First ever Los Angeles show for acclaimed New Zealand sound artist Rachel Shearer!

Shearer creates transcendent worlds of shivering ambient sounds, distant ruptures and warm washes of analog and digital sheen. 

RACHEL SHEARER 
has been an integral player in New Zealand's adventurous and vibrant music and arts community. She has been a member of influential music groups such as Angelhead and Queen Meanie Puss as well as solo under her own name or her Lovely Midget project She has released records via such pivotal labels as Xpressway, Siltbreeze, Ecstatic Peace!, Corpus Hermeticum, Family Vinyard and more. Shearer has also developed a public sound art installation practice with a number of long term installation works dotted around Auckland, and continues to perform live under her own name. 

http://family-vineyard.com/artists/rachel-shearer-lovely-midget

http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/interview/648/Rachel-Shearer.utr#ixzz3fE46FgY9

 

COREY FOGEL / PETER KOLOVOS DUO
First ever live collaboration between Fogel on drums/percussion and Peter Kolovos on electric guitar- long time L.A. people coming together- live and free...

knitdrums.tumblr, soundcloud/coreyfogel, vimeo/coreyfogel 


GABIE STRONG 
is a California based artist and designer exploring spaces of degeneration, drone and decay as a means to improvise new arrangements of self-reflexive meaning. To explore the arena between exteriority and interiority, she uses sound performance, radio broadcasting, sculpture, photography and video as a mediums for experimentation. In looking for the differential, Strong invokes noise to summon the invisible.

Strong is currently exploring themes of spatial decay through her KCHUNG Radio program Crystalline Morphologies.

I'll be DJing at the SASSAS benefit party Blast! 12. Come listen to a variety of extremes from yours truly and support a good cause!

Blast! [12] SASSAS annual garden party fundraiser will be hosted by the Hillenburg Family in their beautiful San Marino home on Sunday May 31 from 4-8pm. Join us to celebrate the launch of SASSAS Records with a Battle of the DJs featuring 12 LA DJs including Money Mark, Tom Chasteen and more, plus a silent art auction of Bootleg LP covers by over 60 artists including Sam Durant, Jim Isermann, Alice Könitz, and Pae White. Tickets include food, drinks, and a chance to win Listening Party tickets or V1 of SASSAS Records!

I will be performing a improvisational noise piece in James Boulton's art exhibition Quality Time at Monte Vista Projects.

Khal - A project by Helga Fassonaki
Friday, March 20, 2015
7:30 – 10pm - opening reception with performances
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA)

An iteration of Fassonaki’s project Khal will be exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Archives (LACA) from March 20 to April 9th where the original 16 scores and recorded interpretations by the participating artists will be exhibited. 

Special guest artist Fariba Safai will open the event on March 20th with a vocal interpretation of one of the scores entitled ‘Celestial'

Three artists will be performing Fassonaki’s scores live:

Kathleen Kim - performing ‘Punk Standards’,  Gabie Strong - performing ‘Armour’,  Shana Palmer - performing ‘Reveal Closed’.

In September 2014 Helga Fassonaki resided in an artist studio in Tabriz, Iran for a month. As a visual and performing artist, what she was able to share in public was restricted. Furthermore, as a female performing artist, the use of her voice in public performance was restricted. 

Due to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini ‘condemned all forms of music, other than classical and traditional Persian music’ as influenced by western culture, and therefore corruptive and forbidden. Khomeini also forbade women from singing solo in public because of 'the seductive quality of the female voice'. 

Since performing as she chose was illegal in Iran, Fassonaki sent compositions in the form of sculptural scores created during her residency in Tabriz to sixteen female artists and musicians living in the US, the United Kingdom, Denmark and New Zealand. The concept being that the scores be interpreted and performed publicly by these artists in lieu of Fassonaki's ability to do so. 

Different iterations of Khal will be presented at galleries in the US and New Zealand as a traveling exhibition in 2015/2016 where the scores and their interpretations by the participating artists will be displayed, heard, and reinterpreted - pushing the idea of a ‘living score’ as an archive open to edits, renewal and dialogue. As the series unfolds from one event to another, Fassonaki seeks to create a composition of voices and actions. Like the idea of Khal, (a derogatory term in Farsi for Iranian Pop music that was sent to Iran by Iranian US immigrants in the form of homemade mixed tapes so that Iranian residents could listen to their country’s own pop stars). Through these simple actions, the hope is that the reverberation of freedom of expression can echo back across the globe and via the clandestine channels of the world wide web find it's way back to the country in which the scores had their origin. 

The original participating artists who received and are performing Fassonaki’s scores include Kali Z Fasteau (NYC, NY), Kelly Jayne Jones (London, UK), Heather Leigh (Glasgow, Scotland), Jenny Gräf (Copenhagen, Denmark), Zaïmph (Brooklyn, NY), Chiara Giovando (Los Angeles, CA), Shana Palmer 
(Baltimore, MD), Purple Pilgrims (North Island, NZ), Rachael Melanson 
(London, UK), Christina Carter (Austin, Texas), Gabie Strong (Los Angeles, CA), Ashley Paul (London, UK), Angeline Chirnside (Auckland, NZ), Matana Roberts (NYC, NY), Rachel Shearer with Beth Ducklingmonster (Auckland, NZ), and Kathleen Kim (Los Angeles, CA). 

Additional artists include Suki Dewey (Oldwick, NJ) and Fariba Safai (San Francisco, CA).