Kaffe Matthews / Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings Duo
kaffe matthews / Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings duo
Friday, March 22, 2004 at 8pm
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Music: 8pm
Admission: $15 / $10 for students and Non-Event members suggested
Pay what you can / No one turned away for lack of funds
Non-Event and the Goethe-Institut Boston are pleased to present a solo performance by electroacoustic musician Kaffe Matthews in her first performance with Non-Event since 2002 along with the longstanding duo of Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings.
About the artists
Kaffe Matthews works live with space, data, things, and place to make new electroacoustic composition. Site, accessibility and the physical experience of this music has always been central to her approach and so she has also invented some unique interfaces — the sonic armchair, the sonic bed and a variety of sonic bikes which enable new paths into composition for makers, and ways in to listening for wide ranging audiences. Currently, she performs with a new DIY instrument, the Ripley, a noise filter system designed on alchemical discoveries made by G. Ripley, a 15th British alchemist.
Long concerned with community and the environment, Matthews has also established the collectives ‘Music for Bodies’ (2006) and ‘The Bicrophonic Research Institute’ (2014) where ideas and techniques grow within a pool of coders and artists using shared and open-source approaches, publishing all outcomes online.
Since 1995 Matthews has performed and taught worldwide, receiving awards such as the NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship; Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory; a Scottish BAFTA with Mandy McIntosh & Zeena Parkins; Distinction Prix Ars Electronica Sonic Bed_London and Honorary mention for cd cécile. She is the first woman to have received the Edgar Varèse guest professorship, computer music, TU Berlin. Kaffe has also been releasing solo works on Annette Works since 1996.
Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings have performed as a duo since 2005. Their music explores an unpredictable relationship with making sounds, achieved by elaborate preparation of acoustic soundboxes, such as drums or cello, and expanded via original electronic instruments, ranging from naked circuit boards to amplified kitchen objects. They focus on the meta-musical potential of unstable sounds and silences, exploring austere combinations of sound and the otherworldly ripple effects that pulse through a silent space or alert ears.
Improviser, composer, and interpreter Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the possibilities inherent in unstable sound and duration. He began working in this thread in 2002, within Boston’s community of improvisers interested in austere combinations of sounds and silences, and has since performed and recorded with musicians throughout the United States and abroad. He frequently collaborates with artists including the trio Meridian with percussionists Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart, pianist Annie Lewandowski, Vic Rawlings, vocalist Ken Ueno, saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, banjo and electronic musician Holland Hopson, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and many others.
Feeney also builds sound installations, concerned primarily with the acoustic properties and geographies of neglected or nontraditional spaces. He is currently faculty in the Instrumental Arts and Performer-Composer specializations at the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches percussion, composition, improvisation, and sound art. He is also a faculty member of the Chosen Vale International Percussion Seminar, a yearly chamber music-intensive workshop
Vic Rawlings is an improviser and instrument builder, specializing in modifications of existing instruments, creating extensive cello preparations. He also continually develops an electronic instrument from extant exposed circuitry, producing, in effect, a modular analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface. This electronic instrument is paired with a flexible array of exposed speaker elements, chosen for their often unpredictable and idiosyncratic acoustic qualities. Rawlings has performed extensively with musicians including Greg Kelley, MAWJA (with Mike Bullock and Mazen Kerbaj), Liz Tonne, Mary Staubitz, Arkm Foam, and others. He is also co-director of the film Linefork, an immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place following the lives of banjo master Lee Sexton and his wife Opal.
This performance is co-presented by Non-Event and the Goethe-Institut Boston.
