musiXplore

At our February 17 concert, we talked about the Make Music New Jersey program. This is part of a free celebration of music-making that takes place on June 21 every year in over 450 cities world-wide. All concerts are free and outdoors (weather permitting) and participation is open to both amateur and professional musicians.

MusiXplore is participating with an evening of music on the patio of the Ivanhoe Wheelhouse. Since the 21st is a Friday this year, we’ll run from 6pm to 10pm. If you are an experimental musician or band and would like to play, please contact us at info@musixplore.org.

If you have a space where you would like to host an outdoor concert or show, you can be part of the celebration too. It could be your front yard or the sidewalk in front of your apartment. Of course, you should let your neighbors know. Maybe you want to organize a concert in your town square.

Make Music New Jersey is here to help you make it happen. Visit the web site here. You can subscribe to the site (link a the bottom of each page) to get news about what shows are happening, or you can click on the Contact Us tab to send a message about what kind of show you would like to host.

This is all about music by the people and for the people, so the more folks get involved, the more fun it will be.

For those who didn’t have a chance to get down the the Wheelhouse on Sunday, here is video of Keren Rosenbaum and Giorgia Ghizzoni performing “The Man Who Shouted Teresa” from a text by Italo Calvino. Click to find out more about Keren and Giorgia.

Keren Rosenbaum is a choreographic composer, cello performer, interdisciplinary musician and an educator, born in Israel in 1970. She started composing music at the age of seven, and later graduated from the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag, Holland. She is founder of the Reflex Ensemble, a unique collective of classical musicians, jazz musicians and actors, as well as lighting, sound, photography and video artists, all from Israel, Europe, and the US.

In her compositions, Rosenbaum employs pre-recorded soundtracks, live electronics, contemporary notation, and her signature “Invisible Score” conducting-via-earphones technique. While structured and choreographed, the music allows for a degree of freedom that both provides room for personal expression and demands a higher sense of aesthetic responsibility from each performer.

Read more about Keren and view videos of performances at her web site.

Keren will be joined by clarinetist Carlos Cordeiro. This show is a benefit for Rwanda Youth Music, joint effort between Musicians Without Borders and WE-ACTx to train HIV+ Rwandan youth to become music workshop leaders in ongoing weekly programs run by WE-ACTx for hundreds of HIV+ children in Kigali.

Our first artist of the 2013 season is Michael Durek, performing as The Use (formerly Cloud Cloud) on Sunday, January 20. Michael is a multi-instrumentalist, artist, and curator. From a chip-tunes beginning in 2009, Cloud Cloud became an electro-acoustic experimental chamber ensemble, and finally meshed into it’s current form as The Use: A saucy blend of pulsitile, structured, yet free electronic music making use of synths, theremins, and sampled sounds recorded from Durek’s everyday life. Durek has performed in six different countries with PAS, leads a group called the SK Orchestra, co-organizes the Omega Sound Fix festival, plays in the groups George Sand, and Ping Pong, and has appeared on over a dozen albums.

His performances are sometimes site-specific or have conceptual elements. Past projects include a site-specific performance on The Waterpod^TM, for which he transformed Mary Mattingly’s floating habitat itself into an electric instrument. He also organized and conducted a 15-member SK Orchestra concert at The Tank in NYC, entitled The History of the Universe. In January 2010, he conceived of, produced, and performed in an event called The Caged Bird Sings. For the event, 5 musicians improvised continuously for 24 hours within the confines of a cage, which he installed in the Alfa Art Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Since 2010, Durek has performed in six countries and at some notable festivals including CoCArt festival at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun Poland (with PAS), Avant Garde festival in Germany (with PAS), and Kunstzwerg festival in Zweibrucken , Germany (SK Orchestra and PAS). He actively performs in the NYC and NJ area, and has played at many venues including the Flux Factory, Central Booking, The Social Plastic Space, The Tank, Monkey Town, Public Assembly, Madame Claude, and Surreal Estate. He has been on over a dozen CDs, and his group the SK Orchestra released a limited edition of hand-numbered tapes, on SicSic label, in 2011. You can see and hear more of Michael’s work at his video and sound pages.

The show will begin at 1:00pm with an opening set by ArtCrime. Advance tickets are available at a discount from http://musixplore.org/shop/.

We hope you had a fine holiday season and are just itching to get back to work! No? We’re not dawdling at musiXplore. Here’s our Winter-Spring 2013 list of concerts by experimental musicians from New Jersey and the Hudson Valley:

Let’s begin with Sunday, January 20 when we’ll be hosting The Use, which is Michael Durek’s solo performance moniker. Michael is a versatile performer on synthesizer and theremin. He has performed in 6 different countries with PAS, leads the SK Orchestra and has played on over a dozen albums.

In February, cellist and flautist Keren Rosenbaum will be performing on Sunday the 17th. Keren is founder and director of the Reflex Ensemble, a multinational ensemble of 35 musicians. She will be performing in her innovative New Classical style.

If, Bwana, otherwise known as Al Margolis, will perform on Sunday, March 17. Al has decades of performance experience with a wide variety of instruments, styles and musicians. He runs Pogus Productions, a mainstay of experimental music distribution and has recently served as guest curator at The Stone in NYC.

Sunday, April 21 will see a concert by Electronic Memory, the duo comprised of Mike Hunter and Ken Palmer. Mike and Ken have performed at the Electro-Music Festival, the New Jersey Festival of Electronic Arts and the Event Horizon concert series, among other. They’ll bring us their mind-expanding style of ambient space music.

Our season will wrap up on Sunday, April 28 with guitarist Peter Biedermann. Peter has influenced a couple of generations of NJ experimental musicians, has led bands as diverse as Ping, White Light and Serious Fun. He has come full circle from the realm of electronic music back to acoustic guitar and will perform a variety of his solo compositions.

Here’s a wish that you have a warm and wonderful holiday this December.

Our winter-spring concert schedule will be out soon, we’re going to be presenting 5 concerts with some outstanding musicians.

Cheers! from everyone at musiXplore.

On Sunday, November 18, musiXplore will host a performance by legendary NJ avant-improv veterans Monkeyworks. This crew plays a great blend of jazz and African styles with an electronic overtone. Their specialty is improvising musical pairings with silent film or avant-garde video, and that’s what you’ll see at musiXplore.

The show begins at 1:00 pm with a set by electrojazz trio ArtCrime, the house band for musiXplore. Then we’ll fire up the video projectors and you’ll experience a show like no other.

Admission: suggested donation of $5. See some of the other posts for video of Monkeyworks and the Shop page on our site for discounted advance tickets.

Here at musiXplore, we think the finest group of improvising musicians in New Jersey is Monkeyworks. Led by Ian Smit, these are veterans who have jammed together for decades. Here is a short excerpt from a performance in October of 2011, when they performed their piece “The Raven” to the accompaniment of a silent black and white Hallowe’en film:

The duo of Ray Bally and Dennis Young go off into the outer reaches. Performance on October 21, 2012 at the Ivanhoe Wheelhouse in Paterson, NJ.

Mark Weinberg performing as Trinitron: