PROJECTS

Wrack | EKG | shudder | gasps & fissures | LOZENGE

Wrack

"This is not your typical jazz or improvised music record and for the sheer adventure of it all, as well as the chance to enjoy some accomplished Chicagoans (and one now ex-Chicagoan, the leader), it is a worthy taste of several considerable talents." (Jay Collins, One Final Note)

With Jason Stein (bass clarinet), Jen Clare Paulson (viola), Anton Hatwich (bass), and Tim Daisy (percussion). Wrack is both a chamber ensemble with a highly unusual instrumentation and a book of compositions tailor-made for the musical personalities of its members. While the compositions' melodic and contrapuntal content is reminiscent of European classical modernism, the open structures, improvisational procedures and energetic performances are heavily indebted to the innovations of the African-American Creative Music tradition. Wrack's debut record on Red Toucan (with Kurt Johnson on bass, omitting Stein and adding Jeb Bishop on trombone) demonstrated the band's "ability to combine turned-up flame with clear-headed attention to texture and space" and was hailed as "a document of exciting new directions from some of Chicago's best players." (Jason Bivins, Dusted Magazine)

EKG

"EKG is capable of a langorous lyricism, while in other cases this tendency is willfully crushed and ground down into a gritty landscape of fine-grained glass and silt. Open and inviting tones draw the listener in at the same time tenser noisy outbursts work to alienate. Tightly controlled grainy textures splutter to life and dissolve into hovering drones . . . the effect is of an irregular pendulum's swing - a fevered and woozy oscillation through tension and release." (Steve Rybicki, Fake Jazz)

EKG is a collaborative electroacoustic duo with Ernst Karel (trumpet and analog electronics). The music is situated between acoustic and electronic, improvised and premeditated, disruptive and meditative; it crackles and hums with precariously restrained potential energy. Combining traditional and extended wind techniques with anachronistic electronic processing, EKG carefully sculpts a bizarre yet organic soundworld of shifting tones, sudden and creeping textures, elusive suggestions of possible melody, and microscopic noise.

Visit the EKG website.

shudder

With Lance Grabmiller (laptop, audiomulch) and Phillip Greenlief (tenor saxophone, Bb clarinet). shudder employs improvisation, composition, and deep listening in the service of an assertive minimalism, mining the intersection of digital and carbon-based sound. The horns emphasize fractured drones and complex textures highly informed by electronic music, while Grabmiller's dual role as sound generator and real-time processor creates an interactive, unstable hall of mirrors.

The three first played together in felicitous settings at a 2003 Matt Gonzales for Mayor (SF) fundraiser (thanks to Ernesto Diaz-Infante) and at the 2004 Big Sur Festival of Experimental Music. The grouping became official in late 2004, going on to participate in the 2006 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, tour the northeastern US, and perform regularly in the Bay Area. Their debut full length album is currently in need of a loving home.

Visit shudder on myspace.

Gasps & Fissures

"Bruckmann's classical and jazz influences are stripped down and dissected, resulting in music that's as much electronic as it is either of the aforementioned styles. Gasps & Fissures inhabits the areas in between these territories, not straddling them so much as existing deep in the cracks, where many wouldn't even think to look. Like a slide of single-celled organisms bursting to life under a microscope, this album finds flourishing life in the most unexpected of places." (Adam Strohm, Dusted magazine)

LOZENGE

". . . one of the most criminally underrated outfits in alt.rock" (Dan Warburton, Signal to Noise)

With an instrumentation of electric accordion, analog synthesizers, bass, and four-handed junkyard percussion, the music of LOZENGE flails in the perimeters of postpunk rock excess. While active in Houston from 1992-94 and in Chicago from 1996-2003, the constant core membership of Bruckmann, Kurt Johnson, Philip Montoro, and Mark Stevens (once augmented by the now dearly departed John Robbins and occasionally joined by the very-much-alive Boris Hauf) carved out an idiosyncratic aesthetic of sensory overstimulation, poly-/a-/hyper-rhythmic propulsion, labyrinthine black humor, and tooth-rattling timbral density. In performance, LOZENGE aspires to the transformative joy of extreme energy expenditure and collective self-immolation. Let the record state that LOZENGE, despite being enfeebled old men currently dispersed across the United States, will reconvene for performances at the drop of a hat, provided said hat is filled with such means as to make the venture logistically viable and economically sustainable.

Visit the LOZENGE website.