John Butcher will perform his new work "The Geometry of Sentiment," a set of new pieces for acoustic and amplified saxophone developed for the distinctive acoustic space of ISSUE Project Room's new theater. John Butcher’s work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked saxophone pieces and solo explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in 1982, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians, mostly involved with improvisation – including Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Gerry Hemmingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, Orig Toshimaru Nakamura, Paul Lovens, Eddie Prevost, Phil Minton, Steve Beresford, Otomo Yoshihide and John Tilbury. His compositions include pieces for Polwechsel, Elision, Rova Saxophone Quartet and “somethingtobesaid” for the John Butcher Group.
Twistycat is the bass woodwinds brainchild of Ed Bear and Lea Bertucci. The Bass Clarinet and Baritone Saxophone are acoustically related to each individual venue through electroacoustic feedback. The creation of an immediate awareness of space aims to break the antiquated barriers between performance and audience, and realize the innate potential of sound as energy and information. TwistyCat's compositions explore themes such as electronic abstraction of acoustic timbre, the bleed between the senses of sight and hearing, post-industrial dissonances, and radio as a vehicle for displacing sound. TwistyCat has performed at many venues and events in the Northeast, including the Darmstadt Festival at Issue Project Room, Mono No Aware at Galapagos Artspace, The New York Underground Film Festival at Anthology Film Archives, Roulette at Location One, free103point9, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church. TwistyCat was the 2009 recipient of Roulette’s Emerging Composers’ Commission
This performance will also mark the release of a new cd on Chicago's Peira Records. The latest album from Ed Bear and Lea Bertucci, (aka Twistycat), marks a sonic and formal departure from previous recordings. Simultaneously minimal and lush, structured improvisations are ornamented with vibraphone and AM radio textures. Bertucci and Bear use electroacoustic/extended techniques on Bass Clarinet and Baritone Saxophone to explore microtonal harmony, creating a slowly shifting sonic space that reverberates with a mournful transcendence.
Ed Bear and Lea Bertucci will premiere a site specific work composed for Issue Project Room's new home at 110 Livingston Street. They have created a dynamic lighting system which draws on the space's dimensions to create stark shadows that reveal/obscure architectural details of the space. This lighting system will act as a three dimensional score for Bertucci and Bear's electroacoustic investigations of the room's harmonic qualities through pitched feedback.