A special evening of EVM : Electronic Visual Music
Featuring: Hookah, J3m5, Rex Bruce
Live visuals by Victor Acevedo
7:00-9:00PM * Admission: Free

7:30PM - Rex Bruce - glitch & drone
8:00PM - J3m5 - rhythmic-noise and/or glitch
8:30PM - Hookah - psychedelic soundscapes


Hookah

Hookah is a psychedelic band from Los Angeles formed in 2004. On this evening they will perform as a trio featuring Russel Chaput - guitar, tape loop effects (Anemone, Skylarks) Dave Foster - Theremin, guitar (Extra Fancy, Nudist Priest, Charmkin Rebellion, Clark, Sweet and Cruel) Warde Randall - synthesizers ( Cat Museum, Math Band, Clark, Sweet and Cruel) Usually their line-up also includes John Mortl - synthesizers (Math Band, Clark)

Hookah sees its enigmatic role in modern culture as a way to revisit and re-imagine ritual through improvisational sonic/visual performances. Hookah's live improvisations operate as abstract and hallucinogenic soundtracks for potential audio-visual dream-scapes.

Acevedo: I first met the founding members of Hookah, Warde Randall and John Mortl over 30 years ago. This was a few weeks before we collaborated on our first live audio-visual [AV] public performance as part of their two-person gallery exhibition at California State University, Los Angeles on September 30, 1987. At that time they were called the Math Band.

For this CSLA performance, I provided the visuals in the form of projected 35mm slides of my recent computer graphic artwork called the Ectoplasmic Kitchen series and we also projected a looped animation of Mandelbrot Set fractals by my colleague John Adamczyk, later to be known more widely as J-Walt.

Also on this evening, guitarists extraordinaires, Joe Baiza and Walt Menetrey shared the stage with Warde and John. The Math Band was the seminal unit that grew into Hookah, in the ensuing years.

This Math Band performance took place just a few hours before the October 1, 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake which hit parts of Southern California pretty hard the following morning. The haunting shamanistic audio-visual improvisational performance was sometimes referred to in retrospect as "The Earthquake Jam."

James Allen

James Allen received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2006, where he began an interdisciplinary studio practice. Since then, his multi-faceted approach has consisted of objects, painting, performance, products and sonic art. Known mostly for his Live PA act "J3M5", a hardware music performance that mixes circuit-bent devices and modified electronics. Stylistically the music falls anywhere between left field electronica, rhythmic-noise or glitch.

James's exposure in the scene spans many areas of media and the arts. His humble beginnings in scenic graffiti were the backdrop in Larry Clark's cult film "Teenage Caveman". Sculptures and video have been exhibited at the LA Municipal Art Gallery and Cal State University LA. His fashion design work with a small boutique company was featured twice in Vogue magazine. The OC Weekly has mentioned his J3M5 as one of the facilitators for the Santa Ana Noise Festival. The LA Weekly had interviewed him in a video about the Bridgetown DIY venue. Today James continues to release music on cassette, cd and vinyl. He also holds an artist residency at Sun Space.

Visualized Live Electronic Micro Genres

To witness a live PA set is an active experience where by the spectator is a participant. The time-based event occupies more than auditory senses, it is felt in the body and visual aspects unfold as a performer controls electronics. The visual stimulus is part of the receivership which arguably makes the act a less passive experience given its overall context. Music is feeling and the listener will bring his or her own thoughts to the work, a visual counter part is the catalyst weather it be contemplative or just entertainment.

To define an auditory and experiential practice one examines the interpersonal, intrapersonal and context. An audience shares subjective aspects; this socio-economic group is introjected collectively and the music makes these emotive qualities palpable. The visual accompaniment is often illustrated vividly with lighting, projections, media, or fashion. A specific social body is dependent on a certain tempo range, sequence, sample group, synthesizer and mix style. When a performer chooses instruments this inadvertently becomes a part of the visual pursuit.

Rex Bruce

Rex Bruce is the founder and director of Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and he is also a pioneer electronic musician having worked with modular synthesis in the 1970s. He studied with Morton Subotnick and other noteworthy contemporary composers. Recently using digital tools he has returned to explorations in music producing a body of work that could be described informally as 'Glitch and Drone.'

Bruce has been working with art and technology for almost four decades, distinguishing himself as an innovative artist, educator and curator working in a wide variety of computer related disciplines over the course of his career.

Victor Acevedo

Victor Acevedo is an artist best known for his digital work involving printmaking and photography. However, since 2007 his primary focus has been on video and producing visual music works. As an ongoing practice, he selects still images from the videos and makes them available as signed limited edition prints.

Acevedo is considered a desktop computer art pioneer as he was an early adopter of pre-Windows personal computers (IBM PC) to create fine art in the early 1980s. He now works primarily on the Apple OS platform. In 2012 Acevedo began using the software called VDMX to integrate real-time video work-flows into his audio-visual (AV) studio practice as well as LIVE performance.

He attended Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) majoring in Fine Art (1979-81) and later went on to teach at the School of Visual Arts in New York, in the BFA and MFA computer art departments (1997-2008.)

Acevedo has shown his work in over 125 group and solo art exhibitions in the U.S. and Internationally since 1982. His work has been featured in many (digital) art history books; most notably "Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation" (Tom Sito, MIT Press, 2013); "From Technological to Virtual Art" (Frank Popper, MIT Press 2007); "Art of the Digital Age" (Bruce Wands, Thames and Hudson, 2006.) His early geometrical 'surrealist' analogue media paintings and drawings were discussed in detail in "M.C. Escher's Legacy: A Centennial Celebration" (Doris Schattschneider & Michelle Emmer eds., Springer-Verlag 2002)

Exploring the (perceptual) implications of synesthesia* and cymatics as well as polyhedral geometry based on R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics, Acevedo's recent work investigates the intersection of electronic music, jazz and audio synthesis as in drone works or glitch/harmonic noise, with dynamic geometrical structure.

* This is 'synesthetic' phenomena only as referred to and implied by the tight-sync of motion graphic elements with sonic events on the video time-line.

This event will be video recorded by Tom Bartolac