R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.
Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemprary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival.
An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.
DuBois has lived for the last fifteen years in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
Bioluminescence is an experimental electronic audio/video processing collaboration between vocalist Lesley Flanigan and laptop artist R. Luke DuBois. The performers (one singing, one processing) create a dense pallet of sound and imagery, all derived entirely from the voice of the singer. Bioluminescence has been performed internationally with regular shows in New York City. Upcoming work includes a performance with David Byrne’s Playing the Building and a collaboration with Matthew Ritchie and Bryce Dressner as part of Ritchie’s touring installation The Morning Line, opening in London 2009.
Fair Use Trio was conceived in the spring of 2006 in celebration of Luke Dubois’ “Billboard” record release on cantaloupe records. Comprised of Matty Ostrowski, Zach Layton and Luke Dubois, the trio provide a live interactive soundtrack to the frenetic and arresting time-compressed hollywood films which are manipulated and layered in real-time by Luke Dubois.
Bradford Reed never fails to entertain and inspire. This Brooklyn, NY based composer, performer and producer fights and tames the idiosyncrasies of the pencilina, an original instrument of his own design and construction. The pencilina is an electric ten stringed collision of the hammer dulcimer, slide guitar, koto and fretless bass with six pickups of varied types. It is struck with sticks, plucked and bowed, giving Reed an incredibly wide sonic palette. Many have enjoyed Reed’s frequent street performances and club dates.
In addition to his solo work, Bradford plays the pencilina, drums and keyboards with King Missile III (”Detachable Penis” and “Jesus Was Way Cool”) and produced Failure and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (on Shimmy Disc/Instict Records) as well as Royal Lunch (Important Records). He also played the electric zither in the Blue Man Group’s band in their lauded Off-Broadway show, Tubes for 8 years. Reed has appeared with his pencilina on MTV, USA Up All Night, Fox’s Sound FX, The Tonight Show and has toured throughout the USA, Asia and Europe. Reed is also featured on Orbitones, Spoon Harps & Bellowphones, Ellipsis Arts’ second experimental instruments compilation album which includes music by Tom Waits, Aphex Twin and John Cage.
Bradford produced records for Krakatoa, Red Velvet Room, Spookorama, Phil Kline and Derek Buckner. He’s also been busy composing for Augenblick (animation) Studios, as well as the Rhombus and Julia Riter Dance companies. He was awarded a fellowship to the Sundance Institute’s 2002 Film Composers Lab where he received mentoring from some of Hollywood’s top composers and film music personnel. In April of 2003 he completed a residency at the Ucross foundation in Wyoming. Bradford serves a mentor for the Music for Youth Foundation and is currently working on a new album and suite for pencilina, string quartet and percussion ensemble.
Adam Kendall is a video-artist and musician living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Through his own work and the A/V series he curates, Adam explores the means of multimedia improvisation and composition. Working solo or with other artists, he approaches live video as a medium as dynamic and improvisational as traditional performance arts, and he approaches composed video with a clear sense of form and counterpoint. Adam curates the {R}ake audio/video series (NYC) and the annual Brooklyn Video-Festival (NYC). He is a computer programmer and audio engineer and incorporates these disciplines into his work. http://www.hellbender.org