The Squid's Ear Magazine

Lafkas, Andrew

Two Paths with Active Shadows Under Three Moons and Surveillance

Lafkas, Andrew: Two Paths with Active Shadows Under Three Moons and Surveillance (Sacred Realism)

Composer Andrew Lafkas' large ensemble piece with performers including C. Spencer Yah, Ron Stabinsky, Barry Weisblat, Sean Meehan, Ben Owen, &c. is a meditative work intended for live performance, this album the 2nd of 3 performances, a brooding and resonant rendering of rich and subtle detail that evolves over 70 minutes, carrying its listeners in a profound revery.
 

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Personnel:



Andrew Lafkas-composer, performer

Marcia Bassett-performer

Barry Weisblat-performer

Ron Stabinsky-performer

Che Chen-performer

Laura Ortman-performer

C. Spencer Yeh-performer

Michael Bullock-performer

Andrew Lafkas-performer

Rick Brown-performer

Ryan Sawyer-performer

Sean Meehan-performer

Brian Chase-performer

Sandy Gordon-performer

Gill Arno-performer

Wolfgang Gil-performer

Ben Owen-performer

Daniel Neumann-performer


Click an artist name above to see in-stock items for that artist.




Label: Sacred Realism
Catalog ID: sr007
Squidco Product Code: 29740

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2019
Country: Germany
Packaging: Digipack
Mixed and mastered by Michael Bullock

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"This piece and group developed over the course of a year. It was presented in concert over three initial phases. The concert recorded here (second phase) occurred 6 months into this process. However, this is not completely accurate; in different forms, the group continues to develop. This recording documents one of many possible manifestations."-Sacred Realism


Artist Biographies

"Andrew Lafkas: bass. Berlin, Germany

Andrew Lafkas is a musician currently living in Berlin, Germany. His primary instrument is the contrabass. He is currently focused on developing pieces for largish ensembles that encourage group intuition; this interest is greatly inspired by and influenced by experiences working in groups led by Milo Fine and Bill Dixon. He is also active in the groups Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, with Todd Capp and Bryan Eubanks, and a trio with Marcia Bassett and Barry Weisblat. He has performed at venues and festivals including Walker Art Center, The Living Theatre, Experimental Intermedia, the Vision Festival, and the Seattle Improvised Music Festival."

-High Zero Festival (http://www.highzero.org/2015_site/performers/)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Ron Stabinsky recently released his debut album, Free for One, the culmination of more than a decade of evolving his improvised solo language. In addition to continuing to pursue his ongoing interest in solo piano improvisation, he enjoys working on music in a stylistically diverse array of situations throughout the United States and Europe with many other musicians and ensembles, including free-improvising saxophonist Jack Wright, bass trombone virtuoso David Taylor, Meat Puppets bassist Cris Kirkwood, and NEA Jazz Master David Liebman. Recent festival appearances include Newport Jazz Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival (Netherlands), Moers Festival (Germany), Jazzfestival Saalfelden (Austria), Outreach Festival (Austria), and Jazz and More Festival Sibiu (Romania). He is currently a regular member of the band Mostly Other People Do the Killing, the new music ensemble Relâche, the Charles Evans Quartet, and the Peter Evans Quintet."

-Ron Stabinsky 3/27/2024

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"C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan 1975, moved to the US in 1980; studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, and is now based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeh is active both as a solo and collaborative artist, as well as with his primary project, Burning Star Core. As an improviser, Yeh is focused on developing a personal vocabulary using violin, voice, and electronics. As a sound artist/composer, Yeh works with all aspects available surrounding a work, aurally and physically, as elements key to the cumulative experience. He is concerned not only with the sensual aspects of 'sound organization,' but the gestural qualities as well. Yeh has collaborated with a deep and ever-growing list of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Justin Lieberman, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, No Fun Fest, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, ZKM Karlsruhe, and has also exhibited visual art, sound, and video works internationally."

-Ubu Web (http://www.ubu.com/sound/yeh.html)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Andrew Lafkas: bass. Berlin, Germany

Andrew Lafkas is a musician currently living in Berlin, Germany. His primary instrument is the contrabass. He is currently focused on developing pieces for largish ensembles that encourage group intuition; this interest is greatly inspired by and influenced by experiences working in groups led by Milo Fine and Bill Dixon. He is also active in the groups Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, with Todd Capp and Bryan Eubanks, and a trio with Marcia Bassett and Barry Weisblat. He has performed at venues and festivals including Walker Art Center, The Living Theatre, Experimental Intermedia, the Vision Festival, and the Seattle Improvised Music Festival."

-High Zero Festival (http://www.highzero.org/2015_site/performers/)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Ryan Sawyer is a drummer and percussionist from the USA. He has played with several artists and bands like, Tv On The Radio, At The Drive-In, Scarlet Johanson, Massive Attack, Boredoms (77 & 88 Boadrum), The Mekons, Thurston Moore, among others.He currently is playing with, Stars Like Fleas, Tall Firs, and Eye Contact."

-Discogs (https://www.discogs.com/artist/300910-Ryan-Sawyer)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Sean Meehan is a drummer who most notably plays a pared-down kit often consisting of a single snare drum and cymbal, creating sounds that range from the subtle friction of a fork rubbing against a drum to tones that seem electronically-generated. These complex, sometimes subtle sonorities require a great deal of concentration for the performer and listener, foregrounding the act of listening just as much as the production of sound, and bringing the audience's attention to both spatial acoustics and social interactions within a space.

Meehan traces much of his development as a musician to the time he spent as a teen in the public library, in particular reading Downbeat Magazine's Blindfold Tests, for which magazine staff would play recordings for jazz musicians without identifying the artists. The guest musician would comment and guess whom they were hearing. From this he understood the importance of having a unique sound and language. How to obtain that goal was informed by other books Meehan selected for the provocative titles running down their spines: As Serious As Your Life: Black Music And The Free-Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, by Valerie Wilmer helped him understand that the way to one's own music was for it to be a reflection of one's particular social context, politics, and inner being; and from a distant shelf, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music by Hermann von Helmholtz provided a lifetime of information and inspiration.

Some of Meehan's early performances were at the Amica Bunker series for improvised music, located at the Anarchist's Switchboard and later at ABC No Rio, New York. Since then, he has presented at many venues, including the Instal Festival, Glasgow, The Whitney Biennial, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Goethe-Institut, Hanoi, but he primarily performs at small, informal, transient spaces and artist-run festivals.

For nearly twenty years, Meehan and saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi presented a summer concert series, always in different locations in New York City that Meehan considered to be marginal. Meehan's work with Shiraishi most directly reflects his interest in urbanism, which includes the acts of walking, writing, filmmaking, and talking to strangers, as well as the practices or concepts of social history, cartography, community control of land, foreclosure and eviction prevention, and tenant advocacy. Three of these concerts have been documented on LP: In the City (Fusetron, 2003) and Summer Concerts 2002 & 2003 (GD Stereo, 2005). In 2007 the duo worked with Arika, a cultural presenter in Scotland, to mount a condensed multi-concert version of these works in similarly "marginal" locations throughout the United Kingdom.

His other significant collaborators include: John Dierker, Geoff Dugan, Michelle Ellsworth, James Fei, Ellen Fullman, Paul Hoskin, Greg Kelley, Andrew Lafkas, Sachiko M, Ben Manley, John McCowen, Ken Montgomery, Toshimaru Nakamura, Kendall Pigg, Matthew Sperry, Edwin Torres, Taku Unami, Barry Weisblat, and Barry Wolifson.

Meehan also makes music-related objects, intended to be used in the way recordings are, but within the listener's imagination, rather than aurally. These include Field Recordings Vol 3 (2003) a folio of letterpress cards, and Audio (2001) a boxed set of four cassette-like objects. These too are rooted in Meehan's early experiences in the library imagining what free jazz sounded like based on Wilmer's descriptions long before actually hearing it, and imagining the swirling, beating tones of Helmholtz's Victorian-era experiments, which Meehan paid homage to in the abridged book-on-tape Meehan Reads Helmholtz (2017).

Meehan completed both his M.A. and M.U.P. at Hunter College of the City University of New York before obtaining his J.D. at the City University of New York School of Law."

-Foundation for Contemporary Art (https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/sean-meehan/)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.



Selected Discography:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Drums and Drones
w/ The Seconds
w/ Alan Licht
w/ Peter Aaron
w/ Collapsible Shoulder
w/ Thollem McDonas
w/ Seth Misterka:
w/ Jeremiah Cymerman
w/ Man Forever
w/ Karlie Bruce
w/ Fretless Brothers
w/ Sway Machinery
w/ Tyondai Braxton

-Brian Chase Website (http://www.chasebrian.com/recordings/)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

Ben Owen works with sound using various approaches including improvisation, recording, listening, and composition. His instruments are simple electronics - played, mixed, re-patched in their own trajectory of small sound, broken and accidental. Over the past few years he has been interested in presenting works, performing and recording in outdoor spaces. His focus is in the sustained, immersive, minimal soundscapes that interact within a defined space as well as an outside environment.

-Ben Owen 3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Two Paths with Active Shadows Under Three Moons and Surveillance 01:09:59

Related Categories of Interest:


Compositional Forms
Electro-Acoustic
Ambient & Minimal Music
lowercase, reductionist, micro-improv, sound improv, onkyo sound
Large Ensembles
New in Experimental & Electronic Music
New in Compositional Music

Search for other titles on the label:
Sacred Realism.


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