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Monday, March 2nd @ 2:00pm in B305B

Vic Rawlings employs a still and unstable sound language that traverses from visceral excess to extreme austerity. He has designed and built two separate instruments to realize this aesthetic, including extensive and invasive cello preparations, some directly based on obscure baroque instrumentation. The amplified cello is used as a resonant wooden microphone. He also continually develops an electronic instrument from the exposed circuit boards of sound processors, effectively producing an analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface. This electronic instrument is realized by a flexible array of exposed speaker elements, chosen for their often unpredictable and idiosyncratic acoustic qualities. His solo performances deny conventional assumptions about the use of time and refuse alliance with dominant trends in improvised music.

Longtime active collaborations include Laurence Cook Disaster Unit (Laurence Cook, Jason Lescalleet, Greg Kelley), undr quartet (Greg Kelley, Liz Tonne, James Coleman), and the BSC (improvising octet led by Bhob Rainey), as well as duos and trios with Michael Bullock, Mazen Kerbaj, Tim Feeney, Tatsuya Nakatani, Ricardo Arias, Bryan Eubanks, Chris Cogburn, Jaime Fennelly and many others. He has performed with a diverse group of major figures of improvised music including Ikue Mori, Eddie Prevost, Jaap Blonk, Daniel Carter, Donald Miller, and Andrea Neumann, among many others. He has also performed the works of Christian Wolff (with the composer), Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and Cornelius Cardew.

Vic has toured internationally and appeared at the following festivals: Victoriaville International Festival of Improvised Music (Victoriaville, Quebec), Vision Festival (NYC), Improvised and Otherwise Festival (NYC), Festival of New Trumpet Music (NYC), Boston Cyberarts Festival, Seattle Improvised Music Festival, No Idea Festival (Austin, TX), Fringe Festival (Charleston, SC), High Zero Festival of Improvised Music (Baltimore, MD), Autumn Uprising Festival (Boston, MA), and the Musique Action Festival in Nancy, France.

Rawlings appears on an international sampling of record labels, including Grob, RRR, Sedimental, Absurd, Emanem, Boxmedia, Audio Dispatch, H+H, Chloe and Rykodisc, among others.

Monday, February 3rd @ 2:00pm in B305B

Aaron Drake classically trained as a pianist from age 5 and competitively performed between ages 8 and 15 throughout the West Coast (US and Canada). Drake studied composition and Complexist Music at San Francisco State University under Josh Levine and Ron Caltabiano. He earned his first public commission from the West Coast Ensemble at 19. Drake completed his undergraduate degree at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen with advanced compositional studies under Frank Cox and Mark Randall-Osborne at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.
Aaron returned to the states and studied at CalArts with James Tenney (microtonal music), Mark Trayle, David Rosenboom and Michael Pisaro. The studies at CalArts pushed him to conceptualize music beyond the intricacies of advanced music theory which lead to his first film collaborations.

The score to his first film, “The Shadow Effect,” won a Bronze Medal at Park City Music Festival and since then he’s scored multiple narrative and documentary features, music for Emmy Award winning TV shows like How I Met Your Mother, Live In Front of a Studio Audience and Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, numbers of advertisements (Nintendo, Nike, Garnier, EA Sports, Gillette etc.), while continuing to write experimental music for live performance and dance. His work has been performed or displayed at many national and international venues such as ICA, ZKM, LACMA, MOCA, REDCAT, OCMA, the Getty Villa and the Hammer Museum.

Monday, October 2nd @ 2:00pm in B304

Davy Sumner is an installation artist, experimental musician, percussionist, sound engineer, maker, and educator in Los Angeles, CA. He creates things that are inspired and informed by noise, geometry, physics, biology, and society, often utilizing sound spaitialization, feedback-based systems, auditory illusions, chaos, and original algorithms as key elements his my work. Davy specializes in imagining and fabricating custom technologies and homemade devices that become infused with a dose of personality and unpredictability when introduced to the physical world.

Davy has installed work and performed at Grand Central Art Center, Long Beach City College, The wulf., Automata, REDCAT, Coaxial Arts, The Cedar Cultural Center, The Lynden Sculpture Garden, Public Functionary, and The Eaux Claires Music and Arts Festival. A fiercely active and diverse collaborator, Davy has worked in live and studio settings with Grammy-winner Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Sean Carey (S. Carey, Bon Iver), Rob Moose (yMusic, Ben Folds), and Eyvind Kang (Beck, Animal Collective), and Michael Pisaro.

Davy earned his Bachelor’s in Music Composition from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and his MFA in Experimental Sound Practices from CalArts, where he studied with Mark Trayle, Scott Cazan, and Amy Knoles.

Tuesday, November 8th @ 4:00pm in B305B  |   Wednesday, November 9th @ 4:00pm in B305B  

ESP guest artist, computer musician, and sound artist Cooper Baker will being giving a two day workshop on Pure Data. All are welcome to attend. The workshops will start with the basics of Pure Data and will progress into the workshop group building a fully functional synthesizer program.