die Reihe + Jon Myers & Madalyn Merkey + DunkelPek
Doors at 7:30pm | Show at 8pm
Radius Gallery
Add to Calendar
$15 General / $10 Students
Electroacoustic composition & improvisation: rearranged house music; radio feedback interference; live laptop performance; visceral percussion-guitar improvisation.
die Reihe
From a review of “Housed” on Thump
NNA Tapes presents “Housed”, the latest work from die Reihe, the project of New York City-based sound artist and engineer Jack Callahan. After years of experimenting with electronic music, composition, and modular systems, the recent work of die Reihe has found Callahan operating on the outermost extremes of conceptual art, the avant garde, and minimalism. Crafting a unique style over the years through a series of live performances and releases on labels such as Ascetic House, Jeff Witscher’s Salon, and his own Bánh Mì Verlag imprint, Callahan has more recently distilled his approach to composition by holding a microscope to various genres of music and focusing on a single element within them. On “Housed”, Callahan turns his lens to this classic style of dance music and investigates one often overlooked component - the chords.
Using his personal knowledge of and passion for House music, Callahan has extracted the chords from over 250 classic House tracks by 150+ artists, and used them as the building blocks for composition, much like his dissection of Trap music drum fills on his “Trap Studies” cassette (Anòmia, 2015). These rhythmless chords, which range from quick synth stabs, pulsing bass swells, jazzy piano notes, and warm electronic melodies, take on new life when separated from their beat-laden former bodies. Typically used for live DJ mixing to create overlapping seamless segues between tracks, these chords are rarely heard on their own in a club context, and are now liberated by die Reihe to exist as sound alone without being tied to the function of rhythm inherent in dance music.
As opposed to the more expected approach of using these chords as the raw source material to be manipulated with digital processing, effects, or layering, die Reihe opts out of personal artistic expression and instead assumes the role of “Organizer”, presenting the sounds raw and as-is, in two arbitrary seamless combinations: randomized (Side A), and shortest to longest (Side B). This approach relates in some ways to Cage’s systems of Chance operations, as well as to Kenneth Goldsmith’s ideas on “Uncreativity”, or to more Dadaist procedures such as Assemblage or Duchamp’s “Readymade” works. By keeping the artist’s hand very light and recontextualizing the sounds within music from a highly conceptual standpoint, die Reihe is able to transform the dimly lit kinetic energy of a dance club into the stark white walls of a gallery.
Madalyn Merkey
Californian composer Madalyn Merkey is an artist performing in acoustic research and live computer music. Her practice began as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she transitioned to sound and time-based art.
Two albums of her experiments with voice, Scent (2012) and Valley Girl (2014), have been released on Matt Mondanile’s New Images imprint. Merkey’s digital voice processing has a sensational effect, with the human voice modulating between foreground and background, creating an unusual occurrence in identifying the sound source. Recent projects combine traditional instruments and electronics in live performance. In observing the acoustic principles of an instrument, she designs a real-time synthesis program to generate complementary timbral events and contrasting scales. This survey has led to an ongoing series of site-specific electronic music performances, in which principles of location, room acoustics and surround sound, are the foundation to develop sound material.
Jon Myers
Jon Myers is a Santa Cruz based composer and musician, originally from New England. His musical interests revolve around notions of stasis, memory, and the role of repetition in forming/disrupting temporalities. As an acoustic improvisor, his minimal approach to instrumentality seeks to tap into the flow of time, while with electronics, he tries not to touch the knobs too much, and just let the circuits speak for themselves.
As a duo, Merkey and Myers have performed in a variety of acoustic, analog, and digital configurations. They are poised to perform together for the first time since 2014.
DunkelpeK
DunkelpeK is Nava Dunkelman (percussion) and Jakob Pek (guitar, miscellany, piano). This Bay Area based duo offers listeners a visceral, syncretic experience of sound and silence. Playing an avant-garde world improvisation that is inspired and informed by many musics, DunkelpeK’s sound interweaves and explores countless dimensions of vibration, giving being to a sonic reality unlike any other.
Indexical’s concerts in Santa Cruz are supported in part by the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County.
Jon Myers & Madalyn Merkey:
[live]
As a duo, Merkey and Myers have performed in a variety of acoustic, analog, and digital configurations. They are poised to perform together for the first time since 2014.
### Madalyn Merkey
Californian composer Madalyn Merkey is an artist performing in acoustic research and live computer music. Her practice began as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she transitioned to sound and time-based art.
Two albums of her experiments with voice, Scent (2012) and Valley Girl (2014), have been released on Matt Mondanile’s New Images imprint. Merkey’s digital voice processing has a sensational effect, with the human voice modulating between foreground and background, creating an unusual occurrence in identifying the sound source. Recent projects combine traditional instruments and electronics in live performance. In observing the acoustic principles of an instrument, she designs a real-time synthesis program to generate complementary timbral events and contrasting scales. This survey has led to an ongoing series of site-specific electronic music performances, in which principles of location, room acoustics and surround sound, are the foundation to develop sound material.
https://soundcloud.com/cyndi
### Jon Myers
Jon Myers is a Santa Cruz based composer and musician, originally from New England. His musical interests revolve around notions of stasis, memory, and the role of repetition in forming/disrupting temporalities. As an acoustic improvisor, his minimal approach to instrumentality seeks to tap into the flow of time, while with electronics, he tries not to touch the knobs too much, and just let the circuits speak for themselves.
http://www.jon-myers.com/
DunkelpeK:
[live]
DunkelpeK is Nava Dunkelman (percussion) and Jakob Pek (guitar, miscellany, piano). This Bay Area based duo offers listeners a visceral, syncretic experience of sound and silence. Playing an avant-garde world improvisation that is inspired and informed by many musics, DunkelpeK's sound interweaves and explores countless dimensions of vibration, giving being to a sonic reality unlike any other.
[Bandcamp](https://dunkelpek.bandcamp.com/) | [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WWb0SF3MxQ) | [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/dunkelpek/)
die Reihe:
Housed
From a review of “Housed” on Thump
NNA Tapes presents “Housed”, the latest work from die Reihe, the project of New York City-based sound artist and engineer Jack Callahan. After years of experimenting with electronic music, composition, and modular systems, the recent work of die Reihe has found Callahan operating on the outermost extremes of conceptual art, the avant garde, and minimalism. Crafting a unique style over the years through a series of live performances and releases on labels such as Ascetic House, Jeff Witscher’s Salon, and his own Bánh Mì Verlag imprint, Callahan has more recently distilled his approach to composition by holding a microscope to various genres of music and focusing on a single element within them. On “Housed”, Callahan turns his lens to this classic style of dance music and investigates one often overlooked component - the chords.
Using his personal knowledge of and passion for House music, Callahan has extracted the chords from over 250 classic House tracks by 150+ artists, and used them as the building blocks for composition, much like his dissection of Trap music drum fills on his “Trap Studies” cassette (Anòmia, 2015). These rhythmless chords, which range from quick synth stabs, pulsing bass swells, jazzy piano notes, and warm electronic melodies, take on new life when separated from their beat-laden former bodies. Typically used for live DJ mixing to create overlapping seamless segues between tracks, these chords are rarely heard on their own in a club context, and are now liberated by die Reihe to exist as sound alone without being tied to the function of rhythm inherent in dance music.
As opposed to the more expected approach of using these chords as the raw source material to be manipulated with digital processing, effects, or layering, die Reihe opts out of personal artistic expression and instead assumes the role of “Organizer”, presenting the sounds raw and as-is, in two arbitrary seamless combinations: randomized (Side A), and shortest to longest (Side B). This approach relates in some ways to Cage’s systems of Chance operations, as well as to Kenneth Goldsmith’s ideas on “Uncreativity”, or to more Dadaist procedures such as Assemblage or Duchamp’s “Readymade” works. By keeping the artist’s hand very light and recontextualizing the sounds within music from a highly conceptual standpoint, die Reihe is able to transform the dimly lit kinetic energy of a dance club into the stark white walls of a gallery.
Jack Callahan is a composer and sound engineer based in New York City. He graduated from
Hampshire College in 2012 with a BA in Music Composition & Theory. In 2011 he studied privately with Ju rg Frey
in Aarau, CH. His music has been performed and recorded by ensembles such as the SEM Ensemble, the Wet Ink
Ensemble, the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra & the Dog Star Orchestra in such cities as New York, Los Angeles,
Amsterdam and Zu rich. Since 2013 he has been making mostly electronic works under the moniker "die Reihe" -
taken from the journal of the same name edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen - focusing on clinical
deconstruction of contemporary music tropes such as Trap and House music. With this project he has toured the
both the U.S. and Europe multiple times, been invited to many festivals and has released music with labels such as
Anomia, Ascetic House and Salon. In 2014 he founded Banh Mi Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary
experimental music and culture. As a sound engineer he has toured consistently with Thurston Moore and his
projects since 2012 and has done numerous tours with him on no fewer than four continents.
> My work deals with the simplicity of material and form, using the bare minimum of “creative”
> intervention on raw materials to achieve complex results. To paraphrase my teacher Jürg Frey, “the artist's hand is
> very light.” In my work that has often meant the use of silence and repetition, especially in my music written for
> ensembles or individuals.
>
> In the past few years my interest in dance music has intersected with my formal concerns. Lately this entails
> working with tropes of dance music and “sampling,” either in the traditional sense of directly as audio or as
> transcription, and the presentation of whatever form the “samples” take as dryly as possible, often simply as lists,
> one after the other.
>
> In whatever way these formal concerns manifest, my work is about uncluttering, both in the work itself – the
> composition – and the experience of the work. By using a minimum of material and organizational means I hope to
> achieve a directness – here it is, what you hear is what it is and nothing more.
die Reihe + Jon Myers & Madalyn Merkey + DunkelPek
Doors at 7:30pm | Show at 8pm
Radius Gallery
Add to Calendar
$15 General / $10 Students