A rare Pacific Northwest performance by percussion group Meridian, who for this performance will be a duo of Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney.

“Drawing on experiences performing both improvised and composed works, Meridian approaches percussion in a way that places the exploration of sound in the foreground, in favor of a musical approach that is concerned with exploring acoustic phenomena, rather than rhythm, gesture, or technique. In creating this music, Meridian reimagines its materials, so that an instrument like a snare drum becomes literally a cylindrical shell with an attached flexible membrane. When viewed from this perspective, traditional instruments become unique sound-making and sound-filtering objects, to be set into vibration coupled with resonant metals, dragged with scraping implements, or driven directly by fingers, bows, or feedback circuitry. In performance, each musician invents a new method for producing sound, a new aggregate instrument, in real-time.”

Friday, March 13
Leaven Community
5431 NE 20th Ave. @ Killingsworth, PDX
Doors 7pm, music 7:30pm
$10-$20 sliding scale, at door

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Greg Stuart is a percussionist whose work draws upon a mixture of music from the experimental tradition, Wandelweiser, improvisation, and electronics. His performances have been described as “a ghostly, gorgeous lesson in how close, concentrated listening can alter and enhance perception” (The New York Times). Since 2006, he has collaborated extensively with the composer Michael Pisaro, producing a large body of music comprised of pieces that focus on the magnification of small sounds through recording and layering, often in combination with field recordings and/or electronic sound. His role as an interpreter of Pisaro’s compositions has been called “a David Tudor to Pisaro’s Cage” (The Boston Globe). Stuart’s most recent collaboration with the composer, Continuum Unbound, a three-disc box set on Gravity Wave, grew out of the pair’s field recording work in Congaree National Park and was selected by The Wire as one of the best albums of 2014.

Stuart currently performs with fellow percussionists Tim Feeney and Sarah Hennies in the percussion trio Meridian, and with computer musician Joe Panzner. Other recent collaborations include projects with Ryoko Akama, Erik Carlson, Antoine Beuger, Eva-Maria Houben, Jürg Frey, Kunsu Shim, Bonnie Jones, Phillip Bush, Nomi Epstein, Speak Percussion, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. He has appeared as a featured performer at numerous festivals and notable venues presenting experimental music including MaerzMusik (Berlin), the Melbourne Festival, Café Oto (London), Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts (Bristol), Cha’ak’ab Paaxil (Mérida), Issue Project Room (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Big Ears (Knoxville), Elastic Arts Foundation (Chicago), New Music Co-Op (Austin), Philadelphia Sound Forum, and Non-Event (Boston) among others. He has recorded for numerous labels, including Edition Wandelweiser, Gravity Wave, Erstwhile, Cathnor, New World Records, Accidie, L’innomable, caduc, Lengua de Lava, Crisis, and Senufo Editions.

An enthusiastic educator, Stuart has given lectures, workshops, and performances at the University of Huddersfield, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Victorian College of Arts, Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Louisville, the New England Conservatory of Music, Harvard University, Florida State University, Georgia State University, and Tulane University. Stuart holds a D.M.A. and M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, and a BMus from Northwestern University. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Music in Columbia, SC where he teaches experimental music and music history, and runs the Experimental Music Workshop.

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Tim Feeney is an improviser, composer, and interpreter who seeks to explore and examine the possibilities inherent in unstable sound and duration. Tim began working in this thread in 2002 within Boston’s community of improvisers interested in austere combinations of sounds and silences, and has since performed and recorded with musicians throughout the United States and abroad. He collaborates with artists including the trio Meridian (with percussionists Greg Stuart and Sarah Hennies), pianist Annie Lewandowski, cellist and electronic musician Vic Rawlings, vocalist Ken Ueno, saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, banjo and electronic musician Holland Hopson, trumpeter Nate Wooley, sound artists Jed Speare and Ernst Karel, video artist Jane Cassidy, and many others.

He has presented work at experimental spaces throughout the United States, such as the Red Room in Baltimore, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Knitting Factory and The Stone in New York, the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC-Berkeley, the Stanford Art Museum, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College. He has recorded for the experimental Caduc, Accidie, Rhizome.s, Full Spectrum, Sedimental, homophoni, Audiobot, Soul on Rice, lildiscs, and Brassland/Talitres labels.
Tim also builds sound installations, concerned primarily with the acoustic properties and geographies of neglected or nontraditional spaces. His recent work has been presented by festivals at locations including Silo City (an abandoned grain complex along the Buffalo River in western New York), Boston’s Metropolitan Waterworks Museum (the preserved steam-pumping station that once processed the city’s drinking water), and the Bernheim Research Forest outside Louisville, Kentucky, as well as at more formal venues such as the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans and the University of Richmond.

As an interpreter of contemporary compositions, Tim has performed at venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Zankel Hall, the American Academy in Rome, and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and his work has been featured on WNYC Radio’s New Sounds. A member of Boston’s Callithumpian Consort, Tim appeared on the Musica Nova series at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, and at New York’s Tonic as part of its 50th birthday celebration for John Zorn. As a founding member of So Percussion, Tim appeared in concerts and masterclasses at Columbia University and Williams College, and commissioned David Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature, premiered at the 2001 Bang on a Can Marathon.

He was a co-founder of the duo Non Zero, with saxophonist Brian Sacawa, which performed American and world premieres of works in concerts at MIT, NYU, the University of Michigan, the Kerrytown Concert Hall, New York’s Tenri Cultural Institute, and Eastern Nazarene College. As the percussionist in the onstage band for Rinde Eckert’s chamber opera Orpheus X, Tim performed to great acclaim in stagings at Boston’s American Repertory Theater, the 2008 Hong Kong International Festival for the Arts, and New York’s Duke Theater at 42nd Street, praised by The New York Times.

Tim is currently Percussion Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, and is also a faculty member of the Chosen Vale International Percussion Seminar, a yearly chamber music intensive workshop bringing students from the US and abroad to rehearse and perform at the Enfield Shaker Museum in New Hampshire. From 2012 to 2018 Tim served as Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Alabama, where he led the applied percussion studio and the Alabama Percussion Ensemble, served as the principal percussionist of the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra, and was a frequent performer with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. From 2007 to 2012 Tim directed the percussion program at Cornell University, where he taught the Cornell Percussion Ensemble, Cornell Steel Band, and CU World Drum and Dance Ensemble.

An active guest educator, Tim has given workshops on improvisation, chamber music and solo percussion performance, Ewe dance-drumming, and Balinese gamelan at schools including the Eastman School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Tennessee, the University of Washington, Michigan State University, the University of Miami, the Longy School of Music, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, Bucknell University, and the Peabody Conservatory. He has presented new music and given invited lectures and workshops at the international conventions of the Percussive Arts Society in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017, and is a member of the PAS New Music Research Committee.
Tim earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the Yale School of Music, where his teachers included Robert van Sice, Richard Weiner, and Paul Yancich. In addition, he has studied Balinese gamelan with Andrew McGraw of the University of Richmond and the late Pak Wayan Konolan in Den Pasar, Bali, and Ewe dance-drumming with James Burns of Binghamton University, Johnson Kemeh of the University of Ghana at Legon, and with master drummer Kodzo Tagborlo of the Dzigbordi dance-drumming society, Dzodze, Volta Region, Ghana

Doors at 7pm, music at 7:30pm.

The Extradition Series welcomes Ashland-based performer/composer Tessa Brinckman, who will present her new solo work Box | Grown Men Sing and join members of the Extradition Ensemble for a group performance of Eva-Maria Houben’s Haiku for Seven.

> Brinckman’s Box | Grown Men Sing (2019) is a 35-minute electro-acoustic meditation on loss, seen through the lens of solitary confinement, its connections to colonization and climate change, and our yearnings beyond dehumanization. Performed by the composer on bass flute and waterphone with fixed audio and video, the piece incorporates interview recordings with three survivors of solitary within the US prison-industrial complex. What did they hear, smell, taste, dream, remember, resist? What did they love?

> Houben’s Haiku for Seven (2003–2019) brings together seven of the composer’s solo “Haiku” scores for different instruments, creating a simultaneous, interlocking realization. The piece will be performed by Tessa Brinckman (flutes), Loren Chasse (percussion), Lee Elderton (clarinet), Annie Gilbert (trombone), Matt Hannafin (percussion), Jacob Mitas (viola), and Collin Oldham (cello).

New Zealand flutist Tessa Brinckman has been described by critics as a “flutist of chameleon-like gifts” and “virtuoso elegance” (Gramophone), an “excellent…flutist” (Willamette Week), and a “highlight of Portland” (New Music Box) who “play(s) her instrument with great beauty and eloquence” (Music Matters New Zealand). She enjoys a versatile career, having worked in many classical music ensembles and concert series in the United States, South Africa, France, and New Zealand. Her orchestral, chamber, and solo music performances include the Oregon Symphony, New Haven International Arts, Festival of New American Music, Britt Festival of Music & Arts, Ashland Independent Film, Oregon Bach, Oregon Shakespeare, Ernest Bloch, Bumbershoot, Oregon Fringe, and Astoria Music Festivals. 

Event page
https://www.facebook.com/events/229373344722361/

Rx Fest, a three day, multi-venue festival in the form of a large-scale benefit for organizations vital to our community, is on the eve of its second year February 14th, 15th and 16th 2020 all centrally located in downtown Portland at Star Theater, Dante’s, Kelly’s Olympian and Valentines. The second annual event benefits Outside In, Q Center, Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette and p:ear.

Not only is Rx Fest a means to raise money for those organizations but also another opportunity to provide a platform for community outreach and engagement where representatives from each nonprofit can speak directly to the public about their respective missions and services.

General admission weekend and individual day wristbands on-sale now! 

The Creative Music Guild Stage at Valentine’s

6pm: Francisco Botello
Francisco Botello is a sound artist and composer born and raised in Chula Vista, California. Growing up a dual citizen on the dividing line between the United States and Mexico, his work reflects on the nature of place and belonging. Gathering and composing with field recordings, he explores questions of identity, ancestry, geography, change and loss. 
franciscobotello.com

7pm: Ayelen Secches & Eddie Bond
Ayelen Secches (Buenos Aires) – Piano
Eddie Bond (Starship Infinity & Aan) – Guitar 
VIDEO

8pm: Deltoid
Made almost entirely of field recordings, [Terminal Terrestre] acts as a memory book for a recent 3-month stay in Ecuador. Some sounds have been presented unprocessed, others manipulated beyond any possible recognition of the original source. None sit still for long. The recordings were taken from many different sources: political rallies in the streets of Cuenca, cats fighting on the roofs of Montañita, church bells in Saraguro, and the nocturnal drone of organic industry in Yasuni National Park. soundsetal.com
soundsetal.com/projects/deltoid-terminal-terrestre/

9pm: Xapchyk
XAPCHYK (pronounced Har- chuk) is David Morgan & Jerry Soga, two Portland, Oregon improvisors challenging each other in an open conversation of multi-instrumental sound collage.
https://xapchyk.bandcamp.com

10pm: Jack Radsliff’s Flux
Jack Radsliff is a guitarist/composer born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently residing in Eugene, OR.
https://jackradsliffmusic.bandcamp.com/track/breathe

11pm: TEVLIN
Bernie Diveley – drums, David Owen Tevlin – guitar
David Tevlin is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional artist living  in Portland Oregon. Playing live and engineering records since 2004, currently David has been busy as one half of the brutal prog rock band TEVLIN , working hard on the band’s second LP.
VIDEO

Event page
https://www.facebook.com/events/875780489539857/