Manuel Mota (guitar) solo,
Margarida Garcia (double bass) and Marcia Bassett (guitar) duo
Barry weisblat (electronics) and Mike Bernstein (electronics) duo
Manuel Mota
Manuel Mota is a guitarist born in Lisbon, with public activity since 1989. From that to 1997 he studies and experiments with prepared guitar, mainly acoustic. Since then his interests shifted to the development of a personal language for fingerstyle electric guitar and started working in a regular basis with bassist Margarida Garcia. A lot of acoustic guitar has been played at home in the last years, and it has also been possible to find him playing with bands Osso Exótico, Curia, Dru, and collaborating with David Maranha and Afonso Simões. Worked with Sei Miguel from 1997 to 2005. Founds the record label Headlights in 1998. Draws and shoots.
Margarida Garcia and Marcia Bassett DUO
Garcia and Bassett first collaborated in a group working with sound, text and light projections. Other members of the group included Mattin, Emma Hedditch and Jeffery Perkins. Through these early meetings, Bassett and Garcia recognized a similar sonic aesthetic. Further meetings of the two have lead to handful of local improvised shows and a forthcoming LP to be released on the label Headlights.
Marcia Bassett
Bassett aka Zaimph, predominantly uses guitar and vocals to create
sounds that shimmer in a dark metallic buzz of sonic noise and drone,
before a swift shift into blissed out ragas or crippling, brutal, white-hot noise. The organic improvised elements of Bassett’s work leave traces of eerie ghost voices and deep-space echoes that recall the electrified ritual of nomadic Japanese avant-gardists Taj Mahal Travellers — but more immediately sound like a magnification of her contributions to Double Leopards and Hototogisu, generating towers of electricity that move from malevolent arcs of anti-gravity and spumes of throttled single notes into deep wormholes that do violence to
feeble notions of time and space.
Margarida Garcia
Using double bass as her main instrument, she developed a close collaboration with guitarist Manuel Mota in 1997. The two have worked as a duo as well as in the group, Curia, which includes Afonso Simões and David Maranha (organeye, osso exótico). Garcia has also worked with Sei Miguel from 1999 to 2002. Other close collabs include Marcia Bassett, Barry Weisblat and Mattin. She has played in live/recording settings with Nöel Akchoté, Otomo Yoshihide, Ferran Fages, Alfredo C. Monteiro, Ruth Barberán, John Tilbury, Eddie Prevost, Rhodri Davies, Matt Valentine, Erica Elder, David Keenan and Alex Neilson (tight meat duo).
Michael Bernstein
Michael Bernstein is a Brooklyn, New York based Musician, Computer Programmer, Tomato Grower, and Homebrewer. He spent most of the first half of the 2000s investigating purely improvised music with Double Leopards and the second half fumbling his way through a new-via-old concept of rock based sound with Religious Knives, which he started with his wife Maya Miller. Only occasionally gathering up the courage to delve into improvised sound in a non “rock” or “noise” show context, he’s very excited to engage with old friend and fellow NYC resident Barry Weisblat in their first duo
performance.
Barry Weisblat
Barry Weisblat was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and remains one of the unsung heroes of deep and investigative Sound Thought. Beyond a long-running commitment to participating in the underground’s underground of improvisation and a dynamic sense of musical conversation, Weisblat has extended his reach and pool of knowledge beyond rubbing the surface of the black box of sound to designing and implementing his own systems. Translating light into sound, sound into action, action into thought, and thought into light, Weisblat’s ceaseless curiosity and simultaneous obsessive desire to participate and join in dialogue has pushed his output farther out than most people can see or conceive of. He’ll be participating in his first duo with fellow South Brooklynite Michael Bernstein.