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Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
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Natacha Diels performs her audiovisual composition Somewhere Beautiful, a journey into a strange landscape occupied by sounds and image that are at once familiar and unknown, reassuring and unsettling. Steph Richards performs with percussionist Kjell Nordeson — her project draws on her avant-jazz ensemble work, where trumpet is augmented by sensory electronics as on her latest release POWER VIBE (Northern Spy). Oakland composer Kyle Bruckmann performs his deconstructed and meticulously amplified oboe set first created for a pandemic livestream.
Natacha Diels’ work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (2018/2021), a solo project entitled Somewhere Beautiful (2022), and Beautiful Trouble, an ongoing ‘opera’ for string quartet with the JACK quartet. Forthcoming is a solo album (Carrier Records 2024), a new ‘opera’ for Festival Nueva Opera Buenos Aires (2024), and a work for headphoned audience with La Muse en Circuit for Ensemble Contrechamps (2025). With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft” (Musical America), “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About), and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003).
"Emerging Maestro" (New York Times) trumpeter Steph Richards is a rising force in the creative music scene, having worked with pioneering artists ranging from Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton and John Zorn to St. Vincent, David Byrne and Yoko Ono and her sonic explorations have led to collaborations with performance artists Mike Kelly, Laurie Anderson/Lou Reed. Richards has also worked with creative jazz masters Jason Moran, Ravi Coltrane, Sylvie Courvoisier and others. Driven by a curiosity how listeners interact with music and what sensory variables are open to experimentation, her own compositions have featured across North and South America and Europe. premiering on iconic stages at Carnegie Hall, the Blue-note, Bimhuis and Lincoln Center.
Oboist and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann tramples genre boundaries in widely ranging work as a composer/performer, educator and New Music specialist. His creative output – extending from conservatory-trained foundations into gray areas encompassing free jazz, post-punk rock, and the noise underground – can be heard on more than 100 recordings. Three decades of chameleonic gigging have found him performing in settings including the Venice Biennale, the Monterey Jazz Festival, 924 Gilman, Berghain, a 12-foot diameter bomb shelter, and dangling 30 feet in the air by a harness from a crane.
UC Berkeley’s CNMAT invited me to livestream a solo recital in November of 2020 – a point in the depths of the pandemic when it seemed a given that even the engineer (Jeremy Wenger) needed to be on a different floor of the building, surveilling via multiple cameras steered by robot arms. Extreme close-miking of extremely subtle sounds coaxed from deconstructed parts of my instruments – a gimmick I’ve been milking since gasps & fissures (2004) – took on new significance as I ‘welcomed’ similarly isolated audience members into the suffocating intimacy of my psychosocial gerbil ball. I'd like to thank Andrew Smith for encouraging me to reconsider its viability for a live concert setting.