Musical Chairs + Val's Birthday!

A night of delightful improvisations and death-defying compositions featuring Jill Burton, Jane Scarpantoni, Michael Evans, David First, Claire Elizabeth Barratt, Pat Muchmore, Gelsey Bell, and Valerie Kuehne. Equal parts performance and birthday celebration, there will be cake.

Gelsey Bell - performs regularly as an experimental vocalist, culling from a wide range of techniques and styles to create her own performance works, to literally voice those of contemporary composers, and to explore improvisation. Her most recent song cycle, SCALING, merges her singer-songwriter composition style with her experimental tendencies towards extended technique for both voice and piano. It premiered as part of the Vital Vox festival at Roulette in November 2011 and a recording of the live performance is available online. She also created a site-specific song cycle called Bathroom Songs (2010), an hour-long, site-specific song cycle called Song Cycle in Time/Space (2005), and a suite of works for voice and boom box calledTelephone Songs (2006). She is a core member of the new music ensemble thingNY, with whom she has premiered over a hundred works. They have performed at such venues as the Stone, Issue Project Room, the Tank, Judson Memorial Church, ABC No Rio, Nuyorican Poets Café, and Secret Project Robot, among others. She is also a core member of the collective Varispeed, whose successful site-specific adaptation of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives landed on both Time Out New York and The Los Angeles Times best of 2011 lists for classical music and opera. And she is a member of art band The Chutneys with Fast Forward and Chris Cochrane.

http://www.gelseybell.com

Jill Burton - Jill Burton is a singular and extraordinary performance artist, vocalist, dancer and energy worker who has been consciously synthesizing her art form for over 40 years. She has developed such a unique style that it is difficult if not impossible to label or categorize her work. Performance healing? Energy art? Improv shamanism? With an extensive background in many traditional and modern music and dance techniques, she has always held a special interest in experimental performance and free improvisation. She has also studied and practiced many bodywork, energy work and spiritual healing modalities, always incorporating these with her performance work.

http://www.jillburton.net

Pat Muchmore - is a cellist/composer and social gadfly currently living in New York City. When people ask what kind of music he writes, he generally requests that they never ask again--but, if they press, he tells them punk-classical. It doesn't really mean anything of course, but it sounds neat and vaguely approximates his approach toward music these days. At the end of 2009, he completed his PhD at the City University of New York Graduate Center, meaning he can officially call himself Dr. Pat Muchmore so long as he doesn't care about the fact that 95% of the people around him would consider him a pretentious ass for doing so. His dissertation is called Humanity and Mechanicity in the music of Nine Inch Nails and is an analysis of the first four albums by Nine Inch Nails(with a brief bonus analysis of one track from the fifth album, [With_Teeth]).

http://www.patmuchmore.com

Claire Elizabeth Barratt - Is a dancer based in New York, she founded “Cilla Vee Movement Projects”, a multi-disciplinary performing arts organization, and has performed in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan. She served a one year apprenticeship with Lori Belilove & Company of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation, is performance curator for Bronx based Gallery “Haven Arts” and is currently an adjunct faculty member of DanceSpace 637 in Ottawa, Ontario.Claire has been featured in Art Basel Miami, the Washington DC International Improv Festival, the Transmodern Age and High Zero Festivals in Baltimore, MD and the Dans/CE Kapital Festival in Ottawa. Much of her work focuses on collaboration with live music in an improvisational context. She also specializes in “Installation”.

http://www.cillavee.com/claire.html

David First - It seems reasonable to assert that David First has had a rather eclectic musical career. He has played guitar with renowned jazz innovator/pianist Cecil Taylor (culminating in a legendary Carnegie Hall concert) and the rock band Televisionís Richard Lloyd. He has created electronic music at Princeton University and led a Mummerís String Band in bicentennial parades. He has played in raucous, drunken bar bands and in concert halls with classical ensembles. As a composer he has created everything from finely crafted pop songs to long, severely minimalist soundscapes.  His influence on modern music may be incalculable: a 45 single release, The Zipper, by his punk-era rock band, The Notekillers, was cited by Sonic Youthís Thurston Moore as one of the songs he played for the rest of the band when they were starting out. Moore recently called it a "mind-blowing instrumental single" in the British rock magazine Mojo.

http://www.davidfirst.com

Michael Evans - Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/percussionist/thereminist/composer whose work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics. As well as being a drumset player, his work with unusual sound sources includes found objects, homemade instruments, the theremin and various digital and homemade analog electronics. His work with the theremin varies the quality of its sound through set-up and technique. On the theremin he has performed with dancers and in group settings playing experimental, jazz, rock, ersatz lounge and chamber music. In 2000, he was photographed playing a Moog ether wave theremin for the front of Bob Moog’s Big Briar catalog. He has performed in multiple performances of the NYC Theremin Society’s Issue Project Room concerts during 2005, 2006 and 2007. He has studied movement/sparring/drumming with Professor Milford Graves, drum technique with Joe Morello, tabla with Misha Masud, kanjira with Ganesh Kumar and Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming with John Amira. He has studied musicianship with Helen Hobbs Jordan, composition with Richard Cameron Wolf, Blue Gene Tyranny and the theremin with Pamelia Kurstin.

http://www.michaelevanssounds.com

Jane Scarpantoni - is a classically trained cello player who has made a name for herself as one of the pre-eminent cellists and string arrangers in alternative music in the 1990s. Graduating from Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, in 1982, Scarpantoni soon joined the jazzy folk-pop quintet Tiny Lights. Her unique style of playing with Tiny Lights led to her performing with a number of other musicians. Some of her most recognized work has been with Kristin Hersh, Bob Mould, John Lurie's Lounge Lizards, R.E.M., Indigo Girls, and the Beastie Boys, as well performing with 10,000 Maniacs and Nirvana on MTV's Unplugged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Scarpantoni

Valerie Kuehne - curator and birthday fiancee, will premier new works for cello and voice. Valerie Kuehne has been described as an "electrically charged virtuoso of all purpose cello." Her work shatters genre and expectations, fusing together experimental, classical, heavy metal, stand-up comedy, poetry, punk rock, and folk idioms. She actively tours the world with cello in tow, performing for audiences in Europe, South America, Canada, and the States to great acclaim. She has shared the stage with an incredible variety of artists such as Amy X Neuberg, Tatsuya Nakatani, Amanda Palmer, Sxip Shirey, the Del Sol String Quartet, Peter Evans, Audrey Chen, Todd Reynolds, Sudden Infant, and many more. She augments her performances with work as an impresario, organizing the Brooklyn based experimental cabaret The Super Coda, which seeks to promote artists working in uncategorizable genres, and educate audiences through establishing visceral and theatrical performance contexts. She regularly contributes writing to The Deli magazine and is a published poet.