NWEAMO 2006 Portland, Oregon USA:

NWEAMO >IS< the New West Electro-Acoustic Music Organization. This non-profit, all volunteer organization has been producing its annual festival, exploring the wildly diverse fringes of experimental music and its intersections with video and performance art now for eight years running. Each year, under the direction of founder and artistic director Joseph Waters, the NWEAMO festival endeavors to travel to cities around the globe, drawing performers and audiences alike from an incalculably wide range of backgrounds, interests, professions, and nationalities. As the board of directors seems to approach the project with a goal of broadening the human understanding of what music can be, literally exploring the far reaches of sonic possibility, they simultaneously explore the connections between both classical and contemporary music and the communities that create it. NWEAMO programs consistently deliver an unparalleled, mind-bending, and often surprisingly challenging array of previously inconceived live audio-visual experiences to the public at large.

We are very excited to be bringing a world-class line-up for this years' festival to the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, Oregon USA, September 24, 2006. This icon of Northwestern chic culture features a performance space with a state-of-the-art sound system, installed in a showroom that was designed from the ground up by legendary architect Jeff Kovel to be not only aesthetically beautiful, but acoustically excellent as well. We believe that our festival and the Doug Fir Lounge are extremely well suited for one another, both at once devised by high-minded visionaries with the hope of redefining the publics perception of what is normal, where boundaries lie, and indeed, what is possible.

This year’s Portland festival will feature:

Masonic and MarsBassMan:

DJ and electronica artist MASONIC has often been heard mixing trip-hop, hip-hop, and funk in San Francisco Ca., at such cutting-edge venues as the 111 Minna Gallery during fashion and art shows, Cloud 9, Skylark, Fuse, and the Solstice Lounge. While living in Rome, Masonic DJed in Monte Testaccio, fueling the thriving nightlife scene built inside the mountain of an ancient pottery dump. With double bassist David Arend (MarsBassMan), Masonic performs sets of his original electronica as the electronica/jazz duo MASONIC AND MARSBASSMAN. Their concerts combine string bass with turntables, piano, and electronic drum pad. Playing together since their studies at The Juilliard School of Music in New York City, they have performed at venues ranging from Berlin's Roter Salon and Zu Mir, to Plado Media's huge parties in Golden Gate Park. <more>

Hybrid Groove Project:

This ensemble is a collaborative composition and performance venture, featuring saxophonist Brian Sacawa and composer/turntablist DJ Dubble8. Synthesizing elements from traditions as diverse as modern classical music, free jazz, funk and break-beat electronica, the project emphasizes affinities between these various influences in a union of groove and sonic experimentation. Praised by The New York Times, Grammy Award-winning concert saxophonist Brian Sacawa has firmly established himself as an important contemporary voice for his instrument. <more>
Erik Spangler (a.k.a. DJ Dubble8) is a composer working within a wide range of listening environments. His compositions have been performed across the United States and internationally from Canada to China, by ensembles including the Atlantic Brass Quintet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project and International Contemporary Ensemble. As a turntablist DJ, Spangler performs live remixes of his own electro-acoustic compositions at venues from nightclubs to universities, through solo DJ sets or in a chamber music context. <more>

Maxime de la Rochefoucauld:

"My music is not so much polyrhythmic as polygravitational," says Canadian composer Maxime Rioux, of his mechanical orchestra of self-built 'automates', whose interlocking actions accumulate into ritualistic, trancelike rhythms described by their creator as "creating chaos with an order". New Yorkers got a rare firsthand glimpse at the fruits of Rioux's obsession during the Montreal based composer's recent residency there, when he put on a series of performances of his ongoing project, Automates Ki, at various venues in the city. The 'Automates' (French for automatons) are an army of tiny robot-instruments rigged up in an impossibly complex tangle of wires, stands, beaters and primitive mechanical arms. Going out as Maxime De La Rochefoucauld, Rioux drives this array of soundmakers using simple, ultra low frequency (that is to say, inaudible) waves generated by an analogue synthesizer. Numbering about 40 for a full performance, the automatons consist mostly of drums, cymbals, and shakers of various sizes, as well as several toy mandolins and banjos. Excluding the occasional store-bought instruments, they're constructed from the booty of one hundred yard sales: an assortment of bottles, thread spools, corks and bits of metal. Triggering them is a maze of weights, spindles, vibrating speaker-cones, makeshift driveshafts, and even used computer disks... <more>

SWARMIUS:

This summer, the edgy San Diego-based quartet SWARMIUS made its debut performances in Germany, Slovenia, and Italy. Although they have yet to perform locally, SWARMIUS is breathing new life into the ideas surrounding classical chamber music performance. Comprised of Todd Rewoldt (saxophone), Felix Olschofka (violin), dancer/choreographer Joe Alter and composer/laptop performer Joseph Waters, the quartet is committed to creating a contemporary classical music and contemporary dance that reflects and connects to the music in the streets, clubs and intimate hideaways of today's world. Each of SWARMIUS' members is a virtuoso in their own right.

The youngest members of the group, both barely thirty, are Rewoldt (aka SAXIMUS) and Olschofka (aka Fiddlus). Rewoldt, the quartets' saxophonist, completed his Doctorate in Saxophone performance at the unheard of age of 26 at the prestigious Eastman School of Music. Felix "Fiddlus" Olschofka was a recording artist at the age of fourteen and was a star at the renowned Berliner Hochschule für Musik (Germany's best conservatory). He performed for the president of Germany at age nineteen, and concertized widely across Europe as a teenage prodigy...<more>

Bradford Reed:

Bradford Reed never fails to entertain and inspire. This New York based composer, performer and producer fights and tames the pencilina, an instrument that he created, and describes as "an electric ten-stringed collision of the hammer dulcimer, slide guitar, koto and fretless bass, with six pickups of varied types". Bradford has played the pencilina, drums and keyboards with King Missile, and played the electric zither in the Blue Man Groups' band in their lauded off Broadway show, 'Tubes' for eight years. He has also worked with 'Failure and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life', producing their latest albums on Shimmy Disc/Knitting Factory Records. Reed has appeared with his pencilina on MTV, USA networks' 'Up All Night', Fox Televisions' Sound F/X, and the Tonight Show, and has toured throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. <more>

White Rainbow:

White Rainbow is Portland-based musician and artist Adam Forkner, a veteran music composer/producer who creates both audio/visual installations and live performances that challenge the definitions of modern music and turn it into something musically rewarding for even the most discerning indie fan. Listeners will recognize Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor! as musical cousins; electronically minded ears will hear Pan Sonic and Fridge. Forkner works digitally and acoustically, feeding his guitar through a baffling series of pedals and mixers, adding computer-generated noises, and sprinkling some live tinkling bells here and there. Creating an astute balance of rhythm and lyricism, warm noise and melody, live sounds and digital, and sometimes adding visuals and featured soloists to the audio soup, Forkner's vision of music is one that re-examines and re-casts the context and meaning of underground music. <more>

NWEAMO will also be presenting festivals this year in San Diego, Ca., and New York City, featuring many, many more composers and performers both similar and divergent in form and spirit from those profiled above. For more information, please check out our official website: http://www.nweamo.org

We look forward to seeing you at the show!!

Buy tickets now at: Tickets West