6th Annual Transmodern Festival - Live.Art.Action

Ami Dang is a South-Asian American musician and multimedia artist born and raised in Glen Arm, Maryland. Her work shifts between electronic and acoustic music, installation, movement, video, and various intermedia forms.  Currently, she is focused on solo performance that combines experimental music notions with North Indian classical sentiments to create a unique one-woman show. Having studied North Indian classical vocals and sitar for over ten years in the United States and Delhi, India, she conjures a 21st century spell of sounds further influenced by ambient, noise, and minimal musics.  In 2005, she became a disciple (for sitar) of Dr. Anupam Mahajan of the Senia Ghurana.  A year later she graduated from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music with a bachelor’s degree in technology in music and related arts.

In 2005 and 2006, she completed two multimedia performance productions.  She directed, composed, and choreographed Unee Sau Churaasee, a one-act performance for video installation, music, and six dancers about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots of Delhi, India. She also created a performance about consumption in contemporary society entitled Reception, a show for viewer-interactive installation using MIDI sensors and five music video shorts.  Last year, shereleased a tour-only EP Because You Rained On Me, and she is currently working on a full-length album.

Ami is often thinking about Sikh spirituality and performance, how children become adults, the sounds of the body, hair, perceptions of the self and the other, translation of information, the public vs. the private, brown identities, beauty, otherness, and good beats.

The art made by Baltimore artist Dan Deacon is about community and how to organize and inspire it. From founding a now well-known art collective (Wham City), to organizing and running an annually sold-out DIY music festival (Whartscape), to conceiving, planning and curating a massive 60 person/30 band tour (Baltimore Round Robin Tour), it’s clear to see that community and bringing people together is the major theme of his work.

Bromst, Deacon’s ground-breaking new album, is the embodiment of that way of thinking. Dan will be performing Bromst with the Dan Deacon Ensemble at the 2009 Annual Transmodern Festival.  This event will act as a record release for his exciting new work, as well as a celebration of his Baltimore base & home and his commitment to on-going ecstatic, collective creative action.

For the last three years Dan Deacon has been working on Bromst. Fusing together the growing intensity of his live performances with his background in electro-acoustic composition, the outcome is a collection of pieces that are intense and epic and at the same time down to earth and welcoming.

Bromst embodies the same energy and excitement as Spiderman of the Rings, however the craftsmanship and composition on Bromst have a wider scope and richer palette.  Unlike the completely electronic Spiderman of the Rings, the instrumentation on Bromst is a mixture of acoustic instruments, mechanical instruments, samples and electronics. The player piano, marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, live drums, winds and brass give Bromst a much richer tone than his previous work.  The intricate and complex parts, skillfully executed by the performers, are woven together into a rich, dense, noisy dance pop that has become Dan Deacon’s signature sound.

David Moré currently works in Chicago, Illinois. His work is often a result of experiments with ordinary objects to produce sound. The end result of these experiments, ideally, exposes the listener to subtle sonic events occuring all around them.

San Francisco duo FREDDY MCGUIRE is Anne McGuire, accompanied by electronic musician Wobbly (Jon Leidecker). Together they perform as The Freddy McGuire Show, in twisted lounge mode. myspace.com/freddymcguire

Anne is widely regarded for her video work, and has screenings this winter at the Berlin Film Festival and The Stan Brakhage Symposium in Boulder, CO.

Wobbly began as an improvised live mix radio program in Santa Barbara In 1990 and since 1994 has become the unintentional psuedonym of Jon Leidecker.  Live performances are still laptop free and aim for extended narratives spun from spontaneous yet coherent multi-sample polyphony.  It tries to sound like everything that’s ever happened.  Selected recent albums  are freely available online.  Previous and ongoing collaborators include  Thomas Dimuzio, People Like Us, Matmos, Anne McGuire (as ‘The Freddy McGuire Show’), Negativland, Tim Perkis, Xopher Davidson, Blevin Blectum, Lesser,  Otomo Yoshihide, Zeena Parkins & MaryClare Brzytwa (as ‘The Amen Seat’).

FUTURE ISLANDS are a new-wave dance band from North Carolina, now residing in the fertile “music capital of awesome”, Baltimore. Future Islands play a terse yet passionate music wrought from a stripped back palette. Gerrit Welmers’ cartwheeling synthesizer melodies tumble across the austere wilderness of William Cashion’s post-punk bass pulse, driven ever forward by ecstatic electronic rhythms.

Samuel, William and Gerrit had been writing songs together since 2003 in the guise of absurdist party project Art Lord & The Self Portraits, however it was with the arrival of Eric Murillo on drums that the band rid themselves of the mythology and masks, taking on a new motive and the name Future Islands. With the change their sound became exponentially faster and surprisingly powerful. They quickly wrote and recorded an EP entitled ‘Little Advances’ in time for their first tour late 2006 and haven’t looked back since.

Photo by Jenn.

BIO: (b.1981) Liz Meredith is a violist, improviser, and composer originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Her music is improvisatory in nature, and frequently moves towards the outer limits of musical genres, being influenced by rock, electronic, and contemporary classical music.

Liz has collaborated with an assortment of individuals, including songwriters, rock bands, electronic musicians, improvisers, and composers. She has composed concert music for The Esterhazy String Quartet, The Opabinia Quartet, and has created electronic and electro-acoustic fixed media works as well.

www.lizmeredith.com
www.myspace.com/lizmeredith

[coming soon]

“Lurch and Holler” is E. Liz Downing and Michael Willis.

Trying to save the world every weekend morning, they conjure healing vibrations by harmonizing with household appliances. They accompany these vibrations with banjo, guitar, and neighborhood sounds like trash trucks, birds, helicopters and such. Finally, “Lurch and Holler” sing, coo and growl words into the poultice which have lately been inspired by the Odyssey, Flannery O’Connor and Gertrude Stein. The resulting medicine is Appalachian Techno Psychedelia and not so far from “Lurch and Holler’s” origin, the Mystic Hillbillie Opera of the late trio, “Lambs Eat Ivy”.

Mark Brown is a Video & New Media Artist presently living and working in Baltimore. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art; majoring in Interactive Media with a concentration in Video.

Mark Brown currently works with local art collective Wham City and the presently forming and mutating Baltimore Humans group; with whom he recently toured exhibiting video works and performing experimental electro-acoustic improvised audio/visual compositions with Baltimore Artists Shaun Flynn and David Zimmerman. He also regularly collaborates with Baltimore artist Kari Altmann; with whom he helped form the experimental curatorial project Netmares Netdreams (http://www.netmaresnetdreams.net).

please visit http://www.mcbrown.info for more information and selected works.

Reina was born Tatiana M. Williams on Sept 17th 1982. The name Reina, by the way, means “Queen” in Spanish. And her royal prowess shines, in Spanish. And her royal prowess shines, as a singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, engineer, and performer of her own, original compositions as well as bringing a new flavor to familiar cover tunes.

So you see, its not just hype, because this woman is the Queen of her musical domain.

Born and raised in a musical family in Baltimore, Maryland, this 26 year old began her music career as an extra on stage, with the Baltimore Opera Company when she was barely 17 months old. Formal musical training began at the age of five, with private piano lessons. She has been writing music and lyrics since age 11, and also plays guitar, bass, and percussion instruments.

Trained at The Omega Studios for Recorded Arts and Sciences in Rockville, Maryland; a State-accredited higher education institution, Reina acquired proficiency on the intricacies of recorded music there, while developing a keen understanding of both the technical and artistic components of recorded music.

She was hired as an apprentice engineer at Reel Tyme Studios in NY, run by Grammy award winner, Ernie Lake, and has also worked with DJ Eddie Baez. She also worked as an engineer at Oz Recording Studio, in Baltimore for two years, where she worked with sensational artists such as Alicia Keys, and Usher.

She is currently involved in developing various East Coast based artists, and is also breaking in to film and television. Her music can be heard throughout various network and cable TV shows.

Reina is an out and proud Lesbian, with a little Dominican blood coursing through veins, which gives her music that extra flava, energy and style, like no other.

Shana Palmer was implanted into the valley’s surrounding the Superstition Mountains.

She is an unapologetic sensualist with a taste for surrealist animal paintings.

With the guidance of the woodland deer spirits she creates hauntingly beautiful music under the guise of Child Bride.

She would like to have you for dinner.

Nick Becker spends most of his days writing Artist Bios for Artists such as Nick Becker. Nick Becker is writing an Artist Bio for Nick Becker right now. Nick Becker spends the rest of his time learning how to make medicine from native plants and storing deer meat in preparation for 2012. Nick Becker makes a living as a psychedelic guinea pig at Johns Hopkins University. Nick Becker is not separate from you or I. Nick Becker is that there is no Nick Becker.

Teeth Mountain is a collective of musicians, artists, and philosophers seeking to subdue the fabric of time by exploring the hypnotic and transformative effects of sound, volume, spirit, rhythm, environment, and other means. Founded by Andrew Burt and Kate Levitt in Baltimore in the Spring of 2007, the group has worked tirelessly to realize its ideas through numerous tours and hundreds of shows, collaborations with a diverse group of musicians, an acclaimed LP, and hosting events at the Comfort Dome, their headquarters in downtown Baltimore.

April will see the release of a new LP on Not Not Fun Records. Comprised of live recordings from the latter half of 2008, the album is a different take on the live album format, seeking to represent the experience of a live band not through a faithful reproduction of a given performance but rather as a dream of a long journey, with the source material manipulated and edited to form a wholly new composition.

The band also is setting out on a full-U.S. tour with the Dan Deacon Ensemble and Future Islands beginning in April. Members Kate Levitt, Greg Fox, Andrew Burt, Justin Frye, and Andrew Bernstein will also be performing in the Ensemble. Following this tour, the band will head to Europe for a week of festivals with Dan and Future Islands and then a two week tour of the UK and the Continent on their own.