Betsey Biggs is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work in music, sound, video and installation has been called "psychologically complex" by the New Yorker. Her work aims to expose the beautiful in the mundane, to actively engage the audience, and to transform the city into a creative interface through psychogeographic practice. Recent projects include a theatrical work with flutist and performer Margaret Lancaster, an outdoor mixer powered by people's shadows and a series of downloadable soundtracks meant for walkers to engage with their surroundings. Betsey recently received her Ph.D. at Princeton University, writing about public sound art, and will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University in the fall of 2009.
Tonight, Biggs performs Ton Yam I (For Brian Wilson), a live improvisation deconstructing and reshaping fragments of the Beach Boy's God Only Knows into a sea of floating harmonies, feedback, and glitch: destruction and reconstruction.
Shelley Burgon (harp & computer) is a member of the performing/composer chamber ensemble Ne(x)tworks and the band Stars Like Fleas. She has spent the last seven years improvising as a soloist and with many legendary people associated with the New York downtown avante-garde. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a "mesmerizing" interpreter of modern music. Shelley has performed her music and the music of contemporary composers for series such as the the MATA Festival, Issue Project Rooms Points in a Circle, free103point9 Wave Farm and Summer Winds, and the Vision Festival among others. In May 2009 she was honored to premiere a new piece for the Merce Cunningham Hudson Valley Project at the Dia:Beacon. She is currently collaborating on an electronic music project with songwriter/vocalist Paul Duncan. Shelley received a BA in Music from SFSU and an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. She can be heard as a collaborator and guest on many labels including Hometapes, Skirl, Tzadik and Ipecac.
At ISSUE Project Room, harpist Shelley Burgon performs "Mirrored Ceiling," a new composition by Stephan Moore for harp and multi-channel audio, in which the harp is fed through a network of shifting delays to create shimmering, meditative sonic patterns.
