Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Jason Kahn, Bryan Eubanks
presented by crow with no mouth
Nov. 7, 2015
Studio Z: 275 East Fourth Street, Suite 200, St. Paul 8 p.m. $12 door admission |
crow with no mouth promotions presents a quartet made up of electroacoustic improviser Toshimaru Nakamura, experimental guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, electronic musician/vocalist/drummer Jason Kahn, and musician/composer Bryan Eubanks. crow with no mouth promotions brings vital, seldom-heard music, electro-acoustic composition, and improvisation to Twin Cities audiences.
Visit bodhidog.wordpress.com for more information. Toshimaru Nakamura is one of the most distinguished and original voices in the world of electroacoustic improvisation, with a vast body of work built up over the past two decades. Since 1998, Nakamura has been exploring the possibilities of his no-input mixing board in contexts ranging from solo to collaborations with Keith Rowe, Sachiko M, Sean Meehan, Klaus Filip and Axel Doerner.
Toshimaru Nakamura’s instrument is the no-input mixing board, which describes a way of using a standard mixing board as an electronic music instrument, producing sound without any external audio input. The use of the mixing board in this manner is not only innovative in the the sounds it can create but, more importantly, in the approach this method of working with the mixer demands. The unpredictability of the instrument requires an attitude of obedience and resignation to the system and the sounds it produces, bringing a high level of indeterminacy and surprise to the music. Nakamura pioneered this approach to the use of the mixing board in the mid-1990’s and has since then appeared on over one hundred audio publications, including nine solo CD’s. He has performed throughout Europe, North America, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, China, Singapore and Malaysia, performing and recording both as a soloist and in collaboration with numerous other musicians. As an active organizer of concerts in Tokyo, Nakamura has helped many musicians coming to Japan find places to perform, both with himself and with others. From 1998 to 2003 Nakamura and Tetuzi Akiyama ran the concert series Improvisation Series at Bar Aoyama and then later the Meeting at Off Site series of concerts. Both these concert series were crucially important in exposing a new manner to improvised music (referred to as Electro Acoustic Improvisation) to the Japanese public and to foreign musicians visiting Japan, making Tokyo one of the global hotspots for this new approach to music. Tetuzi Akiyama is a highly unique and experimental guitarist who integrates free improvisation, the blues, and noise. Besides guitar, he also plays electronics, viola, and self-made instruments.
Akiyama became an enthusiastic hard rock fan when he was eleven years old, and started playing electric guitar at the age of thirteen. Later, he also came to be very interested in free improvisation and classical music. He formed the improvised music band Madhar in 1987. He also started playing classical viola, and formed the Hikyo String Quintet in 1994. The band, which played avant-garde improvised classical music, consisted of a viola, two cello, and two violin players, and included Taku Sugimoto on cello. Sugimoto soon left the band, which thus became a quartet. Later that year, Akiyama and Sugimoto launched their guitar duo, Akiyama-Sugimoto. They played gigs in New York in 1995, and in the Midwest (including Chicago and Detroit) in ’96. For about a year starting in early 1994, Akiyama was also a member of Nijiumu, one of guitarist Keiji Haino’s bands. For the past twenty years Akiyama has collaborated and released music with a great range of artists, including Jason Kahn, Taku Sugimoto, Gunter Mueller, Josef Van Wissem, Oren Ambarchi, Utah Kawasaki, and crow alumni Hong Chulki. Bryan Eubanks (b. 1977) is a musician and composer from the Pacific Northwest of the US. He composes electronic and acoustic works for small ensembles, solo instruments, and custom generative software; improvises in collaboration; and, is developing sound installations and diffusion techniques using acoustic holography. Since 2001 he has participated in many collaborative projects and presented his work internationally. Primarily an autodidact, he received an MFA in 2012 from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. He has lived and worked in Portland and New York City, and is currently based in Berlin.
Jason Kahn is a musician, artist and writer. He was born 1960 in New York and grew up in Los Angeles. He re-located to Europe in 1990 and is currently based in Zürich. As an electronic musician, vocalist and drummer Kahn collaborates regularly with many musicians, both in improvised settings and in the context of graphical scores which he composes for specific groups.
Kahn has exhibited his installations in museums, galleries, art spaces and public sites internationally. These works focus on the idea of space: the conceptual and physical juncture points, its production and dissolution, and our relation to it as a political, social and environmental medium. Kahn’s other activities include sound pieces for radio, film, dance and theater. He has also designed numerous CD, LP and cassette covers. As a writer, his work has appeared in books, magazines and as liner notes to many audio publications. Performing regularly around the world, Kahn has given concerts throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Turkey and South Africa. From 1998 until 2008 Kahn ran the label Cut, releasing twenty-five CD’s which included both his own work and that of many other artists. In 2011 Kahn started the Editions imprint to publish his own recordings and writings. |