VNM Festival 2015 – Nomadic Streams – Oct. 22-24

VNM Festival 2015 – Nomadic Streams – Oct. 22-24

Vancouver New Music Festival 2015
Nomadic Streams – a festival of Ambient Music

October 22 – 24, 2015; Doors at 8PM, show at 9PM each night
VIVO Media Arts (2625 Kaslo Street, Vancouver)

Presented in association with VIVO Media Arts.

Thursday, October 22

Nick Storring (Toronto)
Nick Storring presents a set of all-new material, incorporating electric cello, voice, and live computer processing, as well other small instruments and sound tampering approaches. His live work tends to favour a careful balance of its constituent elements – foregrounding both electronically modified and pure instrumental sound, composition and improvisation, as well as textural and more pitch-centric territory.

Nick Storring is a Toronto based composer, cellist and improviser with a wide palette of interests, ranging from warped dance music to electroacoustic music, experimental pop to chamber music, and even collaborations within various “non-Western” traditions.
nickstorring.ca
Nick Storring – They Carry Light (excerpt) [audioplayer file=”https://newmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/They-Carry-Light-2014-excerpt.mp3″][/audioplayer]

Steve Roden (LA/Pasadena)
possible landscape (vancouver) is an improvised piece that uses, among other things, analog modular synthesis, cassette tapes, and contact microphones. In Steve Roden’s sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case – sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance.
inbetweennoise.com

 Steve Roden – proximities (excerpt) [audioplayer file=”https://newmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/proximities-excerpt.mp3″][/audioplayer]

crys cole (Winnipeg)
crys cole’s performance will play on the hypnagogic state that we experience just before falling asleep – the bleary, distorted and misunderstood moments that conjure a unique state of aural perception.

crys cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, improvised performance and sound installation. Generating subtle and imperfect sounds through simple gestures, she creates textural works that continuously retune the ear. Delicately seeking to both reveal, and obscure the intricacy of seemingly mundane sounds and sources.
cryscole.com  |  Listen

DJ Olive (NYC)
Artist and turntablist DJ Olive premiers his composition, 11 Ways Of Going Through A Door. This new piece reveals a deep regard for all things concrete while simultaneously wallowing in a neutral gooey mud hole of vintage analog scratch and sniff tones. So far inside the sound as to be but a moving shadow; a memory of a memory of a memory of sound through a childhood door.

Ever since emerging from Brooklyn with his band WE™ in the mid ’90’s, DJ Olive has been dropping his distinctly unique and under the radar dance music around the world.
djolive.com  |  Listen

Friday, October 23

souns (Vancouver)
souns is an ambient music project from Vancouver-based artist Michael Red. souns delivers intuitive and improvised sonic explorations of the natural world, outer space, and transcendence. souns will be joined by video artist C130 (Ian Ross).

As souns, Michael Red has released numerous musical works (Panospria, New Kanada, Sensing Waves) and has live collaborated with a varied list of performers, including Tanya Tagaq, Mei Han, Gabriel Saloman, and Scant Intone. Red is also the founding member of Vancouver’s notorious DJ collective ‘Lighta! Sound’, oversees the ‘Low Indigo’ record label and community, and is a recognized figure for curating envelope-pushing electronic music events around Vancouver.
Listen

loscil (Vancouver)
loscil (Scott Morgan) creates music that is subtle but dense, tranquil but bleak and aimlessly adrift, searching, somewhat intuitively, for a union of opposing forces in his work: light and dark, stasis and forward momentum, warmth and frigidity, acoustic and digital. These fusions bring a palpable tension and uncomfortable otherworldliness juxtaposed with an untrusted state of calm and contemplation.

loscil explores the marriage of electronic and acoustic instrumentation to create “stark landscapes that are evocative, earthly, anything but abstract, and so much more than merely ‘ambient’” (The Quietus,UK).
loscil.ca

 loscil – Ahull (excerpt) [audioplayer file=”https://newmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/loscil_Ahull_excerpt.mp3″][/audioplayer]

Marina Rosenfeld (NYC)
Since the mid-nineties, New York based composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld has created large-scale works that a sculptural approach to the intersection of performance, visuality and music composition. Notable works have included series of conceptual “orchestras” for electric guitar; choral works, often for teenaged ensembles; and a customized P.A. system that she has composed for and deployed in monumental sites internationally, including New York’s Park Avenue Armory.
marinarosenfeld.com

Lawrence English (Brisbane)
Lawrence English performs excerpts from his new album, Wilderness of Mirrors. It is English’s most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. Buried throughout, like an unheard whisper, is a singularity that is slowly reflected back upon itself in a flood of compositional feedback. Erasure through auditory burial.

Lawrence English is composer, media artist and curator based in Brisbane, Australia. Working across an array of aesthetic investigations, his work explores the politics of perception and prompts questions of field, perception and memory.
lawrenceenglish.com  |  room40.org  |  Listen

Saturday, October 24

FLUX Quartet (NYC)
Morton Feldman – String Quartet No. 1
The FLUX Quartet performs Morton Feldman’s expansive, piece String Quartet No. 1 (1979). Moving across a wide dynamic territory, String Quartet No. 1 melds together “winding melodic figures, and sad oscillations that breathe, hover and float; moments of quickness – almost breathlessness – giving the work sudden eruptions of urgency; an exquisitely long orchestration of one note, like the spinning of multiple strands into a single thread” (Linda Catlin Smith).

Strongly influenced by the irreverent spirit and “anything-goes” philosophy of the fluxus art movement, violinist Tom Chiu founded FLUX in the late 90’s. The quartet has since cultivated an uncompromising repertoire that follows neither fashions nor trends, but rather combines yesterday’s seminal iconoclasts with tomorrow’s new voices.
fluxquartet.com

Rafael Anton Irisarri (Seattle/NYC)
Predominantly associated with ambient, drone, post-minimalist, and modern classical music, Rafael Anton Irisarri’s recorded output captures an essential vision of floating tones, deep pulsing bass and textural electronics. His use of ostinato phrases taps into minimalist ideals while atmospheric layers of effects suggests a more cinematic quality in his productions. In all, Irisarri’s compositions are deeply emotive and epic to the point of being symphonic.

Rafael Anton Irisarri is a Seattle-based composer, multi­instrumentalist, electronic music producer, interdisciplinary artist and curator.
irisarri.org  |  Listen

FLUX Quartet and guests
John Cage – Four
crys cole, Lawrence English, Rafael Anton Irisarri, loscil, DJ Olive, Marina Rosenfeld, and souns join the FLUX Quartet to perform a live remix of John Cage’s Four (1989). Four’s simple, meditative sounds are rooted in deceptively complex notation, as a quartet of musicians perform, then hand off parts to one another in a piece that has been described as a work of “unique, still, lovliness” (London Times).

Other events

Steve Roden – striations (2011) and distance piece (striations) (2011)
Exhibition opening reception September 25, 2015; 5–7PM
Live performance by Scant Intone

Exhibition continues Monday to Friday September 28 – October 23, 2015; 9AM–5PM
Canadian Music Centre – BC-Creative Hub (837 Davie Street)
Free admission

striations (6 min.) is a two-channel video made by Steve Roden with artist Mary Simpson. It was originally part of a larger exhibition that included painting, drawing, and sculpture related to an unfinished stone sculpture made by Roden’s grandmother.

The film attempts to use fragments of “stilled” information whose meanings are unknown or unresolved, to become active again through engagement and use. The imagery includes Roden’s grandmother’s half carved stones, as well as images related to Henry Moore and artifacts of his grandmother’s objects left behind, such as the crayons used in the rubbings, and the photographs of birds she used as inspiration/study for sculpture never realized.

striations is accompanied by distance piece, a soundwork that intertwines with the silent film.

 Co-presented with CMC BC Region/BC Creative Hub.

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Vancouver Electronic Ensemble
Saturday, October 17, 2015; 8PM
Vancouver Community College Atrium (1155 East Broadway)
Free admission

VEE will perform new ambient-oriented works that take advantage of the sonic environment of Vancouver Community College’s unique, open atrium space. You’re invited to wander through the space to experience the sounds shift as you move from place to place in this highly resonant space.

Featuring: Holly Beckmyer, Ross Birdwise, Merlyn Chipman, Sam Davidson, Justin Devries, Soressa Gardner, Scott Gubbels, Lee Hutzulak, Dave Leith, Giorgio Magnanensi, Brady Marks, Graham Meisner, John Mutter, Matt O’Donnell, Dan Potter, Michael Rohaly, Gabriel Saloman, Andrew Scott, and prOphecy sun, with Mariah Mennie, Patrick Metzger, Jordan Nobles and Tim Tweedale.

Presented in association with Vancouver Community College

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Steve Roden – Sound & vision: working with multiple mediums
Tuesday, October 20, 2015; 7PM
World Art Centre – Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (SFU Woodward’s, 149 West Hastings)
Room 2555
Free

Steve Roden talks about his relationship to sound and visual works, as well as works that integrate both mediums. He relates his influences, inspirations, scores, and processes.

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. Roden’s working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self invented systems into scores, which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and composition.

Co-presented by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.


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Pete Namlook Listening Room

October 22 – 24, 2015; evening
VIVO Media Arts (2625 Kaslo Street)

Explore the work of one of the artists that brought ambient music back onto the subcultural radar in the late 80’s and 90’s via dance music. Each night of the festival – before, during, and after the main events – a large selection of Namlook’s prolific catalogue of work will be broadcast in a continuous loop for your leisurely listening enjoyment. Admission to the Listening Room is included with concert ticket purchase on the night for which your ticket is valid, or festival pass.

Supported by VIVO Media Arts, Room 40, CiTR 101.9FM