Livestream: Stephanie Cheng Smith + Liam Mooney + Sarah Hennies’s “Everything Else”
Solo performances by composer-performer-instrument builders Stephanie Cheng Smith and Liam Mooney, followed by an ensemble performance of Sarah Hennies’s “Everything Else,” featuring the composer and friends.
This event is 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT.
Stephanie Cheng Smith
Stephanie Cheng Smith is a composer, performer and programmer who creates interactive pieces, installations, improvisations and through-composed works. She often uses electronics, violin and light, and her explorations with motor arrays have been featured in the latest issue of Experimental Music Yearbook. Smith’s performances and residencies include Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM, Amsterdam), PACT Zollverein (Essen), liebig12 (Berlin), Re-New Digital Arts Festival (Copenhagen), EcoSono (Caribbean), Centre for the Living Arts (Mobile), Megapolis Arts Festival (Baltimore), and—in Los Angeles—Machine Project, LA Film Forum, REDCAT, and the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS). She has also made appearances on webcasts such as EarMeal, Experimental Half-Hour, KCHUNG and dublab. Smith frequently performs electronic music under the name Stephie’s Castle, is a member of networked music ensemble bitpanic, Animal Crossing: New Horizons experimental performance group Lil’ Jürg Frey, and has composed for and performed as a member of the Dog Star Orchestra. Serving on the wulf.’s Artistic Advisory Board, she also curates and produces experimental music concerts in the Los Angeles area.
Performance of b-z-bowls, a motor-array instrument crafted of bowls, bells, balls, beads and clothespins. A vibration motor is attached to each suspended bowl and controlled from a central interface. In the performance, each bowl is filled with a combination of fillings and manipulated as the performance progresses.
Liam Mooney
Liam Mooney is a composer, performer, and instrument maker based in Los Angeles.
Sarah Hennies
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of small chamber works, but is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance.
Stephanie Cheng Smith:
b-z bowls
Liam Mooney:
the eye that discerns the interiors of things
Liam will play enhanced triangles
Sarah Hennies:
Everything Else
Everything Else takes its name from a piece by composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies. She draws a parallel between “percussion” and queer identities, writing that “a contemporary definition of ‘percussion’ has the potential to include almost anything that is not already defined as some other instrument.”
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Ithaca, NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of solo and chamber works, but is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), The OBEY Convention (Halifax), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven (NYC), Bent Duo (NYC), Cristian Alvear (Santiago), Claire Chase (NYC), R. Andrew Lee (Denver), LIMINAR (Mexico City), The Living Earth Show (San Francisco), The Thin Edge New Music Collective (Toronto), Two-Way Street (Knoxville), and Yarn/Wire (NYC).
In late 2017 she premiered the groundbreaking work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a film exploring transfeminine identity that uses aspects of “voice feminization” therapy as artistic material. The piece features a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied live score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work received widespread acclaim and has since been performed and screened all over the world at a variety of venues and festivals including Bent Frequency (Atlanta), La Sobilla (Verona), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), MOCA Tucson, Time-Based Art (Portland, OR), and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox Theatre.
Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, and in 2016 she was awarded a fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence.
In 2013, Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music including Prune Bécheau, Thomas Bonvalet, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Tim Feeney, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Enrico Malatesta, and Matt Sargent.