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Wednesday, December 16th, composer and performer John McCowen presents his third and final performance as a 2020 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence with LOW QUARTET, featuring Leila Bordreuil, Zach Rowden, & Lester St. Louis.
LOW QUARTET is a reimagined version of McCowen’s large ensemble piece Nice Work If, which was scrapped due to the pandemic. By boiling down the grandiose concepts of the larger piece, these textural swathes are best represented by the vocabularies of Bordreuil, Rowden, St. Louis, & McCowen.
Leila Bordreuil - cello, etc.
John McCowen - clarinets, recorders, etc.
Zach Rowden - double bass, tape loops, etc.
Lester St. Louis - cello, etc.
John McCowen is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer originally from Southern Illinois. His work focuses on extending the possibilities of the clarinet & contrabass clarinet. John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensions within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. His discography includes releases on Edition Wandelweiser, International Anthem, Astral Spirits, NNA Tapes, Cairn Desk, and others. Performances include Le Guess Who Festival (Utrecht), Norður og Niður Festival (Reykjavik), Hot Air Music Festival (SF), Bowling Green New Music Festival, Supersonic Festival (Birmingham), Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), The Stone, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Constellation (Chicago). John was a 2017 & 2019 artist-in-residence at Lijiang Studio in Yunnan, China. He received the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for excellence in music composition in 2016 from Mills College where he also received an MA in Music Composition under the mentorship of Roscoe Mitchell.
Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer working in the realm of improvisation, noise music, and sound art. She accesses concepts as diverse as jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Her work has been described by the NY times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities.” Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Leila challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and amplification methods. Her composed works draw from a similar aesthetic and frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations. Her collaborative projects are notoriously numerous and diverse, and include duos with Bill Nace (Body/Head), Japanoise artist Tamio Shiraishi (Fushitutsa), techno producer Bookworms, bassist Zach Rowden, sound-artist Julia Santoli, saxophonist Michael Foster, and a freely improvised trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey.
Zach Rowden is a American multi-instrumentalist that deals with the in-between of music and perception. The music he makes occupies genres such as spectral music, drone, folk & religious musics as well as harsh noise. He is currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. Current project and collaborators include Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble as a member and soloist, Tongue Depressor with Henry Birdsey, Figured with Ian McColm, Arien Wilkerson (TMNT AZTRO), Leila Bordreuil, Tyshawn Sorey, Robert Black, Charmaine Lee, Paul Flaherty, Austin Larkin, Chris Cretella, Matt Sargent and Wendy Eisenberg.
Lester St. Louis is a New York born and based multi-instrumentalist (primarily cellist), composer and curator. Lester performs in contexts where he feels he can meaningfully contribute, often in context of improvisation, new music and theatre. Lester has performed in the United states, South America and Europe with artists such as Dré Hočevar, Joe Morris, Charmaine Lee, Nate Wooley, MOCREP, Richard Barrett, SZA, Jaimie Branch, TAK Ensemble, The sugar glass theatre company, Soho Rep and many others. As a composer Lester is currently and in the near future composing for Rage Thrombones, JACK Quartet, Mahan Esfahani and Stefan Jackiw, and N/A ensemble. Later this year, Lester will release his first solo album titled “After Affects” on the newly founded Anticausal Systems label.
