Genre:
Classical
,
Experimental
As part of the Decibel Fest's 6th year anniversary, you are cordially invited to partake in the first-ever Decibel Festival Fundraiser Gala! This event will support the 2009 festival edition.
At the Fundraiser Gala, you will enjoy a unique artistic and culinary experience in a spectacular setting that will dazzle you and amuse the senses. Since Decibel's inception in 2004, the four-day music and arts festival held in Seattle bridges the gap between technology and creativity through visual art, workshops, panel discussions and cutting-edge electronic music performances.
This special event will feature live musical performances by:
HELIOS
Type Records
www.soundalong.com/helios
Some people are natural-born musicians. Keith Kenniff is one of those people. At a young age, he began to learn classical guitar, bass and drums under their father’s teaching, and before long Keith decided to further pursue drums. He was finally drawn to study percussion at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. Keith's primary musical venture is the solo project Helios, showcasing his skill in percussion, his delicate touch on the guitar, his measured and spacious songwriting, and his self-taught electro-acoustic production. Keith has released for the prestigious UK label Type Records, to much critical-aclaim. His music have been used in films and major television series. Taking influence from his interest in cinema, and his extensive European travels, the resulting music is a stunning work of instrumental beauty.
RENA JONES
Native State Records
www.renamusic.com
Rena Jones slips through the veils of defined sound, weaving cello, violin, woodwinds, rhodes, electronics and sound design through unique instrumentation. Her most recent album Driftwood was given the honor of the sixth most essential albums of 2006 on NPR Echoes Radio. Her extensive background in music and sound covers a colorful spectrum from award winning video games “Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution” and for various films as a sound editor, sound design and composition.
LUSINE performing an ambient set
www.lusineweb.com
Jeff McIlwain’s ever morphing musical project, Lusine, has been in existence for over 10 years now. Originally a Texas native, Jeff now resides in Seattle. In 1998, he attended Calarts to study 20th century electronic music and sound design for music and film. Soon after, he met Shad Scott and put out a self titled release with Isophlux. Since then, he has been releasing his music on various labels including Ann Arbor's Ghostly International, Hymen, and U-Cover. His latest release, Language Barrier, was somewhat of a departure, focusing less on rhythmic detail, instead highlighting the layers of ambience that were only briefly touched upon in past releases. McIlwain has also contributed tracks to several labels including Mute, !K7, Kompakt, Asthmatic Kitty, and Shitkatapult for various compilations and remix releases. He has performed around the US and abroad including a set at London's esteemed Fabric nightclub, and an ambient performance and collaboration with video artist Scott Sunn at Seattle's Triple Door in April. Jeff has recently been involved in two film projects, co-scoring David Gordon Green’s “Snow Angels” (with Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, 2008), and scoring the film "Linewatch” (dir. Kevin Bray, 2009; with Cuba Gooding Jr., Omari Hardwick) He is currently putting the finishing touches on an upcoming album and gearing up a for an impressive international tour schedule, which includes performances at three of the world's most prestigious electronic music festivals (DEMF, MUTEK and Sónar).
KELLY WISE performing selections by early-20th-century inventor of ambient music, ERIK SATIE
Seattle Piano Collective
www.myspace.com/seattlepianocollective
Erik Satie was an important French composer from the generation of Debussy. Best remembered for several groups of piano pieces, including “Trois Gymnopédies” (1888), “Trois Sarabandes” (1887) and “Trois Gnossiennes” (1890), he was championed by Jean Cocteau and helped create the famous group of French composers, Les Six, which was fashioned after his artistic ideal of simplicity in the extreme. Much of his music has a subdued character, and its charm comes through in its directness and its lack of allegiance to any one aesthetic. Often his melodies are melancholy and hesitant, his moods exotic or humorous, and his compositions as a whole, or their several constituent episodes, short. He was a musical maverick who probably influenced Debussy and did influence Ravel, who freely acknowledged as much.
In 1917 Erik Satie coined the term “furniture music” – a minimalist style of “background” music that would precede the electronic music subgenre ‘ambient.’ These and other related ideas were picked up by several composers of the neo-Classical/20th Century school of music, accentuating atmosphere and texture over traditional form and movement.
Kelly Wise (member of the Seattle Piano Collective) is a Seattle pianist and composer. As a classically trained pianist, Kelly has received a wide range of awards and scholarships for his colorful interpretations of piano repertoire. A connoisseur of Satie’s catalog, for this special evening he will be performing the “Trois Gymnopédies” and “Trois Gnossiennes.”
With visual accompaniment by
SCOTT SUNN
Decibel / Tracer Visuals
www.tracervisuals.com
Scott Sunn is a Seattle-based video artist with almost a decade of experience under his belt. In 1999, he started Tracer Visuals, a company that provides video services to a variety of clients. He specializes in event-based video production, which includes video projection, live video collage, and project management— often all at the same time. Past clients include Radiohead, The String Cheese Incident, Keller Williams, Experience Music Project, XBOX, and many others. Along with providing services for touring musicians and DJs, his projects also include corporate events, private parties, theater, and dance troupes. What makes Tracer Visuals stand apart is attention to detail and the creative use of technologies. Working closely with the artists and lighting directors helps create a show that will complement the performance instead of clash with it.
RAFAEL ANTON IRISARRI
Decibel / Miasmah
www.irisarri.org
www.myspace.com/rafaelantonirisarri
Rafael Anton Irisarri's audiovisual works are a dual perspective close-up focus on the micro textures of rustling static-filled sonic surfaces with the wide-open distant tree lined horizons of sunset at dusk. Submerged piano melodies, reverberating guitar tonalities and electronic punctuation all contribute as the converging elements, but it's his hand at electro-acoustic composition that offers the listener the often breathtaking vantage into this sonic world. The combined effect is one of time passing in introspection, remembrances of landscapes and the nature of our relationship with things past as we move toward those yet to come. Plaintively yearning, his art never resigns itself to the stoicism of the melancholic, but is asking, moving, and drawing us into a state of hearing, seeing and recognizing the scale, scope and richness of the natural world and ourselves in the everyday. It's this intersection of images and sounds, both traditional and modernly avant, that make for the balancing act that can be described as something beyond just 'ambient' or 'cinematic'; it brings the listener to a state somewhere between emotionally entranced and psychologically adrift.