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no idea festival
presents
in association with Switched On

Andrea Neumann and Bonnie Jones

Photo: Susanna Bolle

Andrea Neumann + Bonnie Jones

Unusual Ear: Making Music with Improvised, Acoustic and Electronic Sounds

Saturday, February 4: 2pm-4pm
Spider House 29th St Ballroom, 2908 Fruth St, Austin, TX
Free admission

Andrea and Bonnie will spend time with participants discussing and demonstrating some of the various listening and playing processes that inform their collaborative work.

As a group, we'll look at some of the shapes and structures of improvised and electronic sounds and through guided listening and improvising exercises, experience some of the ways that music is constructed from unusual sound sources and methods of playing.

The musicians will also demonstrate their homemade and custom instruments and the methods they use to explore and play these unusual instruments.

This workshop is free of charge, open to musicians and non-musicians and does not require an instrument.

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This workshop is presented by the No Idea Festival in association with Switched On.

The 9th annual No Idea Festival will be held in:
Austin -- February 02 - 04
Houston -- February 05
San Antonio -- February 06
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Vic Rawlings electronic instrument Bryan Eubanks electronic instrument

Information on the artists:

Andrea Neumann studied classical piano at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. She has been active primarily as a musician and composer in the fields of new music and experimental music since 1994 and co-organizes “Labor Sonor,” a series for experimental music, film and performance in Berlin since 2000.

Her exploration of the piano for new sound possibilities has led her to reduce the instrument to its strings, its resonance board and the cast-iron frame. Playing this unmounted ‘leftover’ of a piano, with the help of electronics to amplify and manipulate the sound, she has developed several of her own playing techniques, sounds, and ways for preparing the instrument. For reasons of weight, a lighter special instrument was crafted in 2000 according to the measurements of the original heavier inside piano (piano builder, Bernd Bittmann, Berlin).

For more info on Andrea: http://www.japanimprov.com/profiles/aneumann/

Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken). She is interested in how people perceive, “read” and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment. Bonnie has presented her work in the US, Europe, and Asia and collaborates frequently with writers and musicians including Ric Royer, Carla Harryman, Andy Hayleck, Joe Foster, Andrea Neumann, Liz Tonne and Chris Cogburn. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

For more info on Bonnie: http://bonniejones.wordpress.com/

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This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division. Further funding provided by Meet The Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program and the Goethe Institut.