Unsound LABs concerts feature collaborations between musicians of different kinds working together for the first time in a series of unique free performances. Curated to cross borders of both sound and geography, this year’s program pairs artists from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia with musicians from the U.S. This year’s LABs features: Zavoloka with Andrea Pensado, Hai Nguyen Dihn with Nondor Nevai, Kotra with Black Rain, Denis Kolokol/Tomek Choloniewski Duo with Nate Wooley, Maria Minerva with Mark Van Hoen, and Mark Mcquire with Bartosz Weber.
Denis Kolokol/Tomek Choloniewski Duo with Nate Wooley
Denis Kolokol currently lives and works in Kraków, Poland. He started writing his own music in 2006 with the means of computer. Have been organizing a festival for experimental music as well as have worked on music and interactive sound-systems for theater. Artist in residence in 2008 at SME of the Academy of Music in Kraków, Poland; in CalArts, USA CA 2009 and 2012 (via CECArtsLink), in Map Extension, Huesca, Spain 2011. Initiated theVolume duo in 2006, which become a trio in 2010. Denis tries to combine non-intersecting or even opposite things: interactivity with algorithmic composition, granular synthesis with sound poetry, etc. His own voice is his own material, while his body is the only controller.
Tomek Chołoniewski completed his studies with the highest note at the Academy of Music in Kraków. His interests are particularly focused on improvised music. He cooperated with the Beethoven’s Orchestra, with whom participated in many premiere performances in Poland, Holland, Germany, Italy). He has performed a number of times in the Cracow Audio Art Festival and on series of concerts of electronic music of Electroacoustic Music Studio In Cracow and many of chamber pieces.
Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performances.
Maria Minerva with Mark Van Hoen
Maria Minerva is myself as my own little sister, born out of need to do whatever. Maria Minerva has not heard of HQ recording. Maria Minerva has not heard that postmodernism is passe. Maria Minerva wishes she was born in the 1980s and born again in the 1990s.
Mark Van Hoen, born in London, England, began recording his own music in the early 80's inspired by German and British electronic music from the decades that preceded. In 1993, seminal electronic dance label R&S records signed Mark who then began to release a dense catalog of albums throughout the 90's, under his own name, as well as Locust and several other monikers. This paralleled his ongoing collaborations with Seefeel, and offshoot band Scala, as well as further projects with members of 'Shoegaze' bands Slowdive and Lush, on UK labels 4AD, Too Pure and Touch.
Mark McGuire with Bartosz Weber
Mark McGuire is an American musician living and working in Portland, OR, his principle instrument being the guitar and using various forms of electronic manipulation. Despite being best known as member of Cleveland electronic group Emeralds (alongside John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt), his solo work is as far reaching and expansive, with something in the region of 40 releases to his name, including releases for Wagon, Arbor, VDSQ, Weird Forest and Editions Mego.
Bartosz Weber has been performing and recording artist most notable for his own project Baaba for which he has composed music and played for over 10 years, aided by crème de la crème of the Polish underground music scene (Macio Moretti, Tomasz Duda, Piotr Zabrodzki). The band has put out four albums and travelled all over Europe including prestigious events in Poland, England, Germany, Russia, France.
He is also a member of the band Mitch & Mitch where he plays guitar, keyboards, sampler, percussion, drums and who knows what else. The band travelled extensively over the last years and has three albums up to this date, including a collaboration with the Israeli band Kruzenshtern i Parohod. bartweba is the name used by Weber when performing solo, duets (m.bunio.s, Tomasz Gwinciński, Wojciech Kucharczyk, Wojciech Mazolewski), live music for theatre plays and as a DJ. Weber received prizes for live music for silent movies at the Nowa Ścieżka Festival in Warsaw. Weber explores live sampling technique based on recording samples during performance and processing them on the spot.. Weber is the inventor of the so-called "midi robe”, a piece of clothing that allows one to play music using their whole body.
