Cluster presents: AETHER*ECLIPSE at VP
Performances by BEAST NEST & MIRRORFRAME
SATURDAY MARCH 2, 2019, 9-12 PM
The Output 218-100 Arthur St
Please join us on Saturday March 2 in The Output for a special evening of sounds from Oakland, California’s Beast Nest and Winnipeg’s MirrorFrame.
Cluster: New Music and Integrated Arts Festival
Sharmi Basu (Beast Nest) will also host a workshop, Decolonizing Sound: Presence and Liberation in The Output on Sunday March 3. Details below.
AETHER*ECLIPSE: BEAST NEST (OAKLAND, CA) + MIRROR FRAME (WINNIPEG, MB)
BEAST NEST and MIRROR FRAME both perform solo experimental electronic works that take a decidedly spiritual approach to politics and sound. From conjuring noisy spirits to enacting ritual magic, BEAST NEST + MIRROR FRAME aim in different ways to transform the gendered and racialized experiences of trauma and systemic violence. Directly embracing the decolonization of musical languages BEAST NEST channels the echoes of depression and the horror of structural oppression into ethereal compositions that function equally as balm and alarm. MIRROR FRAME’s textured generative compositions alchemically pull at the fraughtness of technology and the body through sonic explorations of the possibilities of healing.
BEAST NEST
www.sharmi.info
beastnest.bandcamp.com
BEAST NEST aka SHARMI BASU is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. BEAST NEST is Sharmi’s primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Her workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. She also founded and hosts an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was an organizer the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest.
MIRRORFRAME
beastnest.bandcamp.com
MIRROR FRAME is the solo electronic sound project of artist Alison Burdeny, a disabled Transwoman living and creating on Treaty One territory. Her practice incorporates years of self-taught experimentation with sound
design, multi-instrumental performance, technological research to create compositions that weave synthesis, cyberpunk aesthetic, Queer self-healing practices, and magic spells into vast aural textures. Her works have been performed in Treaty One, Treaty Four, and on Unceded Coast Salish territories with recent performances including Temporal Contours, [bend] festival, and Tidal-Signal Sound Festival.
FREE PUBLIC WORKSHOP
DECOLONIZING SOUND: PRESENCE AND LIBERATION
The Output 218-100 Arthur St
Workshop by Sharmi Basu
No pre-registration required
Sharmi Basu will facilitate a workshop that aims to create intersectional conversations around resistance, music, race, gender, and spirituality. This workshop will work together to discuss what it means to create space for our selves with sound and ways that our art practices intersect with greater political movements and our own personal struggles. Ultimately this workshop will seek to redefine liberation through creativity and presence. We will shed light on ways in which improvisation and playing music can help marginalized people reclaim and create new identities and languages despite the distortion of and violence upon our cultures, work, and genders that have historically oppressed us. Decolonizing sound can mean decolonizing our given languages into ones we create for ourselves. What are the ways sound can be used to challenge capitalism, the police state, heteronormativity, racism, and gendered violence?
Accessible building with elevator, entrance with lift on King street and Bannatyne.
SHARMI BASU is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. BEAST NEST is Sharmi’s primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Her workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. She also founded and hosts an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was an organizer the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest.
You can find out more about Sharmi at www.sharmi.info