Agathe Max + Tony Conrad

Thu 04 Sep, 2008, 8pm
Old American Can Factory

Agathe Max is a French musician based in Lyon. She mostly performs as a solo violin act, enhanced with various loops, distortions and other effects. She has been a member of Brown Recluse, Clara Clara and is a current member of Promise is yours. Her album to come will be released by the infamous Table of the Elements label. She has been very much on tour in the last few years sharing gigs with important international acts such as Carla Bozulich, Jonathan Kane, David Daniell, Melt Banana… Her music is either composed or improvised, depending of the shape of the project. In addition to her musical career, Agathe Max is also a visual artist, a jeweller and an activist in the musical and artistic community in Lyon.

She recorded a first demo in february 2007 of entirely improvised music before recording her first official release on Angry Ballerina Records in the shape of a live album recorded at Lyon’s fave experimental music dive, the Sonic. Her music is hypnotic, pulsed if not rhythmic in a real way, raw & sincere yet sophisticated. It’s an invitation to explore the depths of true feelings, palpable, organic, pagan and spiritual.

Max will mostly present pieces of the new album « this silver string » released on Table of The Elements in September. This album has been recorded in Lyon, France, last february. She will also present a new piece, just worked on, which is based on an Indian raga mixed with distortions and loop effects, and mostly improvised.

Tony Conrad is a video/sound artist, musician/composer, filmmaker, teacher and writer. His collaboration Outside the Dream Syndicate (1972) with the German Krautrock group Faust is a classic of minimal music, and his film The Flicker (1966) is a key work of the structural film movement. Conrad was a founding member of the Theater of Eternal Music, nicknamed The Dream Syndicate, which included John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Conrad has composed more than a dozen audio works for strings with solo amplified violin. He began to work in video and performance in the 1970s as a professor at Antioch College in Ohio and at the Department of Media Study in the University at Buffalo, where he continues to teach. His work has been shown in many museums and galleries in Europe and North America.

Tony Conrad will perform on violin with recorded accompaniment.