Ghostland Empire : for viola, two bowls of water, and electronics - Stefanie Lubkowski viola: Ashleigh Gordon, laptop: Stefanie Lubkowski A resident of Cambridge, MA, Stefanie Lubkowski studied flute, organ, and piano as a child before moving on to a ten-year love affair with the classical guitar. Her initial compositional efforts involved developing unusual timbres on her mother’s Wurlitzer organ and independent study in her high school electronic music studio. These early explorations nurtured Stefanie’s interest in creating sound worlds guided by harmony, punctuated by melody, and inspired by poetry and prose. She went on to study Music and Technology and Guitar Performance at Connecticut College in New London, CT, and received her masters from New England Conservatory where her primary teachers were Lee Hyla and Pozzi Escot. Stefanie has written for orchestra, voice, various chamber ensembles, and electronic media. She has been commissioned by Auros Group for New Music, Ashleigh Gordon, Anthology, the New Gallery Concert Series, Alea III, The Fourth Wall Ensemble, and Transient Canvas. She received her doctorate in composition from Boston University in 2014, where her teachers included Ketty Nez and Sam Headrick. www.stefanielubkowski.com Jamaican-American violist Ashleigh Gordon has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Hong Kong, ranging from chamber and orchestral music settings to off-Broadway and new music productions. As an entrepreneur, Ashleigh is the Artistic Director of Castle of our Skins, a newly created concert series dedicated to promoting the music of Black American composers. She is also the founding violist of Sound Energy, a dynamic new string trio dedicated to performing and commissioning new works. She can be heard on Naxos, Musique Suisse labels. www.violashe.com Inter Alia II - Jed Speare My work emerges out of field recordings and moves through transformative and combinatory phases, inter alia, often with long gestation periods and desultory stances. They pool like eels on the ocean floor, and move about as they wish, in the dark knowledge of their depths until they discover their chains of affinities and move closer to them, eventually finding them. Jed Speare is an interdisciplinary artist who has presented time-based arts internationally for over thirty years. In 2008, The Wire magazine called him “a pioneer of multimedia presentation,” for his use of location recordings in performance and multimedia collaborations. His work encompasses albums, notably Cable Car Soundscapes (Smithsonian Folkways, 1982) and Sound Works 1982-1987 (Family Vineyard, 2008); public projects such as Quiet Zone (Fitchburg, MA, 1994; Toronto Island, 2004) and Audiograms (1994); and sound in urban design (Peaceful - An Ping, Tainan, Taiwan, 1999). In Boston, he’s been Director of two alternative arts organizations, Mobius and Studio Soto, for a combined twenty years. He performs solo electroacoustic work as well as in other combinations, and is active with the New England Phonographers Union, a group he co-founded. He is also on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Acoustic Ecology. LUSITANIA (re)CALLING - Danny McCarthy The work LUSITANIA (re)CALLING was created initially as a sound installation which took place in the Sirius Arts Centre Cobh Ireland to mark the centenary of the sinking of the ship the Lusitania .Cobh is the Irish town where most of the survivors were landed also the bodies of the dead were held there for identification etc. There are numerous photos of the bodies lying in coffins and the town ran out of coffins. The town obviously echoed to the sound of coffins being made and closed.Once commissioned to make the installation the artist undertook extensive research and proceeded to make numerous field recordings of this sound in local workshops. He then used these field recordings and some basic electronics to create the work which was then played back on speakers in the Arts Centre and on the streets of the town to co inside with the centenary of the sinking on the 7th May2015. The work that you will be hearing is a remix of this piece. A special limited edition 10" vinyl record was released by Farpoint Recordings also.The record consists of two tracks "Coffinmakers Blues" and "Stonecarvers Lament". Danny McCarthy tudied at the National College of Art and Design. He currently lectures in Sound Art in the School Of Music and Drama ,UCC as well as visiting lecturer and workshop facilitator in various institutions He has pioneered both performance art and sound art in Ireland and he continues to be a leading exponent exhibiting and performing both in Ireland and abroad .His work has appeared on numerous CD.s, DVDs and has been broadcast widely on both radio and T.V. His work regularly appears on the programme NOVA Lyric FM and he has been the subject of several features on the programme. He is a founding director of Triskel Arts Centre and of the National Sculpture Factory and is a director the Sirius Arts Centre Cobh as well as curating numerous exhibitions and projects including Sound Out (with David Toop), Bend It Like Beckett, Sonic Vigil, Just Listen plus many more, He is the recipient of numerous awards and bursaries from both the Irish Arts Council and Dept of Foreign Affairs, Culture Ireland and has represented Ireland abroad at various exhibitions. He is a First Prize winner in EV+A (selector Pierre Restany). His Books CDs DVDs, vinyls etc are available from www.farpointrecordings.com, www.dannymccarthy.ie and www.soundoutin.blogspot.com . Praest Arif-John-Lichun - Mick O'Shea When visiting Boston with Strange Attractor in 2012 I came across Brattle a second hand bookshop. I bought a book written in Danish in 1909 with the title Praest. The book was small hard backed and smelled good, the cost was $1. In an effort to ‘understand’ this book I asked and recorded non Danish speakers to read from the book. After they read I drew on the pages. These were I think two transgressive acts. The first changed the words and meaning into sounds the second added layers of symbols and marks on top of the words. For this recording I’ve used the voices of Arif Ayab (Singapore), John Thompson (Ireland) and Lichun Tseng (Taiwan). This is an ongoing project. Mick O’Shea lives and works in Cork city and is a member and director of the Cork Artists Collective and The Guesthouse and has been instrumental in establishing a vibrant and growing sound art scene in Cork city. He has exhibited in UK, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Tasmania, USA, China and Japan. He studied instrument physics in C.I.T. and works as an instrument technician in UCC. All of his works spring from his essential experience in drawing. His medium includes sculpture, drawing, sound and cooking. In 2003 O’Shea and fellow artist Stephen Brandes and Irene Murphy set up the collaborative practice, The Domestic Godless which, through performative cooking events, explores culinary activity as art practice and tests assumptions about the cultural traditions of food in challenging and often irreverent and absurdist ways. He also works with various sound artists and composers both national and international including: The Quiet Club with sound artist Danny McCarthy, Rhodri Davies, Stephen Vitiello, Steve Roden, David Toop, Rajesh Meta, Jennifer Walshe, Damo Suzuki;Strange Attractor: Experiments in a quinary landscape and other fields with Anthony Kelly, Danny McCarthy, Irene Murphy, David Stalling Gaitkrash (an experimental performance group) with Bernadette Cronin and Regina Crowley. Broken Memory (excerpt) - David Morneau Gameboy: David Morneau Welcome to Broken Memory by David Morneau, Immigrant Breast Nest's composer-in-residence. Although born from the limited sonic palette of chip-tunes, Morneau is able to coax delightfully unexpected results from the familiar 8-bit chirps and blips in each of these six pieces. Immediately dissolving our preconceptions, "The Black Hallway" leads us to other strange locales, brutal and broken terroir, terminating finally with "Rue D'Auseil" which riddles blips with funk and thumps. Each track title references H.P. Lovecraft's story The Music of Erich Zann in which the titular hero plays his intense, strange music to keep the demons at bay. It's apropos, Broken Memory is radically creative music for staving off the abyss. (immigrantbreastnest.com) David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a "shining beacon" of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output has been described variously as "elegantly rendered", "happily prissy", "impressive", "unusual, esoteric, and offbeat". Morneau’s eclectic output is shown by two recent albums Love Songs and Broken Memory. One is songs that combine Shakespeare’s Sonnets with contemporary poetry. The other is noisy, droning Gameboy tracks that "absolutely wreck shop.… For that, David Morneau wins." Morneau is composer-in-residence with Immigrant Breast Nest, an underground electronic music label, and the artistic director of Circuit Bridges, a new electronic music concert series. Learn more at http://5of4.com Integer Underground - Stefanie Lubkowski A collage of numbers stations samples and sounds from my garage evoke a cold war intrigue and paranoia. Cloud 1 - Max Lord Recorded in 2015 with the Buchla Electric Music Box Max Lord is a Boston-based improvisor who has worked in a variety of rock, noise, electronic and improv settings. Though originally identifying as a percussionist, since 2000 he has performed with Buchla electronic instruments. His recorded work as Ghost Grass recalls mid-century electronic experimentation as often as more modern improvised approaches and is intimately tied to the magnetic medium on which it is created. As a collaborator and organizer, he is closely associated with the experimental movement community.