Monday March 13 * 7pm * TICKETS

Sandy Ewen is a sound artist, visual artist and architect who has recently relocated to NYC from Houston, TX.  Ewen’s audio practice focuses on extended guitar techniques, improvisation, graphic scores and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her unique approach to guitar incorporates a wide array of implements – railroad spikes, sidewalk chalk, threaded bolts, steel wool and other items become an arsenal of abstraction. Ewen has worked extensively with film makers, dancers, poets and musicians to create films, audio recording, sound interventions and performance art. Ewen’s musical collaborations include trio Etched in the Eye, duo with Tom Carter called Spiderwebs, the trio Garden medium, and ongoing collaborations with percussionist Weasel Walter and bassist Damon Smith. For nearly ten years, Ewen has been the leader of an all-female large ensemble. The ensemble conceptualizes and performs sound and performance art, utilizing graphic and text based scores and improvisational constraints. The ensemble performed with an amplified bathtub at Diverse Works in 2016, and performed a suite of installation-specific compositions for  Francis Alÿs’ Fabiola Project at the Menil. Sandy has spent much of 2017 touring, performing solo sets and in collaboration with Steve Jansen (tapes and electronics) and Maria Chavez (turntables) around Europe.  In years past, Ewen has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Keith Rowe, Lydia Lunch and many others, and has performed and recorded with Jaap Blonk, Henry Kaiser and more. In 2014 she performed at San Francisco’s 13th Annual Outsound New Music Summit, and she has made several appearances at Austin’s annual No Idea Festival.

Ben Bennett is a Philadelphia-based percussionist. He usually plays a compact pile of self-made drums, stretched membranes, and other objects which are continually rearranged in the course of playing, and sounded with techniques of the hit, rub, and blow varieties. A branching path of musical de-materialization has led to other forms of performance, including self-vitiating monologues, and the long and repetitive YouTube series, Sitting and Smiling and Walking and Talking. His work tends toward themes of pointlessness, paradox, and stupidity. 

“The enigmatic musician and artist Ben Bennett has a mind-bogglingly wide variety of fascinating work that covers both poles of extremes. As a percussionist, his improvised performances are wild, exciting and constantly changing, using an arsenal of drums, cymbals, homemade instruments and found objects that are struck, rubbed or vibrated using air from his lungs, unlocking hidden universes of unfamiliar sounds.”  -Ernie Paik

Chris Pitsiokos: "I make sounds with an alto saxophone and many other instruments, sometimes by myself, and sometimes with others. Currently I lead a somewhat nomadic existence, but my two home bases are New York City and Berlin. I could say that I work fluidly between composition and improvisation but that would lend these spurious concepts undue importance. I work using the tools available to me—my instruments, pen and paper, computers, verbal communication, body language, community, social dynamics, considerations of human psychology, considerations of acoustics and aesthetics of spaces, food, alcohol, drugs, hugs, history, etc.—to make something happen either alone or with others. I’m not being ironic: I deeply believe that the nature of the relationships between the people collaborating, the space it occurs in, etc., has as great an impact or more of an impact on the resulting art than notes written down on a score. I try to take all parameters into account, and confront my work holistically, carefully considering as many aspects of what goes into the creation as possible. Maybe this is post-composition/post-improvisation. But, once again, even using these terms gives them undue importance—these terms were imposters in the first place, and talking about them as distinct entities, or even antipodes that we can move between distracts from the point of making music. Both terms focus on only one facet of a multi-faceted process."

Bao Nguyen is an experimental vocalist and performance artist born in Vietnam and based in Baltimore. Threading together melodic singing, extended vocal techniques and somatic movement, they create soundscapes that contemplate Vietnamese oral traditions, unexpected improvisation and creative mediumship.