Liz Harris & Roy Montgomery (usa/nz) + Arnold Dreyblatt trio (usa)
Liz Harris & Roy Montgomery (usa/nz) + Arnold Dreyblatt trio (usa)
at les ateliers claus - September 10th - 20:00
the Meakusma aftermath with
Liz Harris & Roy Montgomery (usa/nz) + Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra of Excited Strings (usa/ger)
Liz Harris & Roy Montgomery (usa/nz)
If there’s any trait that New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery and Grouper mastermind Liz Harris share as songwriters, it is their ability to build diaphanous sounds into forms as spired and sacred as temples. Montgomery and Harris have joined forces in the past, namely for 2010’s split LP Roy Montgomery/Grouper, and they reconvene on “Landfall”—the lead single for Montgomery’s forthcoming record Suffuse—to create a shrine of ethereal noise.
As usual, Harris’ lyrics are elusive. Instead of concrete words, utterances are drawn out of her like silken thread from an unwinding spool, tangling with fragments of Montgomery’s multi-tracked guitar. His composition feels as sprawling as Harris’ voice, but assumes a more jagged presence, his delayed riffs and brittle strums are the briny waves and sharp edge to Harris’ siren song. The more intertwined Montgomery and Harris’ mediums become, the higher and more beautifully they rise.
Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra of Excited Strings
Arnold Dreyblatt: Excited Strings Bass
Konrad Sprenger: Percussion, Digitally Automated Guitar System
Joachim Schütz – Modified E-Guitar
Arnold Dreyblatt has been called “the most rock ‘n’ roll of all the composers to emerge from New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s.” Dreyblatt founded The Orchestra Of Excited Strings in 1979, harnessing unusual tuning intervals to an exuberant performance style.
Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings peforms in a 20-tone unequal tuning system based on the harmonic series. For the ensemble he has invented and modified musical instruments has developed new performance techniques. Dreyblatt’s tuning system is calculated from the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and eleventh overtones and their multiples. These mathematically related overones are heard as a tonal relation when they are transposed and sounded above a fundamental tone.
In 2009, Dreyblatt formed a new ensemble for concerts for Nymusikk in Oslo and the Impakt Festival in Utrecht with himself on Excited Strings Bass, Jörg Hiller on Percussion and "Motor-Guitar", Joachim Schütz on modified E-Guitar and Robin Hayward on Tuba. The ensemble grew out of many years of collaboration with Jörg Hiller as musician, music producer and recording engineer. This ensemble has continued to peform internationally at theSKIF Festival, St. Petersburg; MMI Festival, Marseille; Face E Festival, Geneva and at the State-X/New Forms Festival in the Hague as well as in galleries and concert sites in Germany such as the Stadtgarten, Köln, Mex 21 Festival, Dortmund; Kunst als Klang Festival MANALESE editions and Neue Berliner Kunstverein and at the Berghain in Berlin as part of the MaerzMusik Festival.
The five ensemble pieces currently being performed are composed for “excited strings” bass, modified electric guitar, percussion, computer controlled mulit-channel guitar, Hammond Drawbar emulator and microtonal Tuba.
this event is a collaboration with the Meakusma Festival