No Idea Festival 2017

Lê Quan Ninh
percussion
Saint-Silvain-sous-Toulx, France

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Classically trained percussionist Lê Quan Ninh was a founding member of Quatuor Hêlios (1986-2012), a percussion quartet that performed and recorded, among others, John Cage’s percussion works. Their last creation, Seul à Seuls by Georges Aperghis, premiered in late 2006 at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg, France.

As an improvisor, he participates at numerous meetings in Europe and North America and plays regularly in ensembles that mix improvised acoustic & electroacoustic music, ’performance art’, dance, poetry, experimental cinema, photography and video.

In 2006, Ninh founded, along with cellist Martine Altenburger, ensemble]h[iatus, a contemporary music ensemble whose members are simultaneously interpreters and improvisers. They have commissioned pieces by composers Vinko Globokar, Peter Jakober, Steffen Krebber, Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Pateras

His discography includes over 40 CDs on European and North American labels. The last release (Aplomb, 2015) is a duet with his long term colleague Michel Doneda.

In 2014, Ninh published the translation of his book Improvising Freely: The ABCs of an Experience (previously published in french). The book is available here.

Michel Doneda
soprano saxophone
Pont de Barret, France

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Over the years, Michel Doneda has developed one of the most extensive musical vocabularies in free improvisation. With over sixty recordings as a leader, Doneda’s virtuosity on the soprano saxophone is widely recognized internationally. His playing can be at turns lyrical, playful, or raucous, and can switch from the liveliness of street melodies to circular breathing, microscopic sounds, or shrieking outbursts.

Among the myriad activities sustaining his voracious creative appetite, Doneda created the label Sonographica in 1990 with percussionist and composer Alain Joule to investigate the possibilities of mixed media such as music, painting and literature. Early in his career, doneda got involved with street theater, co-founding the Institut de Recherches et d’Échanges Artistiques. Creative popular expression and exchanges with street performers, actors, and poets have remained a primary interest.

Always searching and exploring for new situations and collaborators, Doneda he has played with such luminaries as Elvin Jones, Lol Coxhill, Evan Parker, Roger Turner, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Keith Rowe, Xavier Charles, and Sonic Youth.

His most long-standing recording and performing partners include Basque singer Beñat Achiary, percussionist Lê Quan Ninh, hurdy-gurdy player Dominique Regef, and bassist Barre Phillips.

Kjell Bjørgeengen
video artist
Oslo, Norway

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Kjell Bjørgeengen began as house photographer at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter art museum at Høvikodden around 1970. During the mid ’70s Bjørgeengen studied at the University of Oslo with emphasis on Karl Marx and the logical structure of capital. In ’82 he started his work with video in association with The Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, which specialized in the development of new video technology for artists.

Bjørgeengen looks upon his art as an investigation of a reality which needs to be worked upon and changed in both artistic and political ways.

Known for his pioneering work in sculpture, video and installation, Bjørgeegen has exhibited widely in his native Norway including a series of large scale video installations in Kunstnernes Hus, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, and Bergen Art Museum. He has shown internationally in the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), The Ludwig Forum (Aachen, Germany), and Dundee Contemporary Arts (Scotland), among others.

Most recently, Bjørgeengen has focused on audio generated video performances. He has worked with musicians around the world including: Joelle Leandre, Okkyung Lee, Uchihashi Kazuhisa, Jin Hi Kim, Otomo Yoshihide, MIMEO, Evan Parker Electro Acoustic Ensemble, Aernoudt Jacobs, Streifenjunko, MURAL, Lasse Marhaug, Marc Ribot, Toshimaru Nakamura, Thomas Lehn, John Tilbury, and most frequently with British avantist Keith Rowe.

Rick Reed
electronics
Austin

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Rick Reed (b. 1957) has been creating audio compositions since 1982. His recent works are intuitive studies of electricity, frequency fluctuations, and improvised ’on the fly’ solutions to symmetry problems in electronic sound. Over the past decade he has centered his live work on using short wave radio, synthesizers, and sine wave generators to create otherworldly synthetic sounds with a surface of aesthetic elegance and beauty.

Reed lives in Austin, Texas, and has performed throughout the United States and Europe. His music has been used by filmmaker Ken Jacobs in four of his experiential magic lantern films: Spiral Nebula, Mountaineer Spinning, Capitalism: Child Labor, and Another Occupation. In addition to his solo work, Reed has been a member of Austin groups such as Fear and Tension Corporation, The Abrasion Ensemble, Frequency Curtain, SIRSIT, as well as the international group, The Voltage Spooks (w/ AMM’s Keith Rowe). Along with Brent Fariss, he is currently a member of the world’s only CM von Hausswolff cover band in existence, The House of Wolves.

You can hear his work on such records as Dark Skies at Noon (2005), Dreamz/Blue Polz (2008), The Way Things Go (2011), and Brilliant Flashes (2016), to name but a few.

Andrea Ancira
research
Mexico City

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Andrea Ancira (Mexico, 1984) is an inde­pen­dent writer and researcher based in Mexico City. She is inter­ested in con­tem­po­rary exper­i­mental artistic prac­tices and their role in shaping social iden­ti­ties, dis­courses and sen­si­bil­i­ties. When exam­ining these prac­tices— either in the field of sound or image— she has approached them from their pos­sible impli­ca­tions in the con­for­ma­tion of ideas of utopia, rev­o­lu­tion and the com­mons. The per­spec­tive from where she explores these phe­nomena is informed by mul­tiple the­o­ret­ical frame­works such as marxism, his­tory of contemporary cul­ture and pol­i­tics, fem­i­nism, decolo­nial studies, among others. Her work has been published in aca­demic and non-aca­demic plat­forms.

Ramón del Buey
bass clarinet
Mexico City

Ramón del Buey studied composition and classical philology at UNAM. He has played bass clarinet and piano in different projects, mainly of improvised and contemporary music, in Mexico, Spain, France and the UK. Del Buey usually performs with Generación Espontánea with whom he recorded, edited and mixed «The Marvellous Transatlantic», an album that explored long-distance improvistation and composition between musicians living in Mexico and Europe. Since 2011, along with Darío Bernal, he has been doing workshops to intdoduce music to children, using sound art and experimental music as a platform.

He is currently composing a septet in order to complete his degree and writing a thesis on the function and survival of ancient greek and latin sources in Goethe’s Faust II and Joyce’s Ulysses.

Arthur Henry Fork
guitar, electronics
Mexico City

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Composer, guitarist, new media artist and designer working with the exploration of sound, error, harmonic dissonance and brokenness on the guitar, improvisation and open-source programming. Also works with multimedia installations that fuse his sound composition and design work to create sound-art pieces. His work has been shown at locations and festivals internationally. Other collaborations include: Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Film.

Jacob Wick
trumpet
Mexico City

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Jacob Wick is a trumpet player and improviser.

Originally from the suburbs of Chicago, Wick has lived in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Los Angeles, and has performed with a variety of improvisers and composers in a variety of contexts, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (US), the Moers Jazz Festival (DE), and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MX). He has released recordings on Marginal Frequency (San Diego, CA), Prom Night Records (Brooklyn, NY), Peira (Chicago, IL), Diatribe (Dublin, IE), and Creative Sources (Lisbon, PT). He holds a BM from Purchase College, SUNY, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts.

In performance, Wick works to privilege the perspective, experience, and  expressive capacities of ambient non-human actors—air ducts, airplanes, birds, cement—over his own experience as a white, cis, American male. This approach is indebted to a wild commitment to queer politics and years of cruising contemporary and 20th century art and/or life theories. Current projects include solo trumpet acoustic noise and Dos/Tres Hongos, a duo or trio with Marc Riordan and Frank Rosaly.

Tom Carter
guitar
Houston

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Tom Carter's solo electric guitar work sculpts a rich landscape of immensely-stacked grit and beauty, weaving interlocking strands of melody into towering long-form (and often high-volume) drones.

Known for his work with iconoclasts Charalambides, which he co-founded with Christina Carter in 1991, Carter's recent projects include his eponymous duo with No Neck Blues Band co-founder Pat Murano; Sarin Smoke, his duo with Pete Swanson; and his solo performances and recordings, which have increasingly featured visual components - including collaborations with filmmakers Martha Colburn and Margarida Garcia.

Carter has released dozens of recordings in every available format for many different labels, including kranky, Digitalis, Eclipse, Important, Root Strata, and 3-Lobed. His most recent solo release is available on his own Wholly Other imprint, which he has operated since 1995.

Chris Cogburn
Percussion, electronics
Austin / Mexico City

Chris Cogburn is a percussionist living in Austin and Mexico City. His artistic practice is rooted in the collaborative context of improvisation.

Cogburn’s approach to the drum gives focus to the instrument’s sonic potential as a site and container for resonance. Current practices concentrate on the threshold between acoustic and electronic sounds, their differing tibral qualities and their sites of resonance (speaker/drum).

Current music projects include: un Trio de Gira, with Mexico City musicians Alex Bruck (viola) and Ramón del Buey (bass clarinet); Libración, a duo with Mexico City double bassist Juan García; and the frenetic noise group SSBT with Steve Jansen and Parham Daghighi.

Beginning in the summer of 2003, Cogburn has organized an annual festival of improvised music - the No Idea Festival - showcasing a handful of Texas’ premiere creative musicians in collaboration with improvisors from around the US, Europe, Japan, Mexico, Canada and the world. No Idea events have been held in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Marfa, Fort Worth, Dallas, New Orleans, Mexico City and Mérida, Yucatán.

Human Figure: Virginity
Performance
Austin

Human Figure: Virginity is the performance trio of Parham Daghighi, Spencer Dobbs and Robin Kathleen Williams. Formed in 2016 as an extension of the bands Human Figure (Dobbs & Williams) and Virginity (Daghighi & Dobbs), the trio coalesces the various practices sought by each respective group; namely: composition pierced through with improvisation, choreography, poetry, tape work and engaging artifacts of nature in the context of ritual-tinged performance.

Parham Daghighi is an improviser/multi-instrumentalist whose recent foci include electric guitar, tape manipulation, percussion, violin and dozaleh. He is a core member of Texas-based explorative music groups SSBT and Friendship Cemetery. Recent recordings include 247 Main by SSBT on Astral Spirits and Friendship Cemetery’s self-titled split cassette with Baby Blood on Self Sabotage Records.

Spencer Dobbs is a musician and poet who issues recordings and chapbooks on his Anahuac Editions imprint. His most recent full-length, Changed Fool, was released on cassette by Sloow Tapes.

Robin Kathleen Williams is an artist working with objects of symbolic depth (stones, mirrors, ochre), conceptions and expressions of the body and voice through performance, dance and music. In addition to working with Dobbs and Daghighi, Williams has recently performed with electro-acoustic artist Tara Bhattacharya-Reed.

Etched In The Eye
guitar, baritone sax, keyboard
Houston

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Etched In The Eye is a rebellious trio of individual aesthetics collaborating to form a music that is abstract, improvisational, and heroic.

A sonic landscape of shearing sheets of merciless energy, perplexing filaments of interlocking polyphonic lines over a canvas of well manipulated perception altering prepared guitar, with intrusions of references to traditionalism forced upon an ever evolving architectural tonal structure. An homage to the fog of human achievement.

Band mates includes: Sandy Ewen on guitar played with found objects, Danny Kamins on baritone saxophone, and Robert Pearson on keyboards.

No Idea Hillbilly Minimalism Unit
band
Toronto / Austin

Inspired by the hillbilly minimalism of anti-artist Henry Flynt, Toronto guitarist Kurt Newman has assembled a group of hardworking Austin musicians to explore a music for an imaginary soloist. The band includes pedal steel guitarist Bob Hoffnar, guitarist/mandolin player Lauren Gurgiolo, multi-instrumentalist Michael St. Clair, and drummer Stephen Bidwell.

A world-renowned pedal steel guitarist, Bob Hoffnar is Founder/ Director of The Liminal Sound Series, a live concert performance series dedicated to the commissioning of new works and collaborations between visionary composers and Austin-based musicians and performers.

Composer and guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo draws from a wide range of inspirations in her work - from field recordings to phenomenology - and creates environments that illuminate and shadow boundaries between perspectives, media, and audience/performer.

Multi-instrumentalist Michael St. Clair has toured around the world with such bands as White Denim, Okkervil River, The Polyphonic Spree, and The Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Drummer Stephen Bidwell has studied and lived in West Virginia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, New York but has called Austin home since shortly after hurricane Katrina. He co-leads or plays in three or more projects at any given time (Hard Proof, Mood Illusion, The Azmaris), and works in any genre you can think of as a sideman.

Kurt Newman
guitar
Toronto

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Kurt Newman is a guitarist and improvisor. A native of Toronto, Canada, Newman lived in Austin, Texas for several years and was co-curator of No Idea Festival in its first two years (2003-4).

Over the past two decades, Newman has focused his creative energies on non-idiomatic improvisation, and continues to work on refining his voice as an improvisor.

Among his collaborators: (Europe) John Butcher, Mats Gustafsson, Thomas Lehn, Roger Turner, Jaap Blonk; (Japan) Tetuzi Akiyama; (USA) Kyle Bruckmann, Chris Cogburn, Sarah Hennies, Henry Kaiser, Fred Lonberg-Holm; (Canada): Mike Gennaro, Eric Chenaux, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Mauro Savo, Sam Shalabi, Alexandre St-Onge.

Newman has been in a number of bands: Sackville, Picastro, Wrist Error, Marmots, Golden Melody Awards, Weird Weeds, and Perruque.

Aaron Russell
electric guitar
Austin

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Aaron Russell grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and has lived in Austin, Texas since 2003.

He has played guitar in a number of underground/experimental rock bands since the early 1990s, most notably with Austin groups Weird Weeds (with, at various times, Sarah Hennies, Sandy Ewen, Lindsey Verrill, and Kurt Newman) and Moonsicles (with Sheila Scoville, Lindsey Verrill, and Carolyn Cunningham). In addition to playing in Moonsicles, he is currently actively composing and performing music for unadorned solo fingerstyle electric guitar and has recently completed recording his first album of this material, to be released in 2017.

Aside from music, Aaron is a licensed auctioneer in the state of Texas, fosters rescue dogs with his wife, Sheila Scoville, and has recently embarked on a project of designing and manufacturing a series of wooden jigsaw puzzles.

Lauren Gurgiolo
guitar, mandolin
Austin

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Composer and guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo draws from a wide range of inspirations in her work - from field recordings to phenomenology - and creates environments that illuminate and shadow boundaries between perspectives, media, and audience/performer.

Gurgiolo has directed/co-directed four inter-media interactive installations and is currently working on her fifth - Silent City Part II. She has completed four corresponding albums with her project The Dialtones: The Dialtones, The Quality or Condition, Calculated Carelessness, and Silent City.

Gurgiolo is also an accomplished side musician. She has toured internationally with Okkervil River (2008-2015) and recorded three albums with the band: I am Very Far, True Love Casts Out All Evil (with Austin legend Roky Erickson), and The Silver Gymnasium (2013). She has performed on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Late Show With David Letterman, Conan, and in Andrew Bujalski’s film Results. She is currently a member of The Octopus Project (2015 – present) and is preparing to embark on North American and European tours to support their forthcoming release, Memory Mirror.

Steve Parker
slide trombone, electronics
Austin

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Steve Parker is a trombonist, composer, and curator living in Austin. He directs the hybrid arts series SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum of Art, is an artist of new music outfit Ensemble Signal in NYC, and teaches at UTSA.

As a soloist, he has performed throughout the US, Europe, Asia, and South America at notable festivals and venues. He has commissioned or premiered over 100 new works, working closely with many leading figures of contemporary music. Steve is particularly interested in art projects that serve as community building tools. To this end, he has organized performances for 100 marching tubas, 80 trombones, 99 percussionists, 80 carhorns, and installed large interactive instrument sculptures in parking garages and alleyways. His compositions have been featured at the Fusebox Festival, Ballet Austin, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Asian Arts Initiative, and in numerous public elevators in Chinatown Philadelphia.

Steve has been recognized by the Austin Chronicle (Best of Austin 2015), the Austin Critics' Table, and has received grants from the NEA, New Music USA, American Composers Forum, and ArtPlace. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin, and previously worked as a Fulbright and Harrington Scholar.

Raquel Bell
performance
Austin

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Raquel Bell performed in experimental opera and music in New York City for 12 years before moving to Texas in 2015. Raquel is the singer and midi-percussionist for punk-noise band Normal Love (NYC) and co-founder of MESIKO (NYC). She worked with Newband and the Harry Partch Institute on Harry Partch's operas Oedipus and Delusion of the Fury, dancing and playing the role of "The Old Goat Woman" in the latter.

She has performed at Dance Theatre Workshop, The New Museum, The Japan Society, Jazz Fest Montreal, Eclectic Electric Festival and at the NMASS and Fusebox festivals in Austin, TX. She composed and recorded music for multiple art installations in NYC and at other galleries across the country. Her primary instrument is an analog organ which she plays through extensive effects.

Raquel has two records coming out this year, one with experimental violist, Jessica Pavone in a duo they call Dark Tips, and her own solo record with performances by Bob Hoffnar, Thor Harris, Jonathan Horne, and many other accomplished Austin musicians.

Mutarrancho
dj
Dallas

Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Ernesto Montiel is a visual artist and improviser. He has been djing since his teens. Ernesto moved to Dallas in 2015.

He took the Mutarrancho name for dj gigs since the beginning of 2016 and soon after began playing with Miguel Espinel in the electroacoustic free improvisation duo Monte Espina. Ernesto performs in numerous improvisation ensembles in the DDFW area along with Sarah Ruth Alexander, Lily Taylor, Gregg Prickett, and Stefan Gonzalez. First active in Venezuela, Ernesto’s initial improvisation project was an open collective called El Jaibo (1995) which spawned several other projects, including: Los Jardineros del Chance, Metra, C del Mar: Chimichi Broders, Gabinete Sonoro Goma Espuma, Oso/Malderabia.

As a visual artist Montiel has been developing for some years a chance driven body of work, Stochastic Ethics.

Meteora / Patrick Danse
documentary film
Mexico City

Alina Montero and Diego Westendarp are a creative duo from Mexico City that operates under the pseudonym Meteora. They direct, write, edit and compose music for cinematographic pieces in all of its shapes since 2004. Together they have made short films, documentaries, promotional pieces, and a medium length feature film shot at Iztacchíhuatl volcano, which has been selected at film festivals around the world. Meteora on Vimeo

Patrick Danse is a Belgian film director living in Mexico City. He's been collaborating in numerous projects from documentaries, ads, multimedia, animation and fiction film. His work has been selected in film festivals around the globe. Part of his work has been dedicated to shooting experimental music artists, bringing images to this scene with short movies covering live acts, street performances and talks on conceptual artistic workflow.

Fernando Vigueras
guitar, objects
Mexico City

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Fernando Vigueras is a musician specializing in experimental sound practices and creative forms related to free improvisation, interpretation of new music, and sound art.

His work questions the object essence of the guitar, recreating different concrete means of sound production. He has collaborated with artists like Burkhard Stangl, Jaap Blonk, Remi Álvarez, Frode Gjerstad, David Stackenäs and Keith Rowe, among others.

Fernando is a member of the Mexican free improv collective Generación Espontánea

Vigueras currently conducts the curatorship of the improvised music cycle Articulaciones del silencio (CCEMX) and is a recipient of the grant Jóvenes Creadores program of the FONCA 2016-2017.