Diagram A (Western Mass)

Electronic debris has been collected, fused together, and maliciously tortured to create a disturbing blast of horrible / beautiful noise.

Recent concerts of Diagram A consist of a sonic rollercoaster jumps from thundering distorted crashes to squealing high-pitched feedback, and a single malfunctioning light bulb when illuminated reveals an individual in a hideous mask attempting to control the chaos.

Horaflora (San Francisco)

“Bay Area sound artist Raub Roy goes by the name of Horaflora; and his performances are really impressive exercises in controlled electro-acoustic chaos, with low-tech electronics skittering above various tactile scrapes counterpointed by reversed currents of placid bass frequencies and tonal undulation. One of his best performance stunts is to fill up large balloons, shove a trumpet mouthpiece inside the balloon, and drop the metal mouthpiece on a large drumhead. With two of these devices going, Horaflora can generate prolonged vibration and acoustically phased drones that are really amazing.

It can't be qualified as 'noise' as these collages are more in keeping with a tradition of automatic writing through sound, with idiosyncratic juxtapositions of electronic bloops, ring modulated flanges, minuscule clatter of wood and metal, mad-scientist weirdo percolations, and those sublimated balloon drones. As such it's more in keeping with some of the HNAS collages or something deconstructed from Small Cruel Party and old P.16.D4 tapes. The various tracks ebb and flow with an unhurried pace that slowly magnifies some of the many sounds into more sparse hypno-repetitive passages and then sweep everything into rather dense crescendos of scattershot sediment.” - Aquarius Records

Horaflora.blogspot.com

Horaflora.bandcamp.com

Angela Sawyer a.k.a. Preggy Peggy & the Lazy Babymakers

(Cambridge)

After finishing a philosophy degree specializing in Husserlian phenomenology in the mid-1990s, Angela felt fully prepared to start astonishing audiences around the Boston area using her mouth, some broken electronics, toys & noisemakers. Impromptu squealing & gargling has become her specialty, and she's released a steady trickle of small-run lps, cds, cdrs & cassettes over the years. Changing the names of her projects to suit her every whim, the current active roster includes Preggy Peggy & the Lazy Babymakers, Duck That, Exusamwa, & the Human Hairs. Angela has also been selling vinyl locally for more than 20 years, & runs the one & only Weirdo Records in Cambridge (www.weirdorecords.com).

‘Peace, Loving’ is a New England experiential sound-sculpture-movement-”jazz” band. ‘Peace, Loving’ has composed and performed for aromatics (with three professional chefs), dances for handheld cassette players; worked as set designers, video artists, performance poets, instrument builders, venue/label operators, promoters, gardeners, cheesemongers etc. Constructing their instruments out of simple materials, they create unforgettable, strangely magical performances. They have been known to rotate cast in order to perform and tour as often as possible.

www.travelingband.org

HAG (Brooklyn, NY)

David Grollman is a percussionist from NYC who performs freely improvised music. He performs in art galleries, tiki bars, and venues of curious ambience made more curious by his mongrel sounds. David bows, scrapes, blows, slaps, rubs, caresses, abuses, and generally tests the limits of his instrument. Anything is game. Anything may be a participant if the musical conversation calls for it. Artist, instrument, audience, and environment become ambiguous terms, conspiring in a theatrical exploration of chance dynamics and serendipitous exchanges.

Brad Henkel is a Brooklyn-based trumpeter/improviser/composer. He was born in Southern California in 1985 and in 2003 migrated to the East Coast to study at the Conservatory of Music at SUNY Purchase. Since relocating to NYC in 2007, he has performed in venues throughout NYC, the U.S. and Europe including The Stone, Issue Project Room, Whitney Museum, Roulette, Boise Creative and Improvised Music Fest. (Boise, ID), Heaven Gallery (Chicago), Project Lodge (Madison, WI), Canadian Music Festival (Toronto) and Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). In October of 2010 he was invited to be a featured performer in the Festival of New Trumpet's "Brooklyn's Here" series.

He is a founding member of the experimental horn trio, Buckminster (myspace.com/thebuckminsteraffair), and Swirm (acousticlevitation.org/dtmg.html), an imrpovising trio with percussionist David Grollman and vocalist Laurie Amat. He has performed with, among others: Du Yun, Jeff Kaiser, Katherine Young, Vinny Golia, Jacob Wick, Owen Stewart-Robertson, Jason Ajemian, Dan Peck, Juan Pablo Carletti, Nathaniel Morgan, Peter Hanson, Will McEvoy, Stephe Cooper, Sam Sowyrda and Dustin Carlson.

Keep updated about his performances at:    http://bradhenkel.blogspot.com/

Sean Ali was born in Dayton, OH in 1984. He began studying music in his early teens, first guitar and then bass guitar before finally settling with the contrabass. He also studied the sitar and the oud as a part of his interest in non-Western music. In 2003, Sean moved to New York City to study literature and East Asian languages at Eugene Lang College. Upon graduation, he stayed in New York in order to continue his participation in the city’s avant-garde and experimental music scene. Currently, he performs in a diverse group of ensembles, including Fester, LathanFlin&Ali, Hag, Drillbaby, and Household Tales. In addition to these groups, Sean also does several single-incarnation performances of improvised music, serves as a sideman in ensembles lead by others, and the occasional solo set. As a composer, Sean draws on a variety of compositional techniques (standard notation mixed with graphic, verbal, and conceptual methods) to create his written music. Starting in late-2010, he began exploring the role of curator by planning evenings of musical performances, usually based around some theme, which he continues to do on bi-monthly basis at various locations throughout New York City.   

Lou Bunk (Boston)

Check these photos of the show by Len Tremblay! It was such a great night...

These were the performers:

Watch this video with Lou Bunk’s performance!

Sound and silence are allies in the minimal yet intricate music of Lou Bunk. In both his acoustic and electro-acoustic music, timbre unfolds alongside harmony, while extended instrumental techniques, microtones, and a reinterpretation of the virtuosic paints an alien and sometimes barren soundscape.

A native of the Connecticut suburbs, Lou’s earliest compositions were noise improvisations, and four-track collage experiments. Educated at Washington University (MA Composition) and Brandeis University (PhD in Composition and Theory), he has studied music composition with Eric Chasalow, Michael Tenzer, David Rakowski, Ladislav Kubik, Marty Boykan, and Yehudi Wyner. In his home town Somerville, MA, Lou chairs the board of the Somerville Arts Council and co-produces the concert series Open Sound. Lou has taught harmony and ear training at Boston Conservatory and is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire where he teaches various course related to computer music.

Lou’s music is the recipient of several awards (SEAMUS Student Commission Competition, finalist, Irving Fine Fellowship for Music Composition, ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Award, finalist), and has been performed in dozens of venues, in the US and Europe; SEAMUS, ICMC, Spark, CCRMA, June in Buffalo, The Computer Arts Festival in Padova, Italy, an American Composers series in Trossingen, Germany, Conservatory van Amsterdam, and the Centre for Music Composition and Performance in Athens Greece. Some current projects include a new piece for toy piano and electronics, working with high school students in Dorchester Massachusetts on a Hip Hop Opera, a tower of electro-acoustic flim-flamery, and formulating new ways to teach the world to sing a happy song.

http://www.loubunk.com/