Ambient Chaos - Out of Space Series Presents:
A night of eclectic, timeless music with:
Ayako Kanda and Elliott Sharp
Shoko Nagai and Hans Tammen
Pyron
John Misciagno
Ayako Kanda and Elliott Sharp
Ayako Kanda is an improviser and performance artist whose medium is her voice.
Currently based in Tokyo, Ayako's work moves between total improvisation and standard jazz, quick sketches and impressionist painting, creating rules and then breaking them as she roams freely between linguistic and alinguistic facets of expression.
Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.
A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.
His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.
Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.
Shoko Nagai and Hans Tammen
Shoko Nagai is a versatile musical artist who improvises and performs with world-renowned musicians on piano and accordion and composes original scores for films and live performances. As a teenager in her native Japan, Nagai was trained on Yamaha's electronic organ, the "Electone," to perform popular music. Since moving to the U.S. from Japan and studying classical, jazz music, and compositions at Berklee, she has adapted her mastery of the keyboard to prepared piano, accordions, and other keyboard instruments, often inspired by the minimalist approach of composer Toru Takemitsu. Whether she is performing Klezmer, Balkan or experimental music, Nagai is a charismatic presence onstage, who hypnotizes audiences with her intense focus and virtuoso sound.
Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. This flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).
He currently plays guitar, Buchla Music Easel, a Blippoo Box chaos synthesizer plus other small electronics devices. He also performs with various pieces of software of his own design, i.e. the "Endangered Guitar" (a hybrid software/guitar instrument), and "Prozesshansl" (made to process the sounds of other instruments). He regularly writes for large ensembles, notably his 18-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Third Eye Orchestra, and the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, both founded in 2005. In 2021 FLUX String Quartet commissioned him to write a large work for string quartet and live electronics.
Pyron
https://www.jenniferpyron.com/
PYRON is an experimental sound and video art group based in NYC featuring multi-instrumental and electronic musicians. Jennifer Pyron is an improvisational artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She specializes in art song cycles that dive deep into the psyche through her voice, synthesizer, layered processing, loop station and keyboard
John Misciagno
https://soundcloud.com/johnmisciagno
John Misciagno is a composer and performer, currently residing in New York. Having briefly lived in the Midwest, he studied classical music and electronic music at UW-Milwaukee where he composed for performers such as Spectral Quartet and saxophonist Nick Zoulek. During this time, he also began experimenting with live electronics - performing solo sets and with the impromptu free music group: Unrehearsed MKE. With his last album, "Waking," his recent performances have turned toward ambient music as he performs with electric guitar and keyboard. His latest improvised performances incorporate drones and looping electric guitar underneath layered acoustic-sounding melodies that form an evolving melodic soundscape.