San Francisco Electronic Music Festival

San Francisco Electronic Music Festical

Sunday, September 9th  8pm @ Brava Theater

8pm @ Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street (at York), San Francisco

tickets $12-$16   http://sfemf2012.brownpapertickets.com/ 

Negativwobblyland, James Fei, Chuck Johnson 

Negativwobblyland is a collaboration between Peter Conheim of the sampling art collective Negativland and Jon Leidecker of Wobbly (with satellite members from Negativland often expanding the group to a trio). The duo eschews the cut-and-paste mass media collage of their previous work to celebrate the unpredictable magic of the Booper, an instrument invented by Negativland's The Weatherman in 1975. Boopers are 100% analog feedback instruments, created entirely from salvaged radio and amplifier parts, which recycle their outputs back upon themselves to generate an endlessly changing stream of living electronic sound, seeking connections back to the earliest years of the medium.  Further captured and transformed by live sampling (itself a form of feedback), the duo's music is inherently improvisatory.

James Fei (b. Taipei, Taiwan) moved to the U.S. in 1992 to study electrical engineering. He has since been active as a composer and performer on saxophones and live electronics. Works by Fei have been performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, MATA Micro Orchestra, and Noord-Hollands Philharmonisch Orkest. Compositions for Fei's own ensemble of four alto saxophones focus on physical processes of saliva, fatigue, reeds crippled by cuts and the threshold of audible sound production, while his sound installations and performances on live electronics are often based on electro-acoustic feedback.

www.jamesfei.com

Chuck Johnson is a composer and musician residing in Oakland, CA. In recent years he has developed a versatile analog electronic performance system, worked extensively with just intonation tuning systems in composing for electronics and ensembles, and released recordings of solo acoustic fingerstyle guitar – all with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty. Recordings of his work have been published by Strange Attractors Audio House, Communion, Amish, Merge, and Threelobed.

Johnson’s credits as a film composer include scores for several feature-length films such as Brett Ingram’s award-winning Monster Road and Cynthia Hill’s Guestworker. In 2009 he received an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College.

Johnson views his current work - both electronic and acoustic - as folk minimalism. In addition to solo performance, Johnson collaborates with Danishta Rivero in the electro-acoustic duo Blood Wedding, and he lectures in Computer Music at University of the Pacific.

His SFEMF performance will reflect recent interest in using difference tones generated by a steel guitar as a control source for analog electronics. The difference tones compete with more chaotic processes such as feedback and random voltages for influence on the circuitry, and the tension between fine-tuning and relinquishing of control creates a space for sonic entities to inhabit.

www.cirrusoxide.com