Thursday, May 12, 8 pm, THE STONE (Ave C & E. 3rd)
Sounds From the Bottom
Sound Art gets Saxy
Sound artist Ellen Band with saxophonist David Sholl present electro-sonic collaborations, some composed, others improvised, mixing swirling layers of sonorous, textural tone/noise clusters derived from real-world sounds and live saxophone and electronics. Bring your ears and your mind and leave your dancing shoes at home.
Ellen Band and David Sholl, both residents of the vibrant Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, MA, discovered musical affinities between their widely contrasting musical genres and ran with it. The result is Sounds From the Bottom, a boundary-crossing duo that merges sound as image with melody as narrative. Band’s compositions are steeped in the tonal richness, textural complexity, and rhythm of found sounds. Sholl, a versatile saxophonist and composer is the front man for Four Piece Suit, a band whose music is described as “cinematic”. What Band and Sholl share is a flare for entertaining, adventurous pieces – sometimes zany, sometimes deeply serious. Their electro-acoustic duo invites the audience to journey with them into uncharted territories that are exotic yet familiar and that are filled with abundant aural twists and turns.
For their May 12th 8:00 PM concert at The Stone, Ellen Band and David Sholl will present five diverse pieces:
Troo Grit, likely the most animated piece on the program, is a highly textural and rhythmic piece composed by Band. Using as its base gritty winter sounds blended with a small cement-mixing machine, Sholl adds layered tenor sax melodies. Live hand-held percussion and whistles enhance the mix as the performance builds a playful, imagistic soundtrack whose characters live in the listener’s imagination.
Failure to Thrive is David Sholl’s hypnotic ode to recovering from a life- threatening illness. At once soulful and mournful, it builds to a wacky climax through a mix of Band’s mischievous sounds. To quote Sholem Aleichem, “You’ve got to go on living even if it kills you”.
Portrait of Matthew is one of Band’s portrait pieces composed for Bay Area pianist and composer Matthew Goodheart. All the samples used in the composition are recordings made by Band of Goodheart playing the keyboard, strings, and the soundboard. The piece, in four sections, is meant to be a portrait of the pianist. In this version, Band and Sholl join with the virtual Goodheart to form a trio.
Ellen Band will also perform an improvisation with the prerecorded signature Feedback Music from her former collaborator David Lee Myers.
Goodbye Goodbye, which premiered in March at the Vov Novus 60×60 Athena Mix at Murray State University in Kentucky, is a mashup of an old Stevie Wonder hit.
Ellen Band is a sound artist, composer, and founder-director of Audible Visions concert series. Her work, praised by the Village Voice’s Kyle Gann as “celestial in its implications and down to earth in its reverence for everyday noises”, includes imagistic, mnemonic, and diverse works for performance, sound installation, and sound sculpture.
Her solo and collaborative works are released on XI (90% Post Consumer Sound) and Pogus Productions (Two Ships with David Lee Myers) and on compilations such as Cabinet magazine, White Fungus, The Aerial, and Across Oceans. Her work has received critical acclaim in publications such as: Playboy Magazine, WIRE, (London, England), The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Boston Phoenix, and Art New England, as well as interviews and airplay on Morning Edition on WBUR (NPR Boston) and WNYC’s The Next Big Thing (NPR New York City and 100 national affiliates).
In 2008, The Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, chose her sonic- infiltration work Minimally Tough (for leather jackets in motion) to accompany their exhibit ‘The World As Stage’. In 2002 German radio in Cologne invited her to perform for their radio series Pet Sounds. The live performance, which took place at The Stadtgarten in Cologne, May 2002, was broadcast on German National Radio (WDR) in 2003.
In 2003, as part of their public art program Vita Brevis, she created Portal Of Prayer, the first completely audio- based work ever commissioned by the ICA. This work was installed at Boston’s Logan International Airport, The Boston Public Library, and Codman Square Health Center from March 2nd – June 5th of 2004. Other sound installations are The Green Zone, which was commissioned for the 34th Annual John Donald Robb Composers Symposium at The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2005, and Elusive Convergence with David Lee Myers presented at Diapason, New York, 2003. Her psychoacoustic sound installation Acoustic Mirage was part of SoundCulture96 in the San Francisco Bay Area and has since been featured at The Sound Symposium 2000, St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, and Diapason (Studio Five Beekman), New York City.
In 1997, American Composers Forum awarded her a Composers Commissioning Award. She taught sound art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1994-1997 and 2002) and the Massachusetts College of Art (1994). She was an artist in residence (1996) at Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, Oakland, CA., and a visiting artist at Bard College in 2005.
Saxophonist David Sholl has been part of the Boston music scene since the mid 1970s. Known as one of the few possessors of ‘the tone’, he performed with Little Frankie and The Premiers and The House of Blues House Band. Eight years of crazed rock and R&B with Barrence Whitfield and the Savages led to many tours across Europe and the USA. Currently he performs and composes with the eclectic instro ensemble Four Piece Suit. Along the way he has performed with such greats as Big Mama Thornton, Linda Hopkins, Dr John, Los Lobos, Charles Brown, Mojo Nixon, Natalie Merchant and others.
Sholl’s playing graces many CDs and his compositions have attained notoriety
via radio, TV, and cinema. Examples include major and independent films: True
Love and Blue Vinyl, and many TV spots including such shows as Ed, Pimp My
Ride, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, and most notably, HBO’s Sex and the City. David is an accomplished painter and youth worker and is the creator and director of JamPlan, a music and photography-based center for at-risk teens.
