7:30pm Doors / 8pm Sound
$15 General Admission / Free for Members of The Lab
Reserve seats here
Phillip Greenlief (reeds) & Claudia La Rocco (text, voice) created Animals & Giraffes as a way to explore how improvisation on and off the page can create a larger conversation between sound and text. Collaboration is central to Animals & Giraffes; for this concert Greenlief and La Rocco are joined by electronic musician John Bischoff and percussionist Karen Stackpole (who is one of many Bay Area improvisers featured on the duo’s debut album, JULY, forthcoming from Relative Pitch Records).
Since his emergence on the west coast in the late 1970s, saxophonist/composer PHILLIP GREENLIEF has achieved international critical acclaim for his recordings and performances with musicians and composers in the post-jazz continuum as well as new music innovators and virtuosic improvisers. He has performed and recorded with Fred Frith, Meredith Monk and They Might Be Giants; albums include THAT OVERT DESIRE OF OBJECT with Joelle Leandre, and ALL AT ONCE with FPR (Frank Gratkowski, Jon Raskin, Phillip Greenlief). Recent residencies have included Headlands Center for the Arts and from 2012 to 2014 he was the curator at Berkeley Arts, a home for progressive music. He is the recipient of a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. "The Bay Area's do-it-yourself ethos has produced a bevy of dazzlingly creative musicians, but few have put the philosophy to work as effectively as Phillip Greenlief." – Andrew Gilbert, San Francisco Chronicle (www.evandermusic.com)
CLAUDIA LA ROCCO is a writer whose work frequently revolves around interdisciplinary projects and collaborations. She is the author of THE BEST MOST USELESS DRESS (Badlands Unlimited), selected poetry, performance texts, images and criticism, and the novel PETIT CADEAU, which was published by The Chocolate Factory Theater as a print edition of one and a four-day, interdisciplinary live edition. She edited I DON’T POEM: AN ANTHOLOGY OF PAINTERS (Off the Park Press) and DANCERS, BUILDINGS AND PEOPLE IN THE STREETS, the catalogue for Danspace Projectʼs PLATFORM 2015, which she curated. She has been presented by The Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum of American Art, et al., and is also the first writer-in-residence at On the Boards theater in Seattle. A columnist for ARTFORUM and a contributing editor to EMERGENCY INDEX (Ugly Duckling Presse), she recently became editor-in-chief of the SFMOMA publication OPEN SPACE. She has received grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation.
JOHN BISCHOFF (b. 1949) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his development of computer network music. Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman. He has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 40 years as a composer, performer, and teacher. His performances around the US include NEW MUSIC AMERICA festivals in 1981 and 1989, Roulette and Experimental Intermedia in New York, and Lampo in Chicago to name a few. He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künste in Berlin, STEIM in Amsterdam, and Fylkingen in Stockholm among other places. He is a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers, the world's first computer network band, and co-authored an article on the League's music that appears in Foundations of Computer Music (MIT Press 1985). From 1985 to the present he has performed and recorded with the network band The Hub. In 1999 he received a $25,000 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York in recognition of his music. He was also named a recipient of an Alpert Award/Ucross Residency Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, noted media theorist Douglas Kahn published A Musical Technography of John Bischoff in the Leonardo Music Journal (Vol. 14, MIT Press).
Drummer/percussionist KAREN STACKPOLE is obsessed with gongs. In her explorations of metals, she has cultivated some distinctive techniques for drawing harmonics out of tam tams with various implements. She specializes in dynamic soundscapes and textures, but has also contributed gong sounds to more conventional musical genres as well as contributing source material for film soundtracks. Karen is active in the creative music scene and has participated in music festivals and performed solo in Seattle, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, and the Bay Area. In addition to solo work, she currently performs and records with various projects including Machine Shop: Live Amplified Gong Experience, Sabbaticus Rex, Ghost in the House, Vorticella, Dynosoar, the Francis Wong Unit, and the rock band Steel Hotcakes.
