MAKIHARA/HURT/SANTIAGO TRIO

Upside down and all the wrong ways. A music pedagogue's nightmare. Sure they can play their instruments the right way, but why should they when they can explore the ever expanding possibilities of extended technique. Expect kicking, screaming, biting, smacking, and other profane examples of instrumental abuse.

Toshi Makihara studied drums, percussion and improvisation with Sabu Toyozumi, a prominent percussionist in Tokyo. Since arriving in the United States in the late 1970's he has worked with various new music ensembles as well as with numerous dance and theater companies internationally. Makihara has provided original music to Arden Theater Company, Diversions Dance Company (Wales), Pennsylvania Ballet, ZeroMoving Dance Company and Leah Stein Dance Company among others, and has worked with musicians including Steve Beresford, Peter Brotzmann, John Butcher, Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, Amy Denio, Thurston Moore, William Parker and John Zorn. He has also collaborated with poets, visual artists, filmmakers and performance artists widely. http://www.toshimakihara.com


Composer, free improvisor, and organizer, Dustin Hurt is emerging as a key element to Philadelphia’s experimental and new music scene. Dustin's frequent colaboratorations include a duo with Alban Bailly (as Ko Koed), a trio with Tim Albro and Jesse Kudler (as HZL BRD), and a trio with Sean Mattio and Troy Herion. He is a performer in Nicole Bindler's Philadelphia New Dance and Music Ensemble and was a performer in John Berndt's Baltimore based large group ensmemble, Second Nature, in March of 2006. He has also performed with Jon Barrios, Jack Wright, Gene Coleman, Nozal Cube, Dave Smolen, and Carlos Santiago, among others. His works have been performered by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pennsylvannia Ballet Orchestra, and regularly by the Philadelphia based avant-supergroup, Normal Love.

Carlos Santiago -
... coming soon ...


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ARMSTRONG/CLUETT/SMALLWOOD TRIO

Princeton Junction. This longtime collaboration explicitly blurs the boundaries between composer and performer and improvised music and composed music with refined sensibilities and a mastery of cutting edge technologies.

Newton Armstrong is a composer and improviser working with electronic media. His work has encompassed performance, installation, instrument building and interaction design, and he has collaborated in various capacities with other musicians, writers, dancers, choreographers, and sound, film, video and installation artists. His main instrument (as of early 2006...) is a self-built embedded Linux synthesizer named Mr. Feely. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Newton currently resides in scenic New Jersey.

Seth Cluett is a visual and sound artist whose work includes photography, drawing, sculpture, video, sound installation, performance, and concert music. A native of Troy, NY he is currently pursuing his doctoral studies at Princeton University. His work is a comment on perception and nature. It is an examination of sound, light, weather, geology, and cognition. He uses dust, pigment, glass, sand, water, paper pulp, air pressure, and oxidation exposed to sound or light to show the potential of our senses. How does sound direct our gaze? How does light change how we listen? How do people use this knowledge for power and communication? His work has been shown/performed at galleries, festivals, sound art venues, and concert spaces both traditional and alternative throughout the Americas and Europe. Seth's work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Sedimental, Crank Satori, Boxmedia, and Wavelet records as well as upcoming releases on Kissy and Televaw records. For more information: http://www.onelonelypixel.org


Scott Smallwood was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up at 10,000 feet in elevation in the Colorado Rockies. Currently based in the New Jersey, Smallwood's work exists in the world of real and abstracted sound textures based on a practice of listening, improvisation, and phonography. Ranging between sonic photographs, abstracted studio pieces, improvisations, and composed structures, his work attempts to deal with the puzzle of pulling signal out of noise. His work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Televaw, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Webbed Hand Records, and has been presented nationally and internationally in festivals, conferences, galleries, clubs, coffee shops, swimming pools, rooftops, and dive bars. He is currently a doctoral fellow in the music department of Princeton University.


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