Beth Custer -/+ Joe Lasqo -/+ Thomas Dimuzio @ Duende, Oakland, 15 May 2014
I’m excited to once again play at the unique venue which Chef Paul Canales and impresario Rocco Somazzi have made into an essential gathering place to enjoy exquisite Basque pintxos & the best of the Bay Area’s jazz and creative music – Duende (468 19th Street, Oakland – map). Showtime is 9pm, Thu 15 May.
Duende
I’m delighted as well to be playing with two of the Bay Area’s most unique and unclassifiable musicians, clarinetist, vocalist, and composer, Beth Custer, and synthesizer sifu (師傅) Thomas Dimuzio, as part of Thomas’ notorious Gench Music Series
A sequence of typical quantum eigenvectors for the quantum map (Nodal domain statistics for quantum chaotic maps, by J.P. Keating, J. Marklof and I.G. Williams, New J. Phys. 10 (2008) 083023)
We’re planning a varied evening of trio and solo work that will splatter sonic possibilities all over the quantum map into alternate universes where our musical triangle can have many more than three vertices.
Putative SLE trace from an eigenfunction of the quantum map (Nodal domain statistics for quantum chaotic maps, by J.P. Keating, J. Marklof and I.G. Williams, New J. Phys. 10 (2008) 083023)
Beth Custer (Photo - Anne Hamersky)
Beth Custer is a San Francisco based composer, clarinetist, vocalist, bandleader, and the proprietor of BC Records.
An original member of the Club Foot Orchestra, a trailblazing ensemble who pioneered scoring and performing with silent films (Pandora’s Box, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis, etc.), Beth is also a founding member of the 4th-world ensemble Trance Mission, the trip-hop duo Eighty Mile Beach, and leads the quartet of esteemed jazz clarinetists Clarinet Thing, as well as The Beth Custer Ensemble. The Pacific Film Archive commissioned Beth to compose a live score for My Grandmother / ჩემი ბებია / Моя Бабушка, a rare Soviet film, which she toured internationally in Russia, Czech Republic, Ireland, and England, supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding and Mid Atlantic Arts Fund awards.
Beth Custer performs "For the Grace of Any Man" at the Red House Speak Easy, San Francisco, June 2012
She composes for theatre, film, dance, television, installations and the concert stage and has created scores for the contemporary chamber ensembles Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Zeitgeist, Earplay, City Winds, + Turtle Island and Kronos String Quartets; for the theatre productions of Campo Santo Theatre, Berkeley and San Diego Repertory Theatre, Magic Theatre, California Shakespeare, Overtone Industries, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, and Cornerstone Theatre; for dancers and troupes Joe Goode Performance Group, Flyaway Productions, Osseus Labyrinth, AXIS Dance Company, and butō (舞踏) masters Harupin Ha (ハルピン派), Koichi Tamano (玉野黄市) and Ledoh (レドー). Her score for JGPG’s The Maverick Strain, which won an Isadora Duncan Award, excerpts enjoyed a run at the Joyce Theater in NYC during April ’09.
Beth created KQED’s Independent View theme with her band Eighty Mile Beach and composed for CBS/Film Roman’s Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat with Club Foot Orchestra, as well as creating music for the films of Cathy Lee Crane, Melinda Stone, Betsy Bayha, Julie Wyman, George Spies, Karina Epperlein, Will Zavala, Peter MacCandless, and Koohan Paik (박구한). Beth created four musicals with award winning writer Octavio Solis in LA & SF, and her collaborative scores with inventor and MacArthur Fellow Trimpin led her to compose Vinculum Symphony, a site-specific, large-scale work that unites chamber musicians with experimental instrument builders.
Stephen Kent and Beth Custer perform in the Sanctuary of Dawn at the Garden of Memory event, Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, 21 Jun 2012
Beth has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists including inventor Trimpin; artists Vladimir Kokolia and Billie Grace Lynn; musicians Stephen Kent, Fred Frith, Miya Masaoka (正岡みや), Joan Jeanrenaud, Amy Denio, Tin Hat, Tango № 9, Pamela Z, Will Bernard, Sex Mob, John Schott, Grassy Knoll, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Violent Femmes, J.A. Deane, the late, great Snakefinger, Greg Goodman, William Cepeda, Elaine Buckholtz, Mark Eitzel, Penelope Houston, Anna Homler, Ollin, and Connie Champagne.
She has over 35 recordings out with her ensembles Eighty Mile Beach, Clarinet Thing, Trance Mission, The Beth Custer Ensemble and Club Foot Orchestra.
Head LIght by Trance Mission (Beth Custer: clarinets/trumpet/voice, Stephen Kent: didjeridu/percussion/cello, John Loose: multi-ethnic drums/samples, Kenneth Newby: Asian winds/percussion/digital atmospheres)
With such a creative explosion, it’s very hard to pick particular jewels out of the box, but Beth’s pathbreaking work with Trance Mission holds special significance for me as a musician integrating non-Western and Western musics, and the sparkling, sensuous tracks of Head Light are a wonderful place to hear the most disparate of world-musical elements click together as if they’d been designed to from the start.
Thomas Dimuzio
Thomas Dimuzio is a composer, multi-instrumentalist & electronic musician, mastering engineer, sound designer, and label proprietor also based in San Francisco.
Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and looping techniques to create compelling works, Thomas is a true sonic alchemist who can seemingly create music events out of almost anything. Listed sound sources on his various CDs include everything from ‘modified 10 speed bicycle’ and ‘resonating water pipe’ to short-wave radios, loops, feedback, samplers, and even normal instruments such as clarinet and trumpet, while his current work is facilitated by the deep expanses of modular synthesis.
His use of signal processing, custom crossfade looping and algorithmic mixing fuels a synergy of man and machine in his live performances, while intercepted signal feeds from collaborators, wild sources of MIDI-controlled feedback, modular synthesizers, circuit-bent toys, and/or ambient microphones on the streets, etc. become integrated as sound sources within his system of live interactive electronics, effortlessly moving from electroacoustic and noise to glitch, dark ambient, improv and drone.
Thomas Dimuzio
In his work as a sound designer, Thomas has worked with a number of synthesizer and processor manufacturers such as Kurzweil, Lexicon, and OSC to create custom presets and sample libraries, and he has collaborated with Fred Frith, Thomas Cora, and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet to create sound libraries for Rarefaction and Big Fish Audio. Thomas also continues to play a key role in the development of Avid’s industry standard Pro Tools HD recording and mixing system, as he has for the past 20 years.
As a collaborator, Thomas works with numerous artists and ensembles such as Dimmer (with Joseph Hammer), Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Dan Burke/Illusion of Safety, Nick Didkovsky, ISIS, Negativland, Arcane Device (David Lee Myers), Matmos, Wobbly (Jon Leidecker), Poptastic, 5uu’s, Tom Cora, Mickey Hart, Paul Haslinger, Arte Saxophone Quartett, Due Process, and Voice Of Eye.
Thomas Dimuzio
As a mastering engineer, Thomas has worked with independent artists and labels through his own Gench Studios since the early 1990’s. Among his clients are Matmos, Negativland, ISIS, AMM, Captain Ahab, Doctor Nerve, Psychic TV3, Xiu Xiu, Devin Hoff, GG Allin, KK Null (Kazuyuki Kishino / 岸野 一之), Joey P, Fred Frith, Scott Amendola, and many others.
Thomas Dimuzio’s recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun, Sonoris, Drone, Record Label Records, Odd Size, and other independent labels.
Sonicism, electronic masterpiece by Thomas Dimuzio
Among a profusion of gem-like albums, the one I’ve been listening to the most recently is the double CD masterwork Sonicism, a jewel of many dark and glittering facets.
Joe Lasqo & Morgana perform w Jim Ryan's Green Alembic in the sfSoundSalonSeries at Center for New Music, San Francisco, 15 Apr 2014 (Photo by Carly Hoopes)
It’s my great pleasure and honor to join these eminent colleagues for your listening pleasure.
Join us for a remarkable night of electronic space exploration, reed/vocal virtuosity, and meta-rāga trance in the most unlikely and exquisite of combinations at the warm, hospitable, hip, and in every sense delicious Duende.
Joe