About Author: andrew

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Aphonia Showcase Coming Up Fri. Feb. 6

Hello everyone! Look I know it’s two weeks away but you know, it is probably a good idea to let everyone know about our next show – which we are sure to have a blast at – we hope you will join us! It is also nice as it will be the first time Ben and I will be performing as The Precambrian in a few months. So here is the press release type deal for your information:

Aphonia Recordings showcase: 09-#2 @ Gallery 1412
Friday, February 6th
1412 18th ave – Seattle, WA
8:00 PM

– Darwinsbitch (Oakland)
– LA Lungs (Tacoma)
– Derek M. Johnson (Olympia)
– The Precambrian

DARWINSBITCH

Fluid forms of drones, doomy laments, and folk melodies fleshed out from a
backbone of sine oscillators and violin. Sound sources from the
environment blend with instruments such as piano, ocean-harp, guitar,
bass, and specially designed computer programs to create a unique sonic
hybrid between the acoustic and the digital. Darwinsbitch is the solo
project of Marielle Jakobsons, sound artist and violinist from Oakland,
California. Her work stems from a fascination between human experiences
which are at once “natural” and technologically-altered. Other projects
include: myrmyr (electroacoustic duo with Agnes Szelag), triometrik
(interactive multimedia ensemble), Date Palms, as well as many other
violin/improv performances.

DEREK M. JOHNSON

Derek is an Olympia native and can’t seem to ever get away. He
frequently performs solo acoustic/electric cello throughout the
Northwest with an ever changing, direct animation slide show. He’s
been a member of Bloodclot, Dead Air Fresheners,
Le Ton Mite, Frequency dB, and the unfortunately named Superfly 2000.
Collaborations include: Unwound, Thollem McDonnas, Jeremy Jay, Ben L
Robertson, Arrington de Dionyso, Bob Marsh, among others.

LA LUNGS

L.A. Lungs was formed in the summer on 2005 in a Tacoma studio apartment by
Afterthought Lung (nee Nathan Markiewicz) and Leeward Lungs (nee Lori
Peterson). L.A. Lungs continue to perform around the Pacific Northwest
and have been fortunate enough to share bills with artists such as
Acre, Bird Costumes, Wesley Borden, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities,
Crank Sturgeon, The Dead Air Fresheners, Steve Fisk, Forest Friends,
Gowns, Bill Horist, Josh Hydeman, Derek Johnson, Mattress, Myr Myr,
POWRFL POWER, Racooo-oo-oon, Scard, Shearing Pinx, Talbot Tagora, Your
Drugs My Money, and many more. We can look forward to hearing work
from LA Lungs recent Aphonia Rec. & Debacle releases (“Most of the
Time We Do Not Realize We are Shedding Our Skins”) at this month’s
showcase.

THE PRECAMBRIAN

Aphonia Recordings founders, Ben L. Robertson & Andrew Senna team-up as The
Precambrian. In concept, The Precambrian is a constantly evolving
interactive synthesis environment/instrument, engineered by Robertson
using the graphical programming language, Max/MSP.
In its current incarnation, The Precambrian utilizes a “slide zither”, voice, &
various pitch recognition algorithms to coax out microtonal intervals
derived from a graphical system of 11-limit, just intonation matrices.
In performance, Senna (armed with a handful of homemade piezoelectric
transducers, microphones, & field recordings) executes a series of
absurd one-act narratives & vocal onomatopoeia, indicative of both
his sound design work for film & theater.

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Daniel Johnston Fans Take Note

Nucular Aminals are old friends and on their current self titled release have covered “Walking the Cow.” It is a Daniel Johnston song with no shortage of artists having recorded it. I think it is one of the most faithful to the song’s spirit. Not all artists who pay tribute to an oft revered and eccentric musical talent hit a nerve the way the original performer could. Indeed, not even the songs themselves can remain intact while in transit to other musical interpretations, though Mr. Johnston and Nucular Aminals clearly do it quite well.

Listen to “Walking the Cow” covered by Nucular Aminals available now all over the world.

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Happy New Year!

Welcome to the New Year! We have slowly but surely made the transition to our new servers and if all went well, most of you didn’t even notice. With most of the speed issues hopefully conquered our website should prove to be faster and more reliable than before. Thank you for your patience with our growing pains.

We are preparing for our second year of showcase events. In the last year, Aphonia Recordings has hosted more than 20 performances. That’s like one every other week! Most of our performances go down at the Gallery 1412 near the corner of 18th and Union in Seattle’s Central District.

Many things are on the horizon for us in the near future. We are working on our second compilation, which will find new release as a physical CD and as a download available all over the world. We will also be releasing “The Phantom of the Opera, A Live Soundtrack” by Rachel Carns, Derek M Johnson, Daniel Buscher and Heather Hall. In addition, we are looking at further releases in the coming year. For the time being though, it will be a quiet couple of months.

While we are assembling our biggest distribution ever for the 2009 Compilation, don’t forget to listen to our podcast. You can visit our website listen to our podcasts. Or if you would like to take it with you subscribe on iTunes and download it for free! Our podcast is a semi-regular event that details the work of our artists, including interviews, live shows and explorations on the many phenomena of sound and music. While we would love to have one every day or week even, stay tuned as there will be more intriguing subjects covered.

Thank you to all our artists fans who made 2008 an encouraging year for experimental music. Indeed, we are excited about the New Year and hope that we can top ourselves once again.

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Website Officially Down For Maintenance – Sort Of

The transition is official – as of this morning – our website will be down for maintenance and transfer to a brand spanking new service. Please be patient while we make this jump. If you need to get in contact with us please message us through MySpace as our email through the website will also be down.

Although there will be a window of time where the website will seem functional, at some point it will cease to operated properly. Please be aware of this and send inquiries to us through MySpace.

Thank you!

***Update*** Lucky for us the process has thus far been completely transparent and everything seems to be working fine still. We have yet to transfer over the DNS which will take probably part of today and tomorrow to resolve.

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Foxy Digitalis Has the Spotlight on Aphonia Recordings

Ben and I do a lot of legwork to keep the pulse of this label strong online and elsewhere. Press doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t necessarily come easily. Lately, we have definitely been lucky with coverage locally as well as nationally. The Stranger recently covered our last show, The Phantom of the Opera at the Gallery 1412 and we have been looking into our distribution options for that – we are looking to do a January release.

We have also been fortunate enough to catch the eye of local blogger writing for Illusory Confections and now Mr. Brad Bird of online mag Foxy Digitalis has an exclusive interview with Ben and I which you can find here. I also might add that our local friends and Aphonia Recordings alums L.A. Lungs are featured on Foxy Digitalis as well. I highly recommend going to Foxy Digitalis to check out this interview as well. And don’t forget darwinsbitch also has a limited run (only 100!) cassette up now that you can purchase there. Whew! Hooray for Foxy Digitalis.

In other news, Ben and I will be transferring our AphoniaRecordings.com domain to a new web host – so there will be outages this coming week. Hopefully by Xmas all will up again and everyone can marvel at our new speed and slickness. Actually the site wont look at all different, it will just hopefully work better. There will be some cosmetic changes on the way, which to most of you will be transparent. I will post another outage reminder probably tomorrow as that is when the process is most likely to begin.

While it gets strangely cold here in Seattle and the snow continues to stick to the ground, I wish all of you the best of times as the shortest day of the year inevitably approaches.

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What You Missed…

The blog Illusory Confections thinks our Phantom of the Opera show last night was beyond reproach. This blogger refers to last Friday’s rendition of a live score to The Phantom of the Opera. Click here.

We can’t say how much we appreciated the great turnout and generous donations. And also, we can’t thank Daniel Buscher, Rachel Carns, Heather Hall and Derek M. Johnson enough for their truly brilliant performance to this silent film classic.

Update: Pictures from this special event as well as a live release of the show will become available soon. Stay tuned!

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Guess what? Even The Stranger Suggests…

phantomflyer…going to tonight’s The Phantom of the Opera live score performed at the Gallery 1412 by Rachel Carns, Derek M Johnson, Heather Hall and Daniel Buscher.

And if that weren’t enough anticipatory fodder go here for a Holiday Podcast Special featuring Andrew Senna recalling his childhood experience with the film as well as examination of how truly egregious Andrew Lloyd Webber’s take is on the tragedy.

Aphonia Recordings will be releasing excerpts from this unique ensemble’s live performance from the 25th Annual Olympia Film Festival. This will be last time that these truly talented individuals will be able to perform together – so come and see something truly special!

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Podcast Holiday Special – Phantom of the Opera

Podcast – Phantom of the Opera Special!

Click Play button to listen to this special event – excerpts which were recorded at the 25th Annual Olympia Film Festival by Rachel Carns, Daniel Buscher, Derek M. Johnson and Heather Hall. This coming Friday at the Gallery 1412 in Seattle, WA at 8PM, this crack ensemble of improvisers will take on, for the last time, the live score to this 1929 silent film classic.

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Gallery 1412 4th Anniversary Extravaganza

Our primary performance space is having a special event on Saturday night. So if you can’t come to our showcase tonight, than you damn well better go to this lovely event here in Seattle. Read on…

Gallery 1412 fourth anniversary celebration more info:
featuring performances by:

Gust Burns Quartet,
Campbell/Shoup,
Jesse Canterbury,
Amy Denio

This fall, Gallery 1412 celebrates its fourth year of activity as a focal point of creative performance in Seattle. Gallery 1412 is a collectively run all-ages venue which opened in the fall of 2004 with the intention of continuing and broadening the work of Polestar Music Gallery, the space’s previous inhabitants. Since then, Gallery 1412 has proved itself to be a unique and vital hub of artistic activity on
local, national, and international levels, as well as a sustainable model of artist-run infrastructure. Come help kick off 4 more years of innovation!

The anniversary show will feature musical performances from members of the Gallery
1412 collective, highlighting the diversity and inspiration of this amazing group of artists.

Gust Burns Quartet:
Gust Burns – inside piano
Mara Sedlins – viola
Mark Collins – bass
Wilson Shook – alto saxophone

An acoustic quartet led by seattle pianist/ inside pianist Gust Burns developing directions from and to form, structure, duration, and silence.

Campbell/Shoup:
Greg Campbell – percussion, french horn
Wally Shoup – alto saxophone

The Campbell/Shoup duo is known for its cans of soul stew and bitches brew, all done up in day-glo Warholian colors. Spontaneous, fiery and ever-ready to boil over, this sax/drum sonic polyglot has more flavors than the rainbow.

Jesse Canterbury:
solo clarinet improvisation

Jesse Canterbury is a clarinetist living and working in Seattle, Washington, USA. He
composes and performs creative music, especially jazz, free improvisation, and
contemporary classical music. Throughout his performing career, he has worked and
performed with many of the luminaries of creative music, including George Lewis,
Butch Morris, Derek Bailey, Walter Thompson, Wayne Horvitz, Daniel Carter, and John
Edwards.

Amy Denio:
solo accordion and voice

Amy Denio is a Seattle-based composer and multi-instrumentalist known world-wide for her unconventional songwriting, and incredible musicianship. She has worked with countless artists, including Bill Frisell, Danny Barnes, Kultur Shock, the Pat Graney Dance Company and even Chuck D. With a catalog of over 35 CDs to her name, Denio has performed all over the world, from Carnegie Hall to Taiwan to the Metro buses in downtown Seattle. In addition to her solo work, she currently plays with the Tipton Saxophone Quartet, Quintetto alla Busara and her accordion quartet, Hell’s Bellows. Since 1986, Denio has operated her own Seattle-based record label, Spoot Music.

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Darwinsbitch: Steel Hum

I would like all our readers to check out Darwinsbitch latest release Steel Hum. Marielle V. Jakobson continues her handmade art/sound releases with this very short run (99 copies – well now maybe 98 since I bought one) – cassette tape release. Here are a few words from the Digitalis Industries website:

“finally, the bitch is here. marielle v. jakobsons is the brilliant mind behind the elusive darwinsbitch. her music is rich in texture and portrays an aural depth that you can’t quite pierce. “steel hum” is an introduction, an effort to bring you into the fold in anticipation of her spellbinding debut full-length, “ore.” but what “steel hum” has is an organic sense of place and a path forward.

jakobsons employs numerous methods with a focus on synths, tapes, and violin. what she creates is a slightly-uneasy soundworld, constantly teetering on the edge of collapse. these sides are like a rocking ship drifting back & forth in deep grey seas. you’re not sure if you should just enjoy the view or vomit your dinner over the side. “steel hum” is caught in the space between. limited to 99 copies w/ custom stamped art.”

Support this artist with a singularly original and beautiful vision for music and art. Buy Now