The Lab

The Lab is a nonprofit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission District of San Francisco.


Lubomyr Melnyk
Sep
23
7:00 PM19:00

Lubomyr Melnyk

Friday, September 23, 2022
7pm doors / 7:30pm show
Tickets $25 (discounted or free for members)
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Mask required for entry

Lubomyr Melnyk is a Ukrainian composer and pianist who has pioneered Continuous Piano Music. Classically trained and greatly affected by the minimalist movement in the early 1970s, he has developed his own unique language for the piano, named after the principle of maintaining a continuous, unbroken stream of sound.

Inspired by the minimal phase and pattern music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, yet frustrated by the ecstatic detachment from reality they can encourage, Lubomyr Melnyk went about creating a mode of music, which he called Continuous Music, that was based in the innovations of the minimalist composers but had its roots more deeply planted in harmony. “KMH” (1978) is the fruition of the idea, which he began developing in 1974, and closely figures a similar sentiment that Reich expressed in his watershed “Music for 18 Musicians,” though Reich was detached socially as well as professionally from Melnyk. “KMH,” however, goes beyond the textural beauties of a piece like “Music for 18 Musicians” and succeeds in functioning as an engaging drama as well as a piece of music. The influence of dancer / choreographer and Igor Wakevitch collaborator Carolyn Carlson on Melnyk underlies this.

He recalls, “The entire Continuous Music concept developed from my work with the Carolyn Carlson Dance Company which was based in Paris (at the Opera) during the mid-1970´s. This was a completely new dance format, based on Carolyn's extraordinary and mystical perceptions of dance-space-movement. There has never been nor ever will be anyone like her… She moved like a tiger and a spider and a bird all at once. She was (is) a virtual explosion of the entire physical plane and I was to play for 16 minutes straight while her students moved across the floor. She developed the moving and standing still all at once phenomenon.”

Continuous Music is structured into two formats. In the first the player generates the series of notes (the "chordal-sound continuum") up and down over the keyboard in melodic arpeggio fashion. In the second a note series is held in one rigid location, giving rise to a note pattern with a motoristic character, or a continuous multi-level line of sounds. Both formats utilize the pedal continuously so that the frequencies overlap and become a steady stream of wave-like multi-dimensional sound. The technique requires a pianist able to combine various lines of tone in a continuous stream of notes, to operate incongruous patterns in each hand and have a soft, airy agility in arpeggiating a melodic/harmonic flow.

This music transcends the barriers between consonant and dissonant, tonal and atonal. The individual notes themselves retain an independent life and unite briefly before eventually splitting off from the chord and heading into other relationships. The motions of these continua combine with other tones to form a constantly evolving harmonic structure. The continuity of the music reflects the continuity of time and life and the flow of time within the player’s life. In a live performance the music attains an intense spiritual state.

In 1975, Edward Bond, reviewing a performance by Lubomyr Melnyk stated, “It is unlike anything heard before … one felt the piano was always meant to sound this way!”

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SFEMF 2022: Rova Electric 6 / Only Now / Anne Hege
Sep
18
7:30 PM19:30

SFEMF 2022: Rova Electric 6 / Only Now / Anne Hege

Sunday, September 18, 2022
7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $17-25 (discounted or free for members)
SFEMF 2022 Festival Pass $45
Get Tickets Now
Masks required for entry

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is an artist-run organization founded in 1999 by eight local sound artists and musicians. Since the first festival in 2000, SFEMF has presented works that span the sonic spectra from ambient to rhythmic and atonal to melodic by participants ranging from new and emerging young artists to respected pioneers of the electronic music field. Recent festivals have featured performances by clipping, zoviet france, William Basinski, Dieter Moebius, Christian Marclay, and Maja Ratkje. For more info: ​sfemf.org​.

Anne Hege creates musical worlds that invite an awareness of and attention to the body and our present moment. In her work as a composer, vocalist, conductor, instrument builder, and scholar, she explores the roots of musicality in the intersection of ensemble interaction, technology, embodiment, and expression. She is currently completing her first opera, The Furies, for laptop orchestra and live vocalists to premiere on Stanford's CCRMA Stage on Nov. 11-13, 2022, and is looking forward to the release of her first album of music for The Tape Machine in 2023 on INNOVA Records. annehege.com

Only Now is the vision of Kush Arora, based in Berkeley, CA. His sound is an unremitting emission of razor cut rhythms, primitive channeling, and ritualistic electronics. There is wild abandon in his approach; from seething Indian tribalism to cold fronts of ambience that highlight Arora’s ability to juggle disparate sonics. Active in the Bay Area since the late ‘90s, Kush produces in scenes ranging from noise to dancehall as with his recent “Indian Unclassical” series. Arora's work has been featured on the BBC and in The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian, FACT, Resident Advisor, and Bandcamp Daily. onlynow.bandcamp.com

Rova Electric 6, the collaboration between Rova Saxophone Quartet and Unpopular Electronics (Gino Robair and Tom Djll) began when the groups shared a reverberant room at the 2010 Chapel of the Chimes summer solstice concert. Code-named Popular Tectonics, the sextet explores the liminal space between synthesizer tones and saxophone timbres—the reed instruments working with and against electronic amplification—to exploit the resonant characteristics of acoustic environments. Rova—Bruce Ackley (soprano sax), Steve Adams (alto sax) Larry Ochs (tenor sax) and Jon Raskin (baritone sax)—has released over forty albums and collaborated with a range of internationally renowned artists—Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, John Zorn and Terry Riley, to name a few. The ensemble celebrates its 45th anniversary in 2023. Gino Robair and Tom Djll are also members of Tender Buttons, a trio with pianist Tania Chen.
rova.org
ginorobair.com
Tomdjll.com

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SFEMF 2022: Carl Stone / Amma Ateria / gabby wen + jorge bachmann
Sep
17
7:30 PM19:30

SFEMF 2022: Carl Stone / Amma Ateria / gabby wen + jorge bachmann

Saturday, September 17, 2022
7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $17-25 (discounted or free for members)
SFEMF 2022 Festival Pass $45
Get Tickets Now
Mask required for entry

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is an artist-run organization founded in 1999 by eight local sound artists and musicians. Since the first festival in 2000, SFEMF has presented works that span the sonic spectra from ambient to rhythmic and atonal to melodic by participants ranging from new and emerging young artists to respected pioneers of the electronic music field. Recent festivals have featured performances by clipping, zoviet france, William Basinski, Dieter Moebius, Christian Marclay, and Maja Ratkje. For more info: ​sfemf.org​.

Sound artist and curator Jorge Bachmann has been involved in SF’s experimental music and dance scenes since the early 2000s. His eclectic work ranges from musique concrète to modular synth minimalism. Since the 1980s he has been collecting the microscopic sounds of everyday life and creating immersive soundscapes, blurring boundaries between wilderness environments and man-made sounds. He has performed and exhibited in North America, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South America. in recent years with the likes of Alessandro Cortini, Bryan Day, Michael Gendreau, and Takahiro Kawaguchi. His last album Mare Island is on Baltimore's VauxFlores Industrial label. linktr.ee/ruidobello

Gabby Wen mainly works with sound improvisation and composition, focusing on the immediate corporal response to each sonic event, intentional or accidental, and its evolving/decaying physical existence in time. Born in Toisan, raised in Shenzhen, and living in Oakland, their works draw from early synthesizer music, Japanoise, folk music and rituals of various traditions, and natural or industrial polyrhythms. Gabby continues to develop a body of work combining synthesis, field recording, and guqin playing. gabriellawen.com

Amma Ateria is an electroacoustic composer / sound artist, born in Hong Kong, working in San Francisco and New York City. Her work explores themes in coexistence of polarity, psychoacoustics in binaural beats, and equal-loudness contour. With immediacy of tension/release, she navigates between oppositions, transforming deafening noise into meditative stance. Her compositions, developed during concussion recovery, utilize brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as materials / focal points. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and distorted speech as lost speech. Ammaateria.com

Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between Los Angeles and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan. rlsto.net

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SFEMF 2022: Luciano Chessa / shipwreck detective [Dev Bhat] / Michelle Moeller
Sep
16
7:30 PM19:30

SFEMF 2022: Luciano Chessa / shipwreck detective [Dev Bhat] / Michelle Moeller

Friday, September 16, 2022
7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $17-25 (discounted or free for members)
SFEMF 2022 Festival Pass $45
Get Tickets Now
Masks required for entry

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is an artist-run organization founded in 1999 by eight local sound artists and musicians. Since the first festival in 2000, SFEMF has presented works that span the sonic spectra from ambient to rhythmic and atonal to melodic by participants ranging from new and emerging young artists to respected pioneers of the electronic music field. Recent festivals have featured performances by clipping, zoviet france, William Basinski, Dieter Moebius, Christian Marclay, and Maja Ratkje. For more info: ​sfemf.org​.

Michelle Moeller (b. St. Louis MO) is a composer, performer, and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her musical practice is ever evolving, guided by patient curiosity and a natural resistance to singular identity. Drawing from both a foundational lyricism and a penchant for dissonant textures, she uses live signals, custom effects, and computer synthesis to build intricate electroacoustic systems. She holds an MFA from Mills College. michellemoeller.com

Born in San Jose and living in San Francisco’s Parkside neighborhood, Dev Bhat is a musician, composer, sound designer, and writer. He has previously performed in bands that could be characterized as industrial rock, shoegaze, hardcore punk, instrumental rock, and ambient. Dev’s solo work as shipwreck detective features synthetic and organic textures using analog synthesizers, old tape recorders, samplers, loopers, and effects processors. His performances are built on structured improvisation, and he draws inspiration from nature, RPG video games, sci-fi films, 90s anime, and speculative fiction. shipwreckdetective.bandcamp.com

Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist, and music historian. His compositions include A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by SFMOMA with video by Kalup Linzy; Cromlech, a large organ piece for Melbourne’s Town Hall Organ; and the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, merging experimental theater with reality TV, requiring from the cast over 55 hours of fasting. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in October 2022 will collaborate with famed artist Ugo Rondinone on a multichannel audiovisual installation for Paris Plus/Art Basel. Chessa’s work has appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze, and has been featured in the Italian Marie Claire and the September Issue of Vogue Italia. lucianochessa.com

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Sarah Davachi
Sep
10
7:00 PM19:00

Sarah Davachi

Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St, San Francisco, CA 94108
Saturday, September 10, 2022
7pm doors / 8pm show
Tickets $20 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets Now
Mask required for entry

Sarah Davachi (b. 1987, Canada) is a composer and performer whose work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. Her compositions span both solo and chamber ensemble formats, incorporating a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation. Similarly informed by minimalist and long-form tenets, early music concepts of intervallic and modal harmony, as well as experimental production practices of the electroacoustic studio environment, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and the distant.

In addition to her acclaimed recorded output, Davachi has toured extensively alongside artists such as Grouper, Ellen Arkbro, Oren Ambarchi, William Basinski, Catherine Lamb, Aaron Dilloway, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Michael Pisaro, Loren Connors, Áine O'Dwyer, David Rosenboom, Arnold Dreyblatt, and filmmaker Paul Clipson. Commissioned projects include large-scale works for the London Contemporary Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, Yarn/Wire, Apartment House, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Cello Octet Amsterdam, Bonner Kunstverein, the Canadian International Organ Competition, and Western Front New Music. Her work has been presented internationally by Southbank Centre (London, UK), Kontraklang (Berlin, DE), Radio France (Paris, FR), Issue Project Room (New York, USA), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg, DE), Organ Reframed (London, UK), The Getty (Los Angeles, USA), Lampo (Chicago, USA), Orgelpark (Amsterdam, NL), Le Guess Who? (Utrecht, NL), Barbican Centre (London, UK), The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, USA), Tusk Festival (Newcastle, UK), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montréal, CA), Mazeum Festival (Kyoto, JP), Ambient Church (Los Angeles, USA), Open Frame (Sydney, AU), Unsound (Krakow, PL), Temppeliaukio Church (Helsinki, FI), and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid, ES). In 2020 she founded Late Music, an imprint within the partner labels division of Warp Records.

Between 2007 and 2017, Davachi had the unique opportunity to work for the National Music Centre in Canada as an interpreter and content developer of their collection of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments. She has held artist residencies with The Banff Centre for the Arts, Composer's Kitchen, STEIM, Elektronmusikstudion, OBORO, the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, the National Music Centre, and the Swiss Museum & Center for Electronic Music Instruments, and holds a master's degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California. Davachi is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA, focusing on timbre, phenomenology, and critical organology, and is based in Los Angeles, California.

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