with a daring economy of means. Learn about his work here.
MARK SO is by far one of the most prolific and remarkable composers working in the experimental tradition traced back to John Cage and Erik Satie. His gorgeously simple scores marry extremes of silence and duration with the poetic and narrative power representative of a truly accomplished art. Listen to his music here.
JASON GRIER, composer, computer programmer, polymath and theorist, is largely responsible for creating HumanEar. He has been the central, nearly silent, figure behind a number of developments in LA independent music culture. His music, like all his projects, employs an odd mix of technology, logic and fascination with human will. Listen here.
LUCKY DRAGONS is about the birthing of new and temporary creatures--equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, building up fragile networks held together by such light things as skin contact, unfamiliar language, temporary logic, the spirit of celebration, and things that work but you don't know why. Listen to their music here.
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