Virtual @ LOW END | Celebrating Tony Conrad

Celebrating Tony Conrad Performers

Tony Billoni met Tony Conrad in Buffalo, NY in 1980. As an aspiring artist, entering the world of Tony Conrad was jarring and revelatory. With Conrad’s mentorship, Billoni created award-winning videos and performance art. Moving from making to producing, Conrad’s audacity to bend and blend mediums was evident in Billoni’s ground-breaking Artists & Models Affair, a living art gallery event that drew thousands annually. This was followed by two nite clubs in Buffalo that would have fit equally well in downtown New York City. Now working professionally as a leadership coach and trainer, Billoni has remained close to his beloved WNY arts community through board memberships, volunteering, and the occasional audacious art action. He lives in Buffalo with his life partner and two young adult children.

MV Carbon is a multidisciplinary artist working in sound, performance, film, sculpture, and painting. Carbon’s work explores themes such as interchangeability, animism, telepathy, and transmogrification. Perceptive and reactive techniques sculpt a soulful discourse; tapping into the mystery of the human mechanism; amplifying the ritual, rhythm, and momentum encapsulated in sound and form. Artifacts function as musical instruments, weaving and unraveling lucid abstractions. Music is conjured and manipulated through amplified vessels, stringed instruments, magnetic tape, gongs, and electronics. Working with acoustic space, she sculpts sonics into complex rhythms employing delay, feedback, repetition, and resonance. Carbon has released solo and collaborative projects through record labels including 5RC, Atavistic Records, Ecstatic Peace, Chaikin Records, Hanson, Load Records, and No Fun Productions. She has been awarded residencies and commissions at Clocktower Gallery, (NY, NY), EMS Elektronmusikstudion, (STHLM, SE), Issue Project Room, (BK, NY), Koncertkirken, (CPH, DK), Pioneer Works, (BK, NY), Q02, (BR, BE), Roulette, (BK, NY), The String Orchestra of Brooklyn, (BK, NY), and Zebulon, (LA, CA).

Ted Conrad is the son of Tony Conrad. In 1973, the Conrad family moved from New York City to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Tony Conrad had accepted a position at Antioch College to teach filmmaking. To keep Ted busy, Tony modified the turntable to work as an instrument by installing stops that prevented the swingarm from moving further than the edge of the record playing surface. The recordings from this new instrument were released in 2002 as “Thuunderboy!”. As a child, Ted appeared in his father’s short films including "Teddy Tells Jokes". Starting at an early age, Ted Conrad’s artwork explored and pushed limits. At the age of 13, he sought out and received an FCC license, earlier than the normal age requirement of 14, and began hosting the WYSO "Friday Night Hour of Funk”, a Hip-Hop mix show promoted by Run-D.M.C. with live scratching with records sourced from regular trips to New York. In 1987, Ted's photography was exhibited at the MollyOlga Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Ted graduated from the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts with a telecommunications degree and later attended the University of Buffalo and the SVA in New York City for video production.

Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist working with free improvisation, compositions, and performance. Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training, and performance expectation. Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long-standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash, and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc, and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Apartment House, Tarek Atoui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth, Juliet Stephenson, and J.G.Thirlwell.

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is a composer, performer, and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. Among the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt developed a unique approach to composition and music performance. As he began his music in the 1970's in New York, he invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning and has formed and led numerous ensembles under the title The Orchestra of Excited Strings in the States and Europe since 1980. Often characterized as the most rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground fan base for his transcendental and ecstatic music in various solo and ensemble configurations. In 1984, he moved to Europe where, in addition to composing, he began to work in performance and the visual arts.

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press). Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums, appeared on more than 200 releases, is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, among many others.

Keiji Haino was born in Chiba, Japan on May 3, 1952. Inspired by Antonin Artaud he aimed for the theatre, but an encounter with The Doors stimulated him into music, where he has examined and absorbed a wide range of music from the early blues especially Blind Lemon Jefferson or European medieval music to popular songs across the world. In 1970, he joined a group “Lost Aaraaf” named after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem as a vocalist. Meanwhile, he started to work on home recordings and self-taught the guitar and percussion. In 1978 he formed a rock band “Fushitsusha,” and since 1988, after a recuperation period from 1983 to 1987, he has been internationally active in various forms including solo, groups such as Fushitsusha, Nijiumu, Aihiyo, Vajra, Sanhedrin, Seijaku, Nazoranai or The Hardy Rocks and DJ as “experimental mixture,” as well as collaborations with artists from different backgrounds, drawing the performance of the guitar, percussions, the hurdy-gurdy, diverse wind and string instruments, local instruments from across the world and DJ gears to the extreme through unique techniques. He has released more than 200 recordings and performed live at least 1,800 times.

Lary 7 is a multimedia alchemist able to coax profane and inscrutable sounds and images from numerous and mysterious devices. His work has been described as that of a magician or scientist, not always certain of the outcome, but determined to see it through to its (Il)logical end. Since the late 1970’s he’s been building, soldering, photographing, recording, mixing, filming, playing, recombining, collecting, re-interpreting, and creating in order to make something happen. Lary 7 is the cofounder of Plastikville Records and Directart Productions Ltd. and is the founder of the Analogue Society. He has released work on Touch, Diskono, Ectoplasm, Plastikville, Plastiktray, and Belly-up Records. He has performed in various countries in Europe as well as the U.S. and Canada. Lary 7 lives and works in Manhattan’s East Village and is one of the last remaining vestiges of a once vibrant community.

Jim O'Rourke has been involved in music and film since the late ’80s, as a composer, producer, engineer, and collaborator. He has produced records for Stereolab, Sonic Youth, Wilco, John Fahey, amongst others. His own music has been released by Drag City, Tzadik, Editions Mego, and others. He has scored films for Werner Herzog, Koji Wakamatsu, and others. Since 2013 he has released the bulk of his own work on steamroom.bandcamp.com.

Charlemagne Palestine was born in Brooklyn NYC in 1947. He is a sound artist, composer, performer, video artist and installation artist. Palestine studied at New York University, Columbia University, Mannes College of Music, and the California Institute of the Arts. A contemporary of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Phill Niblock, and Tony Conrad, Palestine creates intense, ritualistic, continuum music for electronic sound sources, bell carillons, pipe organs, pianos, voice, and other keyboard instruments since the sixties. A composer-performer originally trained to be a cantor, and then a carillonneur; he always performs his own works as a soloist. His electronic continuums were his first major pieces. He early on began developing sonorities especially with large numbers of electronic sound oscillators and filters developed by Moog, Buchla, Serge, Arp, and Oberheim. These sonorities lasted from several hours to days exploring slow gradual timbral color transformations and beat tone variations creating what he termed his “Golden Sonorities” or the search for the Golden Sound. His continuum form “Strumming” for amplified pianos, develops harmonies, dissonances, and clusters with a visceral physical force that pushes the sonic limits of a piano till it no longer resembles one, even often naturally detunes from the force and becomes a new kind of multi-spectrum electro-acoustic sound-emitting machine. His favorite pianos are the 9-foot long Bösendorfer Imperial which has 9 tones lower than any other piano in the world and the Borgato which is a grand piano with 2 bodies; one played with the hands and one with the feet. His “Schlingen Blängens”, a sonic continuums form for pipe organs were like in alchemy all the different and varied timbral registers of a traditional church or theatre organ are merged and developed searching for the Golden Sound, using a unique continuum key prolonging technique that allows Palestine to create works developing hundreds to thousands of nuances of organ timbres becoming a massive magical sonorous vibrating storm cloud that interacts with the architecture of each church or theatre edifice. As a vocalist in his epic 2 hour long Karenina he sings in a haunting ghostlike countertenor falsetto register and in other works like his sound/motion videos he sings long tones with gradually shifting vowels and overtones while moving through spaces and places while performing repetitive intense shamanic body action rituals such as throwing himself against walls; running and falling in labyrinthal spaces; singing on high-speed motorbikes or while on roller coasters and other amusement park intense motion rides. Palestine stopped performing from the early eighties till the mid-nineties and devoted himself entirely to his forms of plush animal divinity altars as multi-media sculptures and installations. These altars are always an integral ingredient in Palestine’s performances. Since his return to performing Palestine has reissued works from the sixties and seventies on CD and vinyl, created and recorded many new works, and has collaborated and recorded with other musicians such as Pansonic, Simone Forti, Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, Perlonex, Gol, among others. He now performs regularly in venues and festivals as well as presenting his multimedia installations worldwide. Charlemagne lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Jean-Hervé Péron is one of the founding members of the legendary Kraut Rock band Faust and the curator of The Avantgarde Festival. Formed 1969 in Hamburg, Germany, and considered the inventors of "Kraut Rock", iconoclasts extraordinaire Faust are key figures in 20th Century music. In the early '70s, along with Can and Kraftwerk, they re-invented pop music as a specifically European art form. In their own studio, they were able to revolutionize the whole process of musical production; they improvised with industrial noise, generated bizarre hypnotic grooves, indulged in shockingly willful studio-based collages, and dabbled with every conceivable musical genre, sometimes simultaneously. Every now and then they found time for a burst of satirical pop or waves of delicate ambiance. Amongst those Faust have strongly influenced us we must count Brian Eno, Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, Test Department, Neubauten, My Bloody Valentine, Julian Cope, Sonic Youth, and a host of Industrial and Techno bands. The music has lost none of its immediacy or relevance—it sounds as if it was recorded last week, not last decade. Faust has performed and collaborated with Nurse with Wound, Ulan Bator, Henry Cow, Pascal Comelade, and Jim O'Rourke among many others. In 1972, Faust recorded with Tony Conrad at their artist commune in Wümme southwest of Hamburg. The recording was released as an album in 1973 called Outside the Dream Syndicate. This was Conrad's first and best-known musical work release, critically considered a classic of minimalist and drone music. Faust and Tony Conrad presented the live performance of Outside the Dream Syndicate throughout the years, with their last public performance in August 2015 in Berlin being Tony's last high profile performances before his passing in 2016.

Jennifer Walshe, dubbed the most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), is a composer and performer born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast, and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt, and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include Aisteach, a fictional history of avant-garde music in Ireland; EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, a work for voice, string quartet, and film commissioned by the Arditti Quartet; and TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, which has been touring to critical acclaim. ALL THE MANY PEOPLS, her second solo album, was released on Migro Records in May 2019. Walshe is currently Professor of Experimental Performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart.

C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for interdisciplinary activities as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well as for his music project Burning Star Core. Recent exhibitions and presentations of work include "Shocking Asia" Empty Gallery HK, "Two Workaround Works Around Calder" Whitney Museum NYC, "Modern Mondays" and David Tudor's "Forest Speech" MoMA NYC, "Sound Horizon" Walker Art Center Minneapolis MN, "Tarek Atoui: Organ Within" Kurimanzutto and Guggenheim NYC, "The World Is Sound" Rubin Museum NYC, "Mei-Jia & Ting-Ting & Chih-fu & Sin-Ji" MOCA CLE OH, "Closer to the Edge" Singapore and "Crossing Over" KL Malaysia,” The Moon Represents My Heart: Music Memory and Belonging" Museum of Chinese in America NYC, and "Inner Ear Vision: Sound As Medium" Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE. Yeh was a 2019 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award. Yeh is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine and Triple Canopy and has been a long-time programmer and trailer editor for the microcinema Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn NY. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. In 2017, his project ”The RCA Mark II'' was published on vinyl record by Primary Information.