ErstAEU is a new CD imprint, launched by Erstwhile Records to help document the work of young American experimental musicians working in a post-electroacoustic vein. The first three CDs were released in March 2013 to great acclaim, and now all six musicians will travel to NYC for this special one-time showcase night.
Anne Guthrie / Richard Kamerman
Graham Stephenson / Aaron Zarzutzki
Joe Panzner / Greg Stuart
Richard Kamerman (NYC, 1985) continual improviser, periodic composer, automated percussionist, inept programmer. Kamerman's artistic interest is aimed foremost on the task of magnification. Small sounds, small gestures - made large. Inconsequential events - made important. The vast difference made to a narrative by a small change in focus. Room acoustics, microphone/pickup placement, and amplification are often very important to his live construction of sound, where he places great weight on the embracing of unintended consequences - e.g. errors in translation/format conversion, bursts of feedback, power supply failures. Long term collaborative projects include Tandem Electrics (with Reed Evan Rosenberg), delicate sen (with Anne Guthrie and Billy Gomberg), Fyxzis (with Steven Flato and Corey Larkin), and Frogwell (with Robert Hardin, Bob Lukomski, Jeremy Slater, and Tamara Yadao). He additionally runs the small-press music label Copy For Your Records.
Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, French horn player, and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She studied music composition and english at the University of Iowa and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she is currently a PhD Candidate. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with FrauFraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her current acoustics research focuses on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics. The purpose of this site is to share current and past work in all these fields.
Graham Stephenson is a trumpet player living in Chicago, Illinois. He started playing trumpet in 1990, in the fifth grade, and studied with Larry Prescott. He played the trumpet solo on "Beauty School Dropout" in his high school marching band's football halftime-show rendition of "Grease." He has performed the electroacoustic improvised music on trumpet since 2005 with Dave Barnes, members of the Green Pasture Happiness, Richard Kamerman, and others. His solo recording debut was released in 2011 by Pilgrim Talk. He also plays trumpet in folk-music bands.
Aaron Zarzutzki is a improviser of various sorts. He works primarily with misuse and perversion of objects and systems. Virtuosity, volatility, futility, and capability are thought of. Zarzutzki currently lives, works, and plays in Chicago.
Joe Panzner is a computer musician from Akron, OH currently residing in Columbus, OH. He draws on the live electronic music of John Cage and David Tudor, the long-form memory experiments of Morton Feldman, and the digital extremism of Peter Rehberg, Florian Hecker, Zbigniew Karkowski, Dion Workman, and Julien Ottavi. In addition to his solo performance and composition, he records and performs with scenic railroads alongside fellow computer/electronics musician Mike Shiflet. Panzner works with live electronics and within an ethos of musical materialism, preferring visceral sound experience to representation. He uses treated natural and instrumental sounds, computer synthesis and digitally processed analog synthesis, frequency extremes, and an array of acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena.
Greg Stuart is a percussionist whose work explores various alternative percussion techniques, including sustained friction, gravity-based sounds via small grains, sympathetic vibration, and electronic instruments. Since 2006 Stuart has collaborated extensively with the composer Michael Pisaro to produce a large body of new music for percussion comprised of pieces that focus on the magnification of small sounds through recording and layering and, at times, in combination with field recordings. Stuart also currently works with the percussion trio Meridian (with Tim Feeney and Nick Hennies) and with computer musician Joe Panzner. He has performed at MaerzMusik (Berlin), The Stone (NYC), Gallery Kapleica (Ljubljana), Elastic Arts Foundation (Chicago), New Music Co-Op (Austin), Philadelphia Sound Forum, Sushi Performance and Visual Art (San Diego), MacPhail Center for Music (Minneapolis), and Conundrum Music Hall (West Columbia, SC) among others. His work can be heard on such labels as Edition Wandelweiser, Gravity Wave, Erstwhile, Cathnor, Accidie and Senufo Editions.