Flame Keepers 135: Akul Kaul

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Akul Kaul

July 8th, 2024

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About the Artist

Akul Kaul is a multimodal sound artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Their modes of activity currently cycle between composer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, sound designer, and producer. Akul's workflow tends to feel most organic in a state of alienation, which is the underlying sensation that their sound is rooted in: developing comfort with otherness. While alienation provides inception, Akul finds sustained inspiration from mystical elements in nature to shape sonic landscapes: outer space, the ocean, trees, and our subconscious. Flirting with sounds that live in between the musical communities they have encountered, Akul's productions currently lie at the intersection of electroacoustic and psybient, rooted in a process of layering improvised ideas together.

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Flame Keepers 134: Wes Meadows

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Wes Meadows

July 1st, 2024

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About the Artist

Wes Meadows is a multi-instrumentalist from Berea, Ohio. She plays in The You Suck Flying Circus, Scorpio Death Club, i hope so., as well as many other projects. She also produces albums for others and releases them on her label, Flowerpot Records.

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Flame Keepers 132: Cristóbal García Belmont

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Cristóbal García Belmont

June 10th, 2024

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About the Artist

Cristóbal García Belmont is an artist, musician, and poet from Lima, Perú. His work explores sound, performance, sculpture, and poetry as they investigate the circulation of mediums and materials in complex postcolonial realities. By considering sound through materials and the built environment, as well as visual languages and poetry, he explores sound as a political phenomenon with the capacity to appropriate existing infrastructures and create spaces in which bodies may resonate, opening discussions about inherited power dynamics and proposing alternate ways to imagine the realities we collectively inhabit.

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Flame Keepers 131: Tizia Zimmermann

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Tizia Zimmermann

June 3rd, 2024

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About the Artist

Tizia Zimmermann has wanted to be a musician ever since she first held an accordion in her hand. She studied classical music on the accordion at the Bern University of the Arts, where she completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Performance with distinction. In addition to interpreting contemporary classical music, she plays in various formations in which free improvisation and experimental (noise) music play an important role. She is also active in the organization of various platforms for experimental and improvised music in Zurich, such as the Gamut Kollektiv and is part of the label Wide Ear Records. She works with musicians and ensembles/orchestras such as Collegium Novum Zürich, Philharmonie Zürich, Lucas Niggli, Pablo Lienhard, Chris Pitsiokos, Jason Nazary, Chris Corsano, Christian Weber, Manuel Troller and many more and played festivals like Jazzfestival Willisau, Météo Mulhouse Festival, Jazz em Agosto Festival and Moers Festival amongst others. 

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Flame Keepers 130: Chris Pitsiokos

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Chris Pitsiokos

May 27th, 2024

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About the Artist

Chris Pitsiokos is a New York-born, Berlin-based saxophonist, improviser, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. He has performed extensively in North and South America, Europe and Japan. Chris has been praised by Rolling Stone for his “startlingly original vision” and “astonishingly fleet sax work.” Downbeat has identified his band CP Unit as “A persuasive combination of harmolodic jazz and contemporary noise rock.” As a soloist he has developed a unique voice on the alto saxophone: his expansion of the instrument’s vocabulary has served to multiply its emotive and formal possibilities. He has performed his own music at dozens of major festivals across the globe, including (but not limited to) Saalfelden Jazz Festival and Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, Sapporo International Arts Festival in Japan, Moers Festival in Germany, Tempo Reale Festival in Italy, Rewire Festival in the Netherlands, Jazz Jantar Festival in Poland and Festival de Jazz Lima in Peru. In New York he has presented his work at Roulette Intermedium, ISSUE Project Room, and during a residency at John Zorn’s club the Stone. Lately, he has developed interactive, 4-channel electro-acoustic systems for saxophone and computer. He also composes music for film. His list of collaborators includes many of the leading lights of late-20th and 21st century improvised music, experimental music and free jazz: he has worked with Jaimie Branch, Luke Stewart, Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Lea Bertucci, Weasel Walter, Chris Corsano, Otomo Yoshihide, Nate Wooley, Axel Dörner, Julien Desprez, Sachiko M, and Paul Lytton to name a small few. His current focus is on solo performance, duos with Otomo Yoshihide and Tizia Zimmermann, his band CP Unit, and a collaborative band with Kalle Kalima, Ronny Graupe and Oliver Steidle called “ROKC Music.”

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Flame Keepers 129: Abdul Sherzai

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Abdul Sherzai

May 20th, 2024

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About the Artist

Abdul Sherzai is an experimental musician creating audio that is not for the faint of heart. While focusing on themes of isolation, anxiety and redemption, his music is designed for the hard of hearing. It's for those who embrace that sound can be a full body experience. He creates music for those who understand that there's a space between self-harm and self-improvement where the two are permanently fused.

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Flame Keepers 128: Pablo Picco

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Pablo Picco

May 13th, 2024

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About the Artist

Pablo Picco records and makes music under the name of Bardo Todol. His music is a mix of various music concréte techniques that involves tapes, flutes, field recordings, noise and acoustic elements. Audio collages that are assembled through many years and many improvisations and put together on distant and lonely nights: all of them have this “natural” or “impressionistic” feeling. A new realm of sounds and colours that came out through the speakers with a ferric smell.

In all this distorted resonance, his children, Nico and Cina, have a strong presence making noises, shouting, singing and making non-child sounds.

He has released some tapes in different labels across U.S. and Europe such as Discrepant, Ikuisuus, Lal Lal Lal, Chocolate Monk, Magma Tones, Artsy Records, Dinzu Artefacts, Full Spectrum, Tsss Tapes, Falt, More Mars, Getrude Tapes and more.

He is also a visual artist that makes collage art that illustrates the front covers of his albums.

Currently Pablo is making an animation film grouping together all his music and these short stories. His filming process involves also various techniques such as stop motion, analog and digital collage, rotoscope, and more.

LINKS

MUSIC:
https://bardotodolmonofonia.bandcamp.com/

VISUAL ART:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl8xTEauL4a/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch7UZ9Pu439/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqvJnEwuc9E/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CkQrPt5uHoO/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTZw4rfriSq/
https://www.instagram.com/p/COna0nKA1vU/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2HPdxCgAiH/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxGRjVRAP-k/

ANIMATION VIDEOS:
https://youtu.be/uGZ_LRiArMw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnGpWCHld0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v15BvxZ4Zds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK-MWPoKfbY

DOCUMENTAL FILM “Kalinga Utkal”:
https://youtu.be/Xc0sLYfpxTs

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Flame Keepers 127: Kelly Bray

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Kelly Bray

May 6th, 2024

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About the Artist

Kelly Bray is a trumpet player, improviser, and composer. Her original compositions and improvisations explore the extremes in trumpet technique, often drawing from her relationship to perceptions of gender and femininity in the communities and aesthetics of improvisation, creative music, and trumpet playing. Her recorded electroacoustic works intuitively combine her live improvisational techniques with harsh and glitchy sounding sound manipulation.

Bray is a sought after performer in the Northeast United States and Canada, frequenting venues in Boston, New Haven, New York City, Philadelphia, and Montreal. She regularly performs both solo and in groups, bringing an exciting, yet sensitive improvisational style to each performance.

An alumnus of the New England Conservatory of Music, Bray earned a Master of Music in Contemporary Improvisation, studying with Anthony Coleman and Joe Morris.

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Flame Keepers 126: Andrea Pensado

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Andrea Pensado

April 29th, 2024

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About the Artist

Based in the US since 2002, Pensado uses voice and electronics to make her music. She studied in Argentina and Poland where she graduated in Composition with honors at the Krakow Academy of Music. However, after extensive composition practice, her music started to gradually move away from conventional composition. Nowadays, she mainly uses digital media and live interactive systems to perform. Her voice is constantly interwoven in the performances.  The approach to both programming and performance is highly intuitive. The harsh cut up noise result, mixed with the strong emotional component of her music, generates a deeply personal sonic language. Occasionally, the combination of the performance situation, the often abrasive sounds, the irrational use of the voice and the inherent uncertainty of improvisations contributes to discoveries of unknown places in her mind. 

Pensado performs extensively in the US and abroad. She also produces Sonorium, a series of experimental music based in Salem, MA.

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Flame Keepers 125: Max Feldman

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Max Feldman

April 22nd, 2024

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About the Artist

Max Feldman is a Brooklyn musician and comedian. In 2021 he started his Spa Water project through which he has since released six albums, ranging in style from neoclassical compositions to vaporwave-metal remixes, on the online labels Slyme Records and Pedicure Records. In 2022, Max started performing live music at venues like Berlin, Pianos, Wonderville, and Trans-Pecos, where he uses his trusty SP-404 to turn sounds from his albums (and from elsewhere) into immersive and humorous collages. Also a visual artist, Max does all his own album artwork and often performs alongside his own live visuals.

Max does musical improv comedy, and has performed all around town with his indie team Hey, Handsome! which specializes in making up musical versions of popular TV shows. Max is also a company member of Eight is Never Enough, an interactive family comedy show at the Broadway Comedy Club. Often Max works as the piano accompanist for other musical improv comedy teams, which means he gets to make up the music while they make up the lyrics.

In January 2023, Max joined the bands Jenny Alien and Kiddo Pro, which have given him the chance to rock out on keys and SP-404 respectively. With these bands he has performed at venues like The Knitting Factory, Gold Sounds, and The Living Gallery.

Perhaps of greatest note is that Max once saw Chris Rock in line at a movie theater.

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Flame Keepers 124: Qiujiang Levi Lu

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Qiujiang Levi Lu

April 15th, 2024

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About the Artist

Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江 (they/them) is a Beijing-born, NYC-based performance artist, improviser, composer, and educator. For their solo performance art practice, Lu designs Max/MSP-based electroacoustic feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism, which include special microphones and speakers placed within bodily orifices and a custom-mapped flight joystick controller. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking together sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony.

As a composer, Lu writes instructed improvisation pieces for acoustic and electronic performers and improvisers. Lu’s commissioned works often take a meta, unorthodox approach to music technology, exploring human-machine relationships, audio-visual interactivity, mind-body connection, and the phenomenology of musical performance. Previous commissions have included Popebama, Luke Helker, and Ensemble Decipher.

Lu’s works have been performed and featured at festivals, conferences, and venues such as High Zero Festival, MATA Festival, IRCAM forum, DiMenna Center, Jazz Showcase, SEAMUS conference, Elastic Arts, Spencer Museum of Art, NIME conference, NYCEMF, Oberlin MMG, Rhizome DC, and NowNet Arts conference. Lu currently works as a lecturer and recording engineer in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

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