HzCollective presents: Ignaz Schick, R Keenan Lawler, & Myo

Saturday, April 17, 2010 | 8pm | $5

IGNAZ SCHICK & KEENAN LAWLER met for the first time about 10 years ago in Louisville, KY when Keenan set up a show for Perlonex during their legendary X-Noise tour in 2001. At the time they had a chance to rehearse and record and found that they share the same approach towards drone music which is deeply rooted in noise and electro-acoustic music but also encourages subtle folk elements. Since the first meeting they had been trying to record & perform which until this tour failed for several times due to logistic problems. So they will use the chance and record all 10 live concerts and they will go to mix and edit the material directly after the tour in Louisville.

IGNAZ SCHICK (BERLIN)

* 1972 in Germany [turntablist, sound artist]
In his youth, he studied the saxophone and performed in free jazz and
avant rock bands. At the same time, he was getting obsessed with
multitrack tape machines, record players and effect boxes and he
started experimenting with many different instruments and sound making
devices. After college he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts
in Munich and worked for several years as an assistent for the
contemporary composer Josef Anton Riedl.
Since the late 1995 he works and lives in Berlin where he became an
active and integral force of the so-called “Berlin Nouvelle Vague” and
the blossoming “real time music” scene. From the middle of the
nineties onwards his interest and activities almost completely shifted
towards live-electronics and after testing various instrumentations
(hard- & software samplers, signal processing, contact mics, field
recordings, …) he developed his own and quite unique
electro-acoustic set-up which he calls “rotating surfaces”. Various
objects and materials (from wood, metal, plastic, paper or violin bows
and cymbals) are played directly on the rotating metal plate of the
turntable and the vibrations are simply amplified with a small
condensator microphone. With this set-up he covers many different
styles of contemporary experimental music – ranging from extreme
reductionism via ambient, industrial, musique concrete, electronica to
harsh noise.

Besides his favorite setting – the direct duo-confrontation with the
likes of Chris Abrahams (AUS), Andrea Belfi (I), Alexei Borisov (RUS),
Sebastian Buczek (PL), Phil Durrant (GB), Gunnar Geisse (D), GX
Jupitter-Larsen/The Haters (USA), Sven Ake Johansson (S/D), Andrea
Neumann (D), Dawid Szczesny (PL), Martin Tetreault (CAN), Marcel
Türkowsky (D) or Sabine Vogel (D) – he is member and founder of many
different ensembles like Perlonex, Snake Figures Arkestra, Phosphor,
Blind Snakes, Tree People, Decollage, Berlin Sound Connective, N.I.E.,
….
He has collaborated with numerous international artists (most notably
Don Cherry & Charlemagne Palestine) and toured and performed clubs &
festivals all over Eastern and Western Europe, Australia, Israel,
Malaysia, New Zealand, Russia, Ukraine & the USA. He released many
albums on labels like Zarek, Edition Zangi, edition x, Irrah,
Potlatch, Bad Alchemy, Charhizma, Staalplaat, Nexsound, Non Visual
Objects, Improvised Music From Japan, Absinth or Ambiances Magnetiques
and he was part of radio/television broadcasts and productions on
Arte, ORF-Kunstradio, ORF-Zeitton, BR2, DLR, DLF, WDR3, DRS2, SR, HR,
Radio Copernicus, CBC Canada, (…)
Furthermore he has been curating festivals of experimental music from
the early 90s onwards (FAM, Erase & Reset, Time Shifts & T.I.T.O.,
…) and has been realizing with increasing intensiry sound
installations and conceptual works since 2005.

R KEENAN LAWLER (Louisville, Kentucky)

is a musician, sound artist, improviser and
composer. For nearly thirty years he has been a restless explorer of
sound from rock to electroacoustic improvisation and many points in
between. Since the late nineties he is best known for developing a
highly idiosyncratic difficult to categorize language on the metal
bodied resonator guitar fueled by minimalism, blues, Asian and African
musics, ancient and modern classical, psychedelia and jazz. Lawler is
known for solo performances and recordings and also as a collaborator
and perfomer working with a diverse range of like-minded artists among
them: Matmos, Rhys Chatham ensembles, Charlambides, Pelt, My Morning
Jacket, Tatsuya Nakatani, Paul K and the Weathermen, Connor Bell, Mike
Tamburo and the Universal Orchestra of Pituitary Knowledge, David
Watson, Helena Espvall, Lukas Ligeti, Ut Gret, Ignaz Schick, John
Butcher, Christian Kiefer and Jon Mueller. Lawler’s music can be found
on such labels as Important, Tompkins Square, New American Folk Hero,
Music Fellowship, Rebis, Eclipse and Table of the Elements who
released the acclaimed,”Music for the Bluegrass States”. He performs
live regularly and has participated in such festivals as High
Zero, Fantastic Voyagers, Time of Rivers, Transmissions, Greetings Fellow
Pickers, Terrastock 7 and Table of the Elements Bohrium. His sound art
has been presented in PS1 Brooklyn,Henry Art Seattle.and in Louisville
via collaboration with artists Thaniel Ion Lee, Valerie Fuchs and
Russell Hulsey.

CORY O’BRIEN/MYO (Washington, D.C.)

Myo is the solo project of Cory O’Brien (b. 1980), a self taught
hacker, computer musician and electro-acoustic improviser. Contact
mics on polycarbonate sheets and feedback networks programmed in Pd
and Max/MSP are the preferred tools. His music has been described by
Vital Weekly as “louder, dirtier, gritty and angular, but still with
ingredients of microsound”.

Other projects and collaborations include Never Work (with Kenneth
Yates), Makioki Sisters (with Jeff Surak) and Clouds-Out (with video
artist Jesse Hartgraves).

He currently lives and works in Washington, DC.