Event Horizon Series
presents
April 13th - Juan Garces, B.E.E.P. and Mikronesia
Juan Garces is an experimental and improvisational musician and electronics and synthesizer enthusiast. He uses vintage and contemporary synthesizers, sequencers, live looping, and a laptop computer to take his listeners on a unique, imaginative journey. He has been playing experimental music since the late 1970s. Juan is a founder and constant in the improvisational music projects The Melting Transistor with Floyd Bledsoe and Karl Fury, The Equinox Project with David Berends and Karl Fury, and Black Thujone with Mike Hunter. He has played solo and group performances at various venues, including Electro Music in New York State and Asheville, NC; Rowan University; Event Horizon in Philadelphia; the Cosmic Crossings Concert Series in Washington Crossing, NJ; and on live radio broadcasts on Music With Space (WPRB, 103.3 FM, Princeton, NJ) and Digital Dreams (WLFR, 91.7FM, Galloway, NJ). Juan has also collaborated with Dr. Brad Garton, head of the Columbia University Computer Music Center, in New York City, on numerous projects, and continues to collaborate with other experimental musicians as often as he can. In his deep past, Juan performed live with Ted Klett and Tom McMillan (PaxElectronic Collective/Area 25), Tommy Buzz Matthews, Ian Kelly and Eli Ward (Sonic Alchemy), and Michael Mironov (Dancing Water Percussion Ensemble).
The Boyer College Electroacoustic Ensemble Project—BEEP—is a group for electroacoustic music creation in a collaborative environment. Founded in 2013 by Dr. Adam Vidiksis at Temple University, BEEP embraces a variety of aesthetics, from EDM to the avant-garde. We function in varied modalities: from a laptop orchestra, to fusion of computers and traditional instruments, to an electronic music band. BEEP uses the laptop orchestra model, “an ensemble of computer-based meta-instruments,” as but one of many possible modes of music making using computers and other electronics.
Our main goal as an ensemble is to explore new musical paths and new technologies by uniting people of varying and complementary skill sets in the discovery of new possibilities of creating sound. BEEP also aims to promote expressive music making and musical vocabulary, increase technological literacy among its participants and audience, to encourage a culture of code literacy and computer competency hand-in-hand with critical and independent thinking, and to perform the ever-expanding repertory of electronic music.
Mikronesia (Sonic landscapes + visuals by Willam Fields) - Mikonesia is the ambient music project of composer and sound artist Michael McDermott. He has created works for video, dance, stage, installation, smart phones, multi-speaker arrays, wind sculptures, wishing wells and deep sleep. His practice explores the relationship between present moment awareness, deep time and humanity's personal connection through listening. His work integrates a daily practice of meditation, Deep Listening and textured sound worlds through a process he calls “sonic photography”. This process involves site specific recordings of physical spaces re-imagined using photographic development and collage techniques. His aim is to reframe the everyday world as both a grand statement that stretches out in both directions of time and as an ephemeral instant of precious connection.
In 2016 he completed a certification program in Deep Listening studying with Deep Listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. He was recently Artist in Residence at <fidget>, Composer in Residence for Temple University’s BEEP Ensemble and Composer in Residence at Village of the Arts and Humanities. Over the past two years he has been traveling at artists residencies around the world in Brazil, Iceland, Germany, Thailand and India working on a sound design project of extinct animal sounds called Echozoo.
Admission is FREE
