Steven Mackey was born in 1956. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. Since the mid 1980s he has resumed his interest in the electric guitar and regularly performs his own work, including two concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works. Mackey is Professor of Music at Princeton University where he teaches composition, theory, twentieth century music, improvisation and a variety of special topics. As co-director of the Composers Ensemble at Princeton he coaches and conducts new work by student composers as well as twentieth century classics.
Jason Treuting is best known as a member of So Percussion where he plays legit percussion and mallets. He and composer Steven Mackey met at the Yellow Barn Music Festival and took the opportunity to improvise together, both returning to their mother tongues of drum set and impolite guitar. They have several gigs and a recording this fall to explore the possibilities.
Brendan Murray has been working as a electronic
musician since 1998. Working with inexpensive phrase
samplers, casios and the occasional computer,
Brendan's music is comprised of massive drones, field
recordings and sounds sourced from cassettes all
stiched into long-form compositions. He is currently
involved in long-distance collaborations with NYC
sound artists Richard Garet and Seth Nehil and working
within the fertile Boston improvisation community with
the likes of Mike Bullock, Linda Aubry, Howard Stelzer
and Jay Sullivan. His third solo recording, "Wonders
Never Cease", is to be released by Intransitive next
year.
I have been active as a composer and performer of electronic music since 1992. My music utilizes the qualities inherent to cassette tape and tape players; namely hiss, the roll of tape across play heads, the crackle of dirt caught inside old players, play speed altered manually by pressure from my fingers on the tape's reels. My improvisations tend to employ space and silence as well as gritty low-fidelity noise, and are almost always centered on the physicality of live performance, with an instrumental (rather than the classical 'concrete') approach to the tapes. I have two real CDs to my name, two pieces of vinyl, and several cassettes, CDRs, and compilation tracks scattered here and there.
Over the years, I've performed with folks such as Kevin Drumm, Otomo Yoshihide, Le Quan Ninh, Haco, Martin Tetreault, Gert-Jan Prins, nmperign, Roel Meelkop, Axel Doerner, Andrea Neumann, Jason Lescalleet, Lionel Marchetti, Jerome Noetinger, Brent Gutzeit, Frans De Waard, Phil Durrant, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Alessandro Bosetti, and many other avant-garde types and characters of that persuasion. I find that collaboration is a great strategy for discovering new facets of my own work, and for taking my music to places that I couldn't get to on my own. I also have a few ongoing projects.
In addition to performing, I operate the Intransitive Recordings label and mail-order catalog for electro-acoustic and improvised music. I regularly host sound-art, electronic and improvised music concerts by visiting and regional artists in the greater Boston area, where I live. www.howardstelzer.com
