Buy Tickets
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$17 adv / $20 door / free or discounted for members
Request your member DICE Code or become a member.
In the late Winter of 2021, John McCowen was recording demos in his basement studio. He was aiming to record each part in one circular-breathed take. This turned out to be virtually impossible to achieve. This was due to a constant onslaught of earthquakes. These were earthquakes preceding the Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption of March 2021 near his home in Reykjavík, Iceland. For weeks leading up to the eruption, there was a persistent pulse of earthquakes - sometimes only minutes apart. The sensation of these earthquakes were incredible. At first, from silence, there would appear an incredibly low, sine-like tone. As this tone began to crescendo, it would be accompanied by an ever-increasing vibration. These vibrations would then become visceral as the building shook (there are a slew of outtakes where this is audible as well as the accompanying “goddamnit”). With the epicenter located a 30 minute drive from Reykjavík, one could visualize the initial grinding of tectonic plates and the subsequent, earth-rattling waves emanating from the volcanic center. For John, feeling these rolling vibrations unconsciously shaped the music of Mundanas VII-XI.
The parallels between this experience and the music are unambiguous - two contrabass clarinets emanating low, sine-like tones with shifting harmonics activated by these rumbling swells. When these two contrabass clarinets are combined, there emerges a wave of combinatorial frequencies - an acoustic stream of sound almost tactile. All this said, there exists an orchestra of sound waiting to be observed as the listener goes deeper.
This forty-five minute document exhibits John McCowen & Madison Greenstone at a height of ensemble entanglement - operating as a singular organism. The record has a unified aura from beginning to end - variations on a theme - silence to culmination and back. The music is more akin to the rolling waves of tectonic activity than to McCowen’s more strident works. This showcases the performers ability to remain placid with an ability to shimmer and sonically multiply at a moment’s notice.
John McCowen’s musical life has become an obsession with discovering a polyphonic language on a historically monophonic instrument - the clarinet. This has led him to a unique acoustic vocabulary that is akin to a shifting soundscape of electronic feedback. John's multiphonic approach is based in drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to showcase the compositional potential within a single, acoustic sound source. His work has been described by The New Yorker as “the sonic equivalent of microscopic life viewed on a slide” and “an astonishing demonstration of pure sound and human will” by The Wire. He began playing in the American DIY circuit in a number of groups. These years led to international rock tours as a saxophone & flute player in his early 20’s. After burning out, he decided to pursue classical clarinet performance with contemporary clarinet pioneer, Eric P. Mandat. He has released documents on International Anthem, Edition Wandelweiser, Sound American, Astral Spirits, Superpang, and others. He currently resides in Reykjavík, Iceland where he teaches Music Improvisation at the Iceland University of the Arts.
John remains stubbornly dedicated to acoustic phenomena. His works do not utilize amplifier feedback or electronically-generated sounds unless specified.
Madison Greenstone is a New York based clarinetist whose ‘beautiful and haunting’ playing ‘creeps noisily away from the void’ (Foxy Digitalis). They perform across a wide range of experimental music contexts as a soloist, improvisor, and chamber musician. Madison’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, pushes the limits of innate instrumental expressivities by treating the meeting of instrument and embodied technique as creative of a site of indeterminacy and generative instability. Their approach to the clarinet embraces and instigates chaotic timbral actions, difficult-to-reign sonorities, and the harmonically rich and noisy resonances that have a vivid inner life and movement. Their practice embraces responsive listening as a mediator between embodied technique and latent instrumental agency.
Madison is the clarinetist of TAK Ensemble, “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen), and a founding member of the [Switch~ Ensemble]. Madison performs as a guest with Alarm Will Sound, Nunc New Music, Either/Or, Argento New Music Project, Contemporaneous, Wavefield, amongst others in New York and abroad. They can be heard on labels such as Wandelweiser Editions, Another Timbre, TAK Editions, Unknown Tapes, New Focus Recordings, eë editions (AT), Impakt Collective (DE), and upcoming on Relative Pitch Records (solo) and Dinzu Artefacts (TAK ensemble).
The “house band” for sfSound’s West Oakland Sound Series, the oakland reductionist orchestra is a supergroup of local musicians with a predilection for lowercase/fricative/reductionist acoustic improvisation that often sounds more electronic than acoustic (this ensemble grows out of a rich tradition of "American reductionist" music that flourished in the late 1990's and early 2000's.
Performers include Monica Scott (cello), Danishta Rivero (voice), Cody Putman (bassoon), Kanoko Nishi-Smith (koto), Lisa Mezzacappa (bass), Joshua Marshall (tenor saxophone), Kevin CK Lo (violin/flute/piano), Cheryl E. Leonard (natural-object instruments), John Ingle (saxophones), Matt Ingalls (clarinets), Ron Heglin (tuba), Diane Grubbe (flutes), Sarah Grace Graves (voice), Jacob Felix Heule (percussion), Tom Djll (trumpet), Kevin Corcoran (percussion), Chris Cooper (objects and electronics), and Kyle Bruckmann (oboe).