+ Ateleia and Sadek Bazaraa
+ Hisham Bharoocha w/ Ben Vida
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Tonight's performance marks a new instance of 'Archegram', the ongoing collaboration between musician James Elliott, aka Ateleia, and visual artist Sadek Bazaraa. Combining Ateleia's pulsing ambient soundscapes and Bazaraa's deeply atmospheric video art, the two strive to generate a hermetic sensory environment that melds the streamlined focus of classic modern minimalism with the tranced-out spiritualism of sustained tones, slippery loops and hypnotically repeating geometric imagery.
Since 2004 James Elliott has worked under the Ateleia moniker, releasing propulsive, abstractly melodic electronic music on the Table of the Elements label. Elliott reconfigures a variety of source materials - mainly synthesizer, guitar and electronics - via computer processing into a shifting, constantly mutating framework of psychedelic minimalism. The Wire (UK) has called Ateleia's music, "Quietly breathtaking." Dusted magazine writes, "... the sensual properties of these perpetually flickering micro-melodies and buried, striated rhythms recall the bright eyelid-movie patterning of Man Ray’s 'Emak Bakia' film, where spiralling shapes reflect light in abstruse programs."
Sadek Bazaraa is a multi-media artist working in the realms of fine art, art direction and commercial design as a partner at the design collective GHAVA. Bazaraa's recent visual acuity draws heavily on associations between objects, shapes, patterns, and textures taken from immediate surroundings to form unexpected narratives. Through recontextualization and careful manipulation, the mundane becomes glorified. Bazaraa's process-oriented approach is primarily concerned with the subtle manipulation of geometric shapes and textural distortions to create a truly immersive take on the mathematical ratios of sacred geometry.
Hisham Akira Bharoocha is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He concentrates on creating music, visual art, and photography. Bharoocha has had solo exhibitions of his work at D'Amelio Terras gallery in New York, as well as Vleeshal, a state run space in The Netherlands. He has been in numerous group exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, John Connelly Presents, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His work has been published in Art Forum, V, i-D, Flaunt, Tokion, and Blend, among others.
Hisham's most recent works deal with the melting together of images that happens in the mind when one is meditating, dreaming, day dreaming, or going about their daily lives. Bharoocha likes to observe how his visions and feelings all blend together to create a massive medley of images and vibrations that one can feel in the body. Hisham tries to create works that show the absurdity and logic of how each mind works, what kind of relationships it creates between experiences and images that we absorb through our senses moment by moment.
He is well known in the underground music scene for helping to found both Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. After leaving Black Dice, he created Soft Circle, a solo project that allowed him a more personal exploration of his own musical interests. His first solo album, 'Full Bloom' was released in January 2007 on Eastern Developments. Hisham has recently collaborated with the artist Doug Aitken on a sound piece which was performed at the MoMA, as well as musicians such as the experimental rock group Boredoms. Bharoocha is currently working on a new Soft Circle album due to be released sometime in 2009.
Hisham is one of the New York underground community's creative leaders, continually trying to bring together the visual art, music, and fashion communities for collaboration. Bharoocha was the musical director for the now legendary 77 BOADRUM performance, a musical composition composed by the experimental Japanese music group Boredoms, which involved 77 drummers playing 77 drum kits in a Spiral formation at Empire Fulton Ferry State Park on July 7th, 2007. Bharoocha was also the music director for this year's 88 Boadrum performance which happened on August 8th, 2008 with 88 drummers playing with Boredoms in Los Angeles, as well as 88 drummers playing with Gang Gang Dance in New York City on the same day.
