Liz Tonne & Sean Meehan
“So, I have never had anything remotely close to an ecstatic moment, so maybe tonight is the night.” - Sean Meehan
Liz Tonne is a sound artist inspired by the unorthodox use of the human voice. She is an improviser and an interpreter of contemporary composition using voice as her instrument. Her singing is an abstraction of styles ranging from jazz to bird songs, and uses techniques taken from bel canto, wheezing and the mimicry of machinery.
As well as performing as a solo artist, Tonne is a member of The BSC, a large improvisational group directed by Bhob Rainey. She is a quarter of undr quartet, who along with James Coleman, Greg Kelley and Vic Rawlings, celebrated 2008 as their tenth year anniversary as one of the pioneering ensembles of Boston’s “lowercase” sound.
www.liztonne.com
Sean Meehan plays the drums. This is his second performance with Liz Tonne. He plays with others, most notably Matthew Sperry and Kendall Pigg. Meehan and Pigg have recently finished a duo drum CD to be released later this spring.
Duane Pitre is a Brooklyn-based composer, improviser and sound-artist. His primary instrument is electric guitar, which he plays in a nontraditional fashion, utilizing various objects such as mallets and rotary tools to coax unusual sounds from the instrument. His current solo works explore both chaos and discipline—and the territory that exists between the two.
Pitre (originally from New Orleans) spent the better part of the 90s in San Diego, where he began exploring drone, minimalism, and ambient music. In September 2004 he moved to Brooklyn and began studying the physics of sound, the involvement of mathematics in tuning and temperament, the tuning system of Just Intonation, and other microtonal tuning systems.
In summer of 2007 Pitre’s album, Organized Pitches Occurring in Time, was released on Important Records. This album consists of two versions of his lengthy drone/contemporary-classical composition Ensemble Drones. Ensemble Drones was performed live in December 2007 by a 13-piece ensemble in Burlington, VT, and future performances of the piece are in the works for Chicago (May ‘08), New Orleans, Austin, and San Diego.
Pitre has a number of releases scheduled for 2008, including a track on a compilation of experimental/avant-garde guitarists (to be released by Quiet Design) and limited edition lathe-cut vinyl on Ireland’s 5 Minute Association label (Loren Connors, Michael Gira, Sunburned Hand of the Man).
Pitre is currently curating and will be contributing a track to a Just Intonation compilation (to be released on Important Records in late 2008/Early 2009), which will include work by artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Michael Harrison, and Arnold Dreyblatt.