Happenings

Monday, April 13th @ 2:00pm in B305B

Michelle Lou is a composer, performer, and sound artist that works mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music. Her work has been presented at Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, The Festival of New American Music, the MATA Festival in New York City, The 66th American Music Festival at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., The Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, Ultima Festival in Oslo, Chance and Circumstance in Brooklyn, amongst others. She received degrees in double bass performance and composition from UC San Diego and Stanford University. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has taught composition and electronic music at Dartmouth College, the WasteLAnd Summer Composition Course, the Academy for New Music Künstlerhaus Boswil, Switzerland, and is currently teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Monday, April 6th @ 2:00pm in B305B

Jane Cassidy is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator from Galway, Ireland. Trained in music and visual art, Jane earned a Masters in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin in 2008 and an MFA in Digital Art from Tulane University in New Orleans in 2014. Jane’s main interests lie in audio-visual immersive environments, visual music, live VJing and multi-channel work. Cassidy has had solo shows at the Mobile Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the University of New Orleans, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Exhibitions include the European Media Art Festival, Germany, the New Orleans Film Festival, Punto Y Raya Festival, Spain, Galway International Arts Festival, Currents New Media Festival, New Mexico, live visuals for Animal Collective in New Orleans, as well as group shows internationally. Currently she is the Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Boston College in Massachusetts.

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.