Philadelphia-born, New Jersey-raised polymath Laraaji has maintained a pursuit of spiritual transcendence through music since the mid-70s. After several years of studiously developing an aesthetic informed by Eastern faiths and transcendental research in his long-time home in Harlem, in 1979 Brian Eno stumbled upon him busking in Washington Square Park in New York, improvising celestial…
Bowerbird is pleased to present New Perplexity (Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, Ron Shalom) in an evening of new works created during their upcoming artists-in-residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. New Perplexity is a composer-performer collective intent on creating new contexts for the daxophone, a thin hardwood strip played with a bow, created by the German…
Bowerbird is pleased to present an evening of screened and live audio visual shorts including the Philadelphia premiere of Phill Niblock’s newly mastered 1966 film The Magic Sun - an experimental work featuring Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra that was produced using a unique negative process and ultra-tight close-ups on the moving hands and mouths of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a double bill of fingerstyle and American primitive guitarists Yasmin Williams and Daniel Bachman. YASMIN WILLIAMS DANIEL BACHMAN ABOUT THE ARTIST Yasmin Williams is an acoustic fingerstyle guitarist with an unorthodox, modern style of playing. Her music has been commonly described as refreshing, relaxing, and unique and has…
Philadelphia favorites Alash return to The Rotunda for a FREE concert. Alash are masters of Tuvan throat singing (xöömei), a remarkable technique for singing multiple pitches at the same time. Masters of traditional Tuvan instruments as well as the art of throat singing, Alash are deeply committed to traditional Tuvan music and culture. At the same…
Bowerbird is honored to present a two evening retrospective of pioneering composer Johanna Beyer. The first evening features her percussion music and the second evening features her chamber music. Although Beyer's music was overlooked during her lifetime and for decades after her death, it was some of the most experimental and prophetic work created during…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the world premiere of Greg Brown’s Fall and Decline performed by Variant 6. The new work composed for voices and electronics is based on texts of Sadakichi Hartmann, Eprenius, Todd Hearon, Edward Gibbon, and Omar Khayyam. The composition contemplates the inevitable decline of all things natural and manmade. Variant 6…
Bowerbird is excited to present a rare evening of all contemporary music for brass ensemble featuring musicians from the Arcana New Music Ensemble. The program encompasses a wide variety of compositional voices from the last sixty years, including Lois V. Vierk's thorny Jagged Mesa, Michael Nyman's very un-Cagein For John Cage, and more recent works…
Bowerbird and the Arcana New Music Ensemble are excited to present the music of Ben Patterson (1934-2016), an important and under-recognized leader of the early Fluxus movement, an international, interdisciplinary community of experimental artists that began in the early 1960s. The program represents Patterson's wide range of compositional strategies. For example - Paper Piece (for 1…
Pressure Wave is a new evening length audio /visual piece by composer/ performer HPrizm (Kyle Austin). The work uses amplified resonance of urban spaces and the intersectional space between Sonic Activism, Musique concrète, and Rap's early roots to examine the dense environments and circumstances that birthed Hip Hop. HPrizm is known for "Evoking images of…
Boston based composer/performer Howard Stelzer performs "Crossing Parallel", a live score to Joe Taylor's poetic film footage of the American southwest. Accompanying this work will be a screening of Philadelphia based film maker David Scott Kessler's Icelandic short film Lopapeysa (with a recorded score by Mary Lattimore and Benjamin Warfield). ABOUT CROSSING PARALLEL "Crossing Parallel", an…
Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada presents his new group featuring Julia Holter and percussionist Corey Fogel performing music from Wada's new album “Nue” out this fall on Brooklyn-based label RVNG Intl. Opening the evening will be a new synthesizer duo project from Jeff Zeigler (Philadelphia) and Dash Lewis (Richmond). In Japanese, ‘nue’ is a mythological…
Currently over 100 feet in length, LONG/GONE is a single intricately-cut piece of paper which flows freely from image to image. Narratives and scenarios (often drawn from classic works of literature from Homer to Dante) emerge and collapse and spill over into each other. In performance, Erik scrolls the paper-cut continually across the surface of…
90 mins, black and white, German with English subtitles
Bowerbird is excited to present a screening of "Wild Combination", director Matt Wolf's visually absorbing portrait of the seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell. Before his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, Arthur prolifically created music that spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract art. Now, over fifteen years…
Bowerbird is excited to present the music of Pauline Oliveros performed by the Arcana New Music Ensemble. One of the leading composers and performers of the 20th and 21st century, Pauline Oliveros' career spanned four decades and influenced generations of musicians. While Oliveros is most widely known for her improvisationally centered Deep Listening work, her…
Bowerbird is excited to present a rare Philadelphia appearance by experimental vocal duo Audrey Chen and Phil Minton. Opening the evening will be cellist-singer Daniel de Jesús. With primary focus on the interplay between the uttered sounds of the mouth and vocal chords, Audrey Chen and Phil Minton plumb the depths of their most inherent…
Bowerbird is excited to present Emma Resmini, an extraordinary young virtuoso performing a program of contemporary music for flute. The program includes "Flautina" from Stockhausen's opera "Montag aus Licht" and Dai Fujikura's "Poison Mushrooms", a threnody to the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. Emma began playing at flute at the age of three and is…
