Monday, June 10th | 8:00 PM | Pay What You Wish!
artists: S*Glass, Sailor Beware, Ashé Mystics, Alex Tatarsky
series: Jim Strong Eats An Umbrella
description: Noise, Hypnosis, On-Site Demolition and an Installation of Can Openers
Lara Allen’s solo work under the name Sailor Beware combines sound collage, spoken word, and vaudeville in a kaleidoscopic portrayal of her experiences in Cincinnati public schools, a troubled teen industry cult, and children’s mental hospital. She was in Caroliner for a while, way back when, and also fronted Heavenly Ten Stems, who specialized in covers of Asian pop and rock tunes (the sort later popularized by labels such as Sublime Frequencies, et al.), has appeared on an album by Secret Chiefs 3, and was the off-the-hook screeching front-person of legendary Ohio psycho-rock juggernaut Manwich. Her artwork was on the cover of Bananafish #12 and she was interviewed in #17. More recently, she was a guest on Will York's Who Cares Anyway podcast. Listen to it here:
https://youtu.be/s_tEywAnmxE?si=XskYwC12FqrO-SV4 Numerous samples of her work on her website: http://www.laraallen.com She currently teaches at Pratt in Brooklyn
Numerous practices make up the electro-acoustic sound collages created by S*Glass. He combines tape music, electronic processing, voice, found sound, and chance operations. Every show uses a different batch of curated audio, mixed live, while the self-produced studio albums are more refined assemblages. The playing of non-musical objects is sometimes incorporated (dental floss, aluminum foil, wind-up toys, metal lunch box, cabbage). Self-shot video is screened during sets, which is mostly textures made with multiple layers that slowly wobble out of sync, jump cuts, and a smattering of primitive animation. The overall effect is one of surreal disorientation. S*Glass is a founder of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble (a large non-musical music group begun in the early 1980s), and Glands of External Secretion (a duo with rock musician Barbara Manning since the early ’90s). From the late ’80s until 2004, he was the main driver behind Bananafish. Since 2017, he’s performed as a solo artist and completed U.S. tours of the West Coast and SW, New England, part of the South and Midwest, England and Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, and a handful of places in Canada.
Ashé Mystics:
The Ashé Mystics are Kevin Diehl, Julius Masri & Joshua Marquez. They create a world of sound with electronic circuitry, improv and percussive underpinnings. Kevin Diehl is a Musician, Composer, Arts Organizer, Drummer, and Percussionist. Among his current projects is a new trio featuring Chad Taylor and Joe Chambers. Their eponymously titled debut record, Onilu, is due for release in Fall 2023. It features compositions by all three multi -instrumentalists. Onilu is a Yoruba word meaning “drummers.” Another project is Justice: The Vocal Works of Oliver Lake. A vocal trio joins his ensemble Sonic Liberation Front in performing the works of this widely acclaimed composer. Julius Masri is a Philadelphia based multi instrumentalist, and performer/composer for the city's dance community at large. His music focuses on improvisatory methods and syncretic / linguistic exchanges within various musical languages including Jazz, Metal, AfroCuban, Experimental Noise, and Arabic music. Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, he moved to the States in 1990 and picked up drumming a year later. He studied with Philadelphia instructors Carl Mottola, Elaine Hoffman-Watts, and as an undergraduate at Bard College, with AACM's Thurman Barker, Richard Teitelbaum, and Joan Tower. Julius plays drums, circuit modified Casio keyboards, Oud, Kamancheh (aka Rabab, Spike Fiddle), and various other instruments. Joshua Marquez is a Filipino-American composer and activist whose award-winning music explores the liminal space between tone and noise as a means to investigate the complexities and duality of Asian American identity. Searing a sonic imprint of cultural identity, his tranquil investigations of the noise spectrum represent the internal conflicts of multiculturalism and the struggles of alienation and assimilation through the fusion and fission of disparate timbres. Hailed as "cutting-edge" (The Gazette), "haunting" (The Daily Iowan), and "creepy" (Fanfare Magazine), Marquez's polemic deconstruction of sound is consumed by ever-evolving rituals of disintegrated perspectives from a postcolonial lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-2agI2eeWQ
Alexandra Tatarsky blends performance art, comedy, physical theater, and clown practices to probe the construction of meaning, self, and community. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. “Performance is a realm that allows us to think up worlds beyond walls and boxes,” Tatarsky says. They describe the clown as an “ideal model for our times” while also drawing on traditions like vaudeville, postmodern dance, comedy, and Russian futurism. Tatarsky has performed original, evening-length solo works at New York’s La MaMa and the Exponential Festival, the UK’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and in Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival, among others. They have an MA in performance studies from New York University and a BA in Russian literature from Reed College, and they studied devised performance at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training.