Chris Brown, piano, Suzanne Thorpe, flute, and Nate Wooley, trumpet, perform improvised electroacoustic music using timbres and textures that emerge from extended instrumental techniques and live electronic/computer sound transformation. All three musicians draw on diverse backgrounds in classical, rock, jazz, noise, electronic and experimental music to their spontaneously generated, collective sound explorations. The Baltimore-based composer Alexandra Gardner presents two short compositions from a series of works for solo instruments and electronics: New Skin performed by Pat Spencer, alto flute, and Bloom with Clarice Jensen, cello.
Chris Brown is a composer, pianist, and electronic musician who creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. He has performed throughout the U.S. and internationally for over 30 years. Collaboration and improvisation are consistent themes in his work, as well as the invention and performance of new electronic instruments. He writes his own interactive music software that he uses in his compositions and improvisations. Recordings of his music are available on New World, Tzadik, Leo, Pogus, Intakt, Rastascan, Ecstatic Peace, Red Toucan, SIRR, and Artifact labels. He teaches at Mills College in Oakland, California and is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).
Suzanne Thorpe is a musician/composer who works in a spectrum of modalities, fixed and improvised, installed and recorded. She plays electro-acoustic flute through an ever-evolving array of analog and digital effects, incorporating laptop upon whim. Her way is to listen for just-the-right sounds and timbres, and the right moments to introduce them to each other. Her composed works tend to be site-specific sound pieces that speak of and with their environment with an amalgam of sound sources, bringing forth moments of vulnerability, possibility and multiplicity. She has released over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, and Tape Drift, and was a founding member of critically acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she performed, recorded and toured from 1989 - 2001, earning a gold record for 1998's Deserter's Songs.
Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, and began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. He moved to New York in 2001, and has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. His solo playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet, redefining the physical boundaries of the horn, with a combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor. Time Out New York has called him "an iconoclastic trumpeter", and Downbeat's Jazz Musician of the Year, Dave Douglas has said, "Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole". In 2011 he was an artist in residence at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY and he is also the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American.
Composer Alexandra Gardner creates music for varied instrumentations, often mixing acoustic instruments with electronics. Praised as “highly lyrical and provocative of thought” (San Francisco Classical Voice), and “mesmerizing” (The New York Times), her music has been featured at venues worldwide, including the Aspen Music Festival, Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, Beijing Modern Festival, Warsaw Autumn Festival, and The Kennedy Center. Selected honors and awards include recognition from Meet the Composer, American Composers Forum, The American Music Center, Vassar College and The Netherland-America Foundation. Alexandras music has been commissioned by ensembles such as the SOLI Chamber Ensemble, Percussions de Barcelona, ETHEL, and the Seattle Symphony.