ZS and Mivos Quartet, two of New York City’s most exciting avant-garde ensembles, come together for an evening of new chamber music and collaboration. Mivos performs Mario Diaz de Leon’s haunting spectral/noise piece Moonblood and Tristan Perich’s Salt, a work written for Mivos with Perich’s trademark 1-bit electronics, plus a new arrangement of J.S. Bach’s Contrapunctus XIX by ZS guitarist and composer Patrick Higgins. ZS perform several selections from their recent output, including their ferocious 30-minute work Xe in a new collaborative arrangement featuring Mivos.
Program
J.S. Bach: Contrapunctus XIX (arr. Patrick Higgins, 2013)
Tristan Perich: Salt, for string quartet and 1-bit electronics
Mario Diaz de Leon: Moonblood
Patrick Higgins: Aletheia (preview excerpt from SQ3: Encomium)
ZS: Wolf Government
ZS: Xe (in a new collaborative arrangement by ZS & Mivos)
"Zs is a band; it’s also a perpetual itch, an index of unease around the restrictions of genre in New York experimental music." - New York Times
ZS is a band and a genre. ZS—Sam Hillmer, saxophone Patrick Higgins, guitar Greg Fox, drums— is concerned with creating music that challenges the physical and mental limitations of performer and listener equally. ZS has toured extensively in North America, Europe, and Asia. On September 11th, 2012, ZS released 'SCORE - the complete sextet works 2002 - 2007' a four CD box set. SCORE will be followed by the GRAIN EP in April of 2013 and XE, an LP due out in late 2013, to be accompanied by extensive touring.
The Mivos Quartet, an “accomplished, admirably broad-minded young string quartet” New York Times, is devoted to performing the works of contemporary composers, presenting new music to diverse audiences. Since the quartet's beginnings in 2008 they have performed, commissioned and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers who represent multiple aesthetics of contemporary classical composition. Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is committed to working with guest artists and exploring multi-media projects involving live video and electronics as well as improvisation. Mivos has appeared on concert series including Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Germany), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), Concerti Aperitivo (Udine, Italy), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Edgefest (Ann Arbor, MI), and Aldeburgh Music (UK), where Mivos was invited to work with the Arditti Quartet and Helmut Lachenmann for a week-long masterclass intensive. Mivos was one of five groups selected for the Young Ensembles Fellowship at the 2012 Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, where they were awarded a Fellowship Prize for Interpretation. Mivos returned to Aldeburgh Music in January 2013 for a two-week residency, where they performed several concerts featuring repertoire by British and American composers, and recorded their upcoming album featuring music by Alex Mincek, Felipe Lara, David Franzson, and Wolfgang Rihm.