Maple House Collective presents...
Keir Neuringer, James Brandon Lewis Trio, Ayman Fanous, CK Barlow
Keir Neuringer is a Philadelphia-based saxophonist and composer whose work is underpinned by interdisciplinary approaches and socio-political contextualizations. He is best known for a personal and intensely physical saxophone technique, revealed through long form solo improvisations, as well as collaborations with a multitude of world-renowned and underground practitioners in jazz, avant-garde, noise, classical, theater, and dance disciplines. He has travelled extensively to present his work, appeared on numerous festival stages, and given workshops throughout Europe and North America. In addition to the saxophone, he plays analogue electronics and Farfisa organ, and sings and narrates text. He trained as a composer and saxophonist in the US, spent two years on a Fulbright research grant in Krakow, and then moved to The Hague, where he lived for eight years, curating performative audiovisual art and earning a masters degree from the experimental ArtScience Institute. Originally from New York State, he settled in Philadelphia in 2012, where he lives with his family and is a member of the Books Through Bars Collective.
"...with Neuringer's music...mortal purpose is a given."
(Bill Meyer, September 2014 issue of Wire Magazine)
http://www.keirneuringer.com/
James Brandon Lewis Trio
James Brandon Lewis Saxophone
Luke Stewart Bass
Warren Trae Crudup III Drums
“James Brandon Lewis, a jazz saxophonist in his 30s, raw-toned but measured, doesn’t sound steeped in current jazz-academy values and isn’t really coming from a free-improvising perspective. There’s an independence about him, and on “Days of FreeMan” (Okeh), he makes it sound natural to play roaming, experimental funk, with only the electric bassist Jamaladeen Tacuma and the drummer Rudy Royston, and without much sonic enhancement. The record sounds a little reminiscent of what James Blood Ulmer and Ornette Coleman were doing in the late ’70s and early ’80s — on records that included Mr. Tacuma — but it’s not clearly evoking a particular past. Maybe it’s an improvised take on early ’90s hip-hop, as Mr. Lewis has suggested, but it sounds less clinical than that. It sounds like three melodic improvisers going for it.”
— The New York Times
http://www.jblewis.com/
Over the last 25 years, Ayman Fanous has forged a singular synthesis of classical and flamenco guitar technique with contemporary free improvisation. His music has been described as a “stylistic amalgam of Derek Bailey and Paco de Lucia” (Signal to Noise). Fanous also reaches back into his Egyptian ancestry in improvisations on the bouzouki. He has given hundreds of solo performances, and has also led duos or trios with a number of leading improvising musicians including Bern Nix, Tomas Ulrich, Jason Hwang, William Parker, Frances-Marie Uitti, Ned Rothenberg, Mark Feldman, Mat Maneri, Lori Freedman, Kinan Azmeh, Ikue Mori, Andrea Parkins, Chris Speed, Greg Howard, Satoshi Takeishi, and Tatsuya Nakatani. His duo CD with Tomas Ulrich (Konnex, 2007), was described as "the benchmark for all cello-guitar duo recordings" (Signal to Noise). His duo CD with violinist Jason Hwang (Innova, 2013) was described by Robert Iannopollo (in Cadence Magazine) as "one of the finest duet recordings I've heard in recent memory."
https://soundcloud.com/ayman-fanous
CK Barlow
Starting with bounces between cassette decks as a kid and later ridiculously long tape loops in Miami University’s basement music lab, I’ve always been fascinated with field recordings (and mangling thereof). I expanded on this during my master’s degree at the University of New Mexico, emerging with a custom performance setup for real-time sample manipulation that combined Max patches on a hot-rodded Mac SE with an Ensoniq ASR-10.......
At some point I put a lot of thought into why rock’n roll shows, of which I have done and seen my share, are so much more exciting to watch (typically) than experimental electronics shows. The answer I came up with was threefold:
physicality – It’s way more fun to watch a drummer pound away and sweat buckets than to see someone make infinitesimal movements on a trackpad, as if she’s checking her gmail.
risk – We shouldn’t charge money and then press Play and sit back. Boo. It’s a lot more thrilling if you know the whole thing could fall apart at any moment – and that the performers actually worked at rehearsing so that it wouldn’t.
a clear association between cause and effect in the performer’s actions, so that the audience isn’t mystified (or bored) by that part of it – When a guitarist screams up the neck, listeners know what to expect, and that’s part of the excitement. This ties closely with physicality, of course, but extends into making it possible for the audience to associate specific movements with specific (musical) results. “Ah, when she hits the drum pad harder, the pitch gets higher. Cool!”
http://ckbarlow.com/wordpress/experimental-electronics/