Meridian Music presents a new work for processed percussion using nothing but plates, cups, bowls, forks, spoons, serving utensils, graters, beaters, ricers, whisks, colanders, flour sifters, and one droning, not burning, can opener. No knives. Some electronics.
“Put A Fork In It” is percussionist Suki O’Kane’s first and last composition for kitchen, meant to magnetize some of the Bay Area’s most inventive percussionists and electronicists in contemplation of ordinary objects and their musical properties. Suki is joined by Moe! Staiano and Anna Wray on percussion. Lance Grabmiller, Gretchen Jude and Zachary James Watkins on electronics.
Wednesday, January 9, 2012
Meridian Gallery: Composers in Performance
535 Powell Street, San Francisco
7:30pm
$10 general | $8 student/seniors
About the Performers
Lance Grabmiller is an electronic artist (shudder, Tiny Owl, &Friends, The Abstractions, Nanaqui, HSoA, Stars Like Fleas, C17H19NO3 and Paved in Skin), music publisher (Praemedia) and impresario.
Gretchen Jude is a performing artist blending a variety of performance practices for voice, improvisation, traditional Japanese music and Urasenke tea ceremony, electronic and computer music (Candy Acid, Glou-glou and Gestaltish).
Moe! Staiano is a percussionist (Vacuum Tree Head, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), band leader (Surplus 1980, Mute Socialite), and composer (Moe!kestra!).
Zachary James Watkins is a composer (Beam, sfsound, Microscores, Seattle Chamber Players), multimedia performer and sound artist (Country Western, part of Meridian Gallery’s Composers in Performance, movable, long commutes between loved ones, music for motors and resonant strings, Positively Right On), and Lecturer of Music at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Anna Wray is a percussionist (William Winant Percussion Group) at Mills College, where she is a Provost Scholar and recipient of the Carroll Donner Commemorative Scholarship.
About the Composer
Suki O’Kane is a classically trained mallet percussionist, a media ecologist, and a composer working with artists from an encyclopedic range of musical genres. One of the founding members of the lo-fi sampling ensemble The Noodles (with Michael Zelner), plays percussion with Moe! Staiano’s Moe!kestra!, Dan Plonsey’s Daniel Popsicle, Big City Orchestra, Tiny Owl and is an ensemble member of Thingamajigs Performance Group performing new works by Edward Schocker, Dylan Bolles and Zachary Watkins.
Suki has performed live and recorded with She Mob and the side projects of its co-founder Joy (Sue Hutchinson): mad folk duo Junior Showmanship and it’s alter-ego speed metal Winner’s Bitch. She has performed in realizations of Jon Brumit’s Vendetta Retreat; with Lucio Menegon in his Split Lip, Soundtrack Instumentals and Strangelet projects; and with Dohee Lee in realizations of the multidisciplinary performance and installation piece Mago.
Her compositions for theater include three commissions for Theatre of Yugen with playwright Erik Ehn: Frankenstein (2003), The Cycle Plays (2007) and Cordelia (2011), part of Ehn’s Soulographie project. She teamed with Jason Ditzian to compose for Inkboat’s Line Between (2011). She is directing the development of music for What A Stranger May Know, Ehn’s 32-play cycle remembering the victims of the Virginia Tech Massacre while developing new site-specific work for the Illuminated Corridor, a nomadic public art project that creates streetscapes of live experimental music and performative projection in Oakland (2013), San Francisco (2014), West Marin (2014).
