Fire Over Heaven continues with a special program of sight and sound collaborations featuring Barry Weisblat with Todd Capp, Che Chen, Sandy Gordon, Talice Lee and John McCowen, and Camilla Padgitt-Coles and David Lackner's project, Wind❏ws... A long time veteran of New York's sub-underground, Barry Weisblat has kept a low profile. But for those that have been paying attention, his activities as an improviser and builder of primitive electrical systems is clearly the work of an inspired and idiosyncratic imagination. Whether appearing, as he often does, with a heavily modded casio keyboard and an array of electronic and object based sounding devices, or behind a crudely fashioned and dangerously arcing jacob's ladder, or playing snare drum in the 75 Dollar Bill little big band, each performance seems to provide another window into a restless polymath personality. Tonight's performance will highlight yet another facet, Weisblat's work with 35mm slides. Burnt, fused, punched, rack-focused and layered, these projections go the opposite way of the flicker, prioritizing instead a kind of glacial but no less psychedelic crossfade. These visions will be accompanied (or maybe interrogated, and vice versa) by a band made up of Weisblat's friends and frequent collaborators, percussionists Todd Capp and Sandy Gordon, violinist Talice Lee, clarinetist John McCowen and myself on contrabass, percussion, tape machine, etc. The group's sounds may also be supplemented by crude signaling devices from Weisblat's hand-hewn universe, and/or interjections from his field recording archives. Who knows what he'll get up to up in the balcony... Also on the bill is Wind❏ws, a duo project that fuses the color saturated video abstractions of Camilla Padgitt-Jones with the harmonically saturated tones of her and collaborator David Lackner's improvised structures. Using crystal singing bowls, synthesizers, sax and flute, Padgitt-Coles and Lackner forge a tone world that occupies a territory somewhere between new age music and a heightened pitch-sensitive minimalism, surely informed of Lackner's studies with Lamonte Young and Marian Zazeela... This special installment of Fire Over Heaven is also part of the Short Run Screenings program, and has been funded by a generous grant from the NEA. Come join us in real time.

C.C.
Organizer, Fire Over Heaven

Schedule:
7:30pm - doors
8:00pm - Wind❏ws (David Lackner & Camilla Padgitt-Coles)
9:00pm - Barry Weisblat w/ Todd Capp, Che Chen, Sandy Gordon, Talice Lee, and John McCowen

Todd Capp began playing drums in South Side Chicago basements, where jazz met psychedelia and the avant-garde learned the blues. He currently resides in Downtown Brooklyn, where he continues to explore the shapes of swing - sonic textures and tangents of the space-time continuum and the human heart - through improvised music.

Che Chen is a multi-instrumentalist (guitar, contrabass, woodwinds, percussion, etc.) based in Queens, NY. Born in 1978 to Taiwanese immigrant parents, he studied visual art before turning his attention to sound/music. His primary interests include modal and free improvisation, untempered tuning systems (just intonation), repetition, rhythm and duration. He performs solo and in many ongoing and spontaneous formations, but his main preoccupation is playing guitar in 75 Dollar Bill, which he founded with percussionist Rick Brown in 2012. He is also the organizer of the monthly Fire Over Heaven music series at Outpost Artists Resources.

Sandy Gordon is a drummer/percussionist, improviser, and teaching artist collaborating on projects in sound, movement, film, theater, education, healing arts, and other modalities. An Alexander Technique teacher-in-training at Balance Arts Center NYC, she teaches drums and mindfulness-in-music to all ages, and in 2017 began adapting the teachings of Pauline Oliveros and Milford Graves for children and teens at summer camps, and as a guest teacher in school band rooms. As an improviser blending percussion, objects, field recordings, and electronics, she has played most recently with Anastasia Clarke, Barry Weisblat, Marcia Bassett, Colin Fisher, Derek Baron and is a member of the collective group Causings. She has contributed vibraphone and drums to recent albums by Ka Baird, Will Stratton, and Carlos Hernandez (Ava Luna), and designed sound for Claire Moodey's play Femme Pathos.

Talice Lee grew up playing orchestral violin, singing in choirs and playing in bands in Baton Rouge, Louisiana before moving to New York more than a decade ago. Equally at home in song-based, composed and improvised music contexts, she has lent her violin playing and singing abilities to the songwriting projects of Sue Garner and poet Morgan Vo, uncategorizable modal rockers 75 Dollar Bill, experimental new music pieces by Cody Boyce and Che Chen, and improvised settings with veteran NYC free improvisers Daniel Carter and Todd Capp.

John McCowen is a New York based composer and performer whose work focuses on the extended possibilities of the clarinet/contrabass clarinet. Within solo work, John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensionality within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. John was a founding member of the Chicago avant-rock group, Wei Zhongle, where he performed on amplified clarinet/electronics. His most recent albums have been released by International Anthem, Astral Spirits, and Editions Wandelweiser.

Barry Weisblat was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and remains one of the unsung heroes of deep and investigative Sound. Thought. Beyond a long-running commitment to participating in the underground's underground of improvisation and a dynamic sense of musical conversation, Weisblat has extended his reach and pool of knowledge beyond rubbing the surface of the black box of sound to designing and implementing his own systems. Translating light into sound, sound into action, action into thought, and thought into light, Weisblat's ceaseless curiosity and simultaneous obsessive desire to participate and join in dialogue has pushed his output farther out than most people can see or conceive of. Some collaborations include work with Michael Bernstein, Margarida Garcia, Andrew Lafkas, Toshio Kajiwara, Matt Valentine, Theo Angell, Otomo Yoshide, Mattin, Tim Barnes, Greg Pope, Toshi Nakamura, Sean Meehan, Dion Workman.

Wind❏ws explores an inner sound world riding the line between music for meditation and a minimalism informed by just intonation, yet dictated by the acoustics of the instruments themselves. The group’s sensibility towards magic, spiritual, and the sublime is often accompanied in live performances by Camilla's sound reactive light installations. Wind❏ws finds a sound both ancient and cosmic through their use of saxophones, crystal singing bowls, flute, chimes, and synthesizers.

David Lackner is a composer and multi-instrumentalist (saxophone, piano, flute, E.W.I., synthesizers) specializing in jazz, minimalism, and pop music. In 2008, David founded Galtta as a vehicle for producing, film scoring, and releasing music of various like-minded artists. Informed by Jazz and his study of North Indian vocal music with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, David's music often explores just intonation and long durations. David has toured across the US, Canada, and Germany, and has performed and recorded with: Martha Reeves and The Vandellas, The Drifters, Adrian Knight, Max Zuckerman, Lydia Lunch, ESPTV, Martin Bisi, Camilla Padgitt-Coles, Wind❏ws, The Phantom Family Halo, Mickey Rooney, Sid Simmons, Billy G. Robinson, Alice Cohen, Randy Gibson, Anthony Vine, Fielded, Mark Price, Makoto Kawabata, and John Swana. http://davidlacknermusic.com/

Camilla Padgitt-Coles is a multimedia artist creating physical real-time atmospheres with light, color, sound, and interactive technology. Projects and collaborations she has worked on span contexts of musical/visual performance, standalone installations, independent publishing (on the label Perfect Wave), and event curation. She has toured with music and projections in the US and in Europe and performs and records music solo as Ivy Meadows and with the bands Future Shuttle, Energy Star, Tropical Rock, Lighter, and Wind❏ws. http://ivymeadows.net