RAWL (Jack Wright / Ben Bennett / Evan Lipson / Zach Darrup) + Naomi McCarroll-Butler + Unguent

Event Details

Event type: All Ages

RAWL (YouTube)

Jack Wright is a veteran saxophone improviser based mainly in Philadelphia. Since the early 1980s he has been touring through the US and Europe, finding interesting partners and playing situations. Now pushing 80 he is still touring widely, engaged with players outside music school careerdom and mostly unknown to the music press. His influence has extended through writings, most recently The Free Musics, published in 2017. As for his playing, he possibly has the widest vocabulary of any saxophonist, an expert at leaping pitches, punchy, precise timing, sharp and intrusive multiphonics, surprising gaps of silence, and sounds often animalistic and obscene. A reviewer for the Washington Post said, "In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king."

Ben Bennett is a Philadelphia-based percussionist. He usually plays a compact pile of self-made drums, stretched membranes, and other objects which are continually rearranged in the course of playing, and sounded with techniques of the hit, rub, and blow varieties. A branching path of musical de-materialization has led to other forms of performance, including self-vitiating monologues, and the long and repetitive YouTube series, Sitting and Smiling and Walking and Talking. His work tends toward themes of pointlessness, paradox, and stupidity.

Evan Lipson has lived with the incurable disease of music since early adolescence, seeking the liminal realms in which intellect and instinct, history and myth, and creative and destructive force intersect. Drawn towards aberrant perspectives at an early age, his formative experiences were primarily rooted in extreme and discordant forms stemming from various traditions of “underground” and ancient musics. He may or may not have some degree of affiliation with an organization known as MEINSCHAFT. Past units include Normal Love and Satanized.

Zachary Darrup is an improvising guitarist currently living in Philadelphia. During his early teenage years in the rural coal region of Pennsylvania a strange boy appeared like an angel, carrying a large cd booklet of wild musics of all sorts. This chance meeting at a pizza shop, plus tumultuous relationships with his home turf, school teachers, and other agents of law and rule enforcement led Zach to drop out and skip town, devoting himself to following music wherever it would take him--somewhere else. His techniques are informed by the musical possibilities of film language, jovial mockery and mimicry of plants, animals, and audience members, thoughtful room listening, word play, colors, and culinary experiments.

NAOMI MCCARROLL-BUTLER (WEB)

Naomi McCarroll-Butler is a saxophonist, clarinetist, and instrument maker from Toronto. She is interested the elegance of the overtone series, breathwork in the unique somatic journey of trans and gender-non-conforming people, and the creation of trance environments through drone, repetition and fluid tuning systems.
 
UNGUENT (BANDCAMP)

Typified by a relentless pursuit of enervating and enlightening novel sound-forms, Unguent represents over a decade of independent research, recording, and performance of experimental synthesis by Lance Howard Simmons. Current work focuses on the detail, flexibility, and precision of the digital synthesis medium.

TONE is made possible through the support of the Toronto Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Long & McQuade, and Burdock Brewery.

Event Link: More Info