You can’t step in the same river twice…
September 22 quartet performance
Bay Area electronic-music improvisation comrade Bill Hsu is visiting Philly at the end of September. Bill and I last played music together in San Francisco in 2019, and so we’re long overdue for another performance. We’ll be joined by two stellar Philadelphians, saxophonist Noa Even and cellist Thomas Kraines, and as a quartet we’re opening for Erik Ruin’s Ominous Cloud Ensemble.
Bill, Noa, and Thomas are - each in their own ways - incredibly refined and subtle musicians. Their playing is intensely detailed, their timbres delicately controlled, their physical gestures and musical shapes rich with intention. This may be a meet-onstage, one-chance-only performance, but I think it’s going to be a fascinating grouping, and I can’t wait to find out where our collective exploration will lead.
The show is at Studio 34 in West Philly (4522 Baltimore Ave), starting at 7:30 pm, it’s co-produced by Fire Museum Presents, and advance tickets are available now. If you’re nearby, please join us!
At the workbench
I have a couple of recording projects in the works. Bryan Jacobs and I decided to follow up our 2022 performances with some studio recordings, and we are now deep into post-production, passing editing and mixing tweaks back and forth. Working with Bryan in any capacity is a joy, but the engineering work has supplied some unexpected pleasures. He zeroes in on very different details than I do, and offers very different approaches to and solutions for the mixing issues we identify. So the collaborative effort has been a very welcome education in both technical and creative domains, and I’m confident that the finished product will be all the better as a result of the shared process.
It’s also going to be absolutely bonkers, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Meanwhile, Bridges of Königsberg is celebrating the release of our latest, The Shenanigans-to-Tomfoolery Continuum, by getting busy a new round of recordings. We’re now living in wildly distant places from one another (Peter J. Woods is in England, and David Collins is on the West Coast of the US), so collaboration is mostly defined as “hanging out on the Internet” with a side helping of haggling about schedules and timezones. While I miss hanging out with these lovely gentlemen in person, the long-distance work only seems to nourish the music and our determination to challenge and surprise one another, and the resulting aesthetic grows ever richer and stranger. It’s early days for this project, but we’ve got something good cooking.
Nonce
Cartoonist John Granzow pioneers the field of cardio-organology.
Hope to see you on September 22. As always, thanks for reading - yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns