an afternoon of curious music electronic press kiT
Curious Music Announces An Afternoon of Curious Music virtual festival
Event features new music, video and conversation with Curious Music artists. Festival launches the label’s engagement with outer/most and Dublab.
February 25th, 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Russ Curry, russ@curiousmusic.us
Title: An Afternoon of Curious Music
Artist: Various contributors
Format: Virtual festival (film)
Release Dates: Premieres Sunday, March 21st at 1:00 p.m. CST
An Afternoon of Curious Music
Dear Friend,
It is with great pleasure that we offer to you our first virtual festival - An Afternoon of Curious Music featuring Amanda Berlind, Bjarni Biering, Heavy Color, Kate St. John and Neill MacColl, Wobbly, Tim Story and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The event will stream on Sunday, March 21, 2021 at 11am PT / 1pm CT / 2pm ET in partnership with outer/most.
Afternoon is a beautiful and contemplative assemblage of thoughts and performances centered around the theme of curiosity, unavoidably inspired by recent circumstances. The program features a wealth of new material, most created specifically for the event, including a new video from Amanda Berlind, a new work from Kate St. John and Neill MaColl and a rare-as-a-hen’s-tooth new solo composition from Tim Story.
It is in this spirit of exploration, contemplation and inquisitiveness that we invite you to join us for An Afternoon of Curious Music.
Tickets and merch bundles on sale now at outermost.stream. Limited edition Curious Music T-Shirt is available exclusively with livestream ticket purchase.
Thanks so much for supporting independent music and musicians.
Russ Curry/Curious Music
ABOUT CURIOUS MUSIC
Curious Music was founded in 1988 by Russ Curry and “went to sleep” in 2001. After an extended period of dormancy, Curry rebooted the label in 2017, with a focus on creating unique, high-quality limited-edition vinyl, digital releases, virtual events, and museum exhibitions and installations. Releases include the work of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Tim Story, CM von Hausswolff, Kate St. John, Harold Budd, Heavy Color, Dieter Moebius and Dwight Ashley. Upcoming projects include the Curious Music debut album of Icelandic composer Bjarni Biering, the Curious Music debut album of Nashville-based experimental artist and composer Eve Maret and The Moebius Strips museum installation.
Our mission is to inspire and nurture the curious spirit.
PBS profile of Curious Music
ABOUT AMANDA BERLIND
Composer and visual artist Amanda Berlind recently completed a music commission for the contemporary classical ensemble Bang on a Can All-Stars (performed for the people’s commissioning fund concert), “Bird Chart”, which is included as a bonus track on the DL and CD versions of Green Cone. She is also working on commissions for composer-performers Yaz Lancaster and Andrew Noseworthy and is a contributor and grant writer for the experimental sound art publication Soap Ear.
Berlind received her Bachelor of Music in Music Theory and Composition from New York University (NYU) where she studied with composer Julia Wolfe (winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music). She also studied with composer Michel Merlet at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, in addition to studying sound spatialization at IRCAM (institut de recherché et coordination acoustique/musique) in Paris, France. She received the Robert Hirsch Memorial Award (2019); the Etchings Fellowship in Auvillar, France (2018); and the G.A.N.G. (Game Audio Network Guild) Scholarship at GameSoundCom (2017). She also was awarded the Alan Menken Scholarship, sponsored by composer Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), for her 2018 academic year at NYU.
She worked in an ice cream shop. But it was too cold.
Pom 3 from the album Green Cone by Amanda Berlind.
ABOUT BJARNI BIERING
Classically trained in traditional modes of score and technique, Bjarni disrupts the clean classicism of his sound with economically dispersed beats and delicately layered piano. He has developed a holistic style as a composer that merges sight and sound through the lens of human emotion. Bjarni revels both in the quiet, reverent solitude of composition and scoring, and the collaborative process - bringing a practical, unfussy artistry to his work with filmmakers, visual artists and musicians.
After training as a pianist, Bjarni immersed himself in composition, drawn to the endless creative potential of modern recording technology and the freedom of improvisation. His obsession with sound and composition began early, during his childhood in Reykjavík where he would sit in concert halls or in front of his parents’ hi-fi laboriously studying the sounds produced. He would spend endless hours at his piano or computer attempting to recreate, construct and deconstruct those sounds, his own melodies and the works of classical and contemporary composers. This construction and deconstruction can be heard in the music of the internal worlds he creates now, gently building and felling the passage of time and our human experience.
After completing his classical training, Bjarni spent a number of years playing keyboard and piano in various ensembles and bands across South Africa, the UK and the Nordics. But soon, he felt the need to return to his classical roots and studied his BA in Music Composition at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, and then on to the UK to do an MA in Composition at the University of Bristol. It was during his time in Bristol that his interest in film grew and he began studying, exploring and creating music for screen and other media.
He has scored feature films, documentaries, animations and shorts, as well as advertisements, and written production albums for EMI, Stereo Royal and No Sheet Music. Projects include The Karman Line, a BAFTA nominated short starring Olivia Colman and Having you, starring Anna Friel and Andrew Buchan.
from Bjarni Biering’s forthcoming album on Curious Music.
HEAVY COLOR
The modern-music ensemble Heavy Color was founded by composer-producers Ben Cohen and Sam Woldenberg. Their often surreal and cinematic compositions explore spiritual jazz, traditional music, electronic and avant-psychedelia. Their first album Arise Ye Spiritual Machine (2014) re-contextualized archival music in a modern beat-tape format. River Passage (2018), a collaboration with musicians in Eastern Congo that combines elements of Afrobeat, minimalist Electronica and futurist Hip Hop, spans physical environments, cultures and languages. The project began in May 2015 when Cohen and Akili Jackson (Radiant City Arts) traveled to the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as musical ambassadors for Earthwork Music. A three-year creative exchange led to the release of River Passage, a portion of the proceeds from the sales of which fund EDRC projects that support gender equity and fair wages for women in farming regions as well as an arts center for youth in the city of Bukavu that provides a safe space for teaching dance, recording technology skills and music lessons.
In 2020, Heavy Color was commissioned by the investigative journalism collective Public Herald to compose the score for Invisible Hand. Heavy Color will release Soft Light in 2021, a recombination of 70’s fusion, acoustic and electronic meditations in pattern-based music, and psychedelic pop.
A Theme For Standing Rock by Heavy Color from the album Music for the film Invisible Hand.
ABOUT HANS-JOACHIM ROEDELIUS
Austria-based German composer Hans-Joachim Roedelius has profoundly influenced generations of musicians in a career spanning more than a half-century and over 100 solo and collaborative recordings. From his groundbreaking duo Cluster with Dieter Moebius, to his genre-crossing solo works and collaborations with luminaries including Brian Eno, Roedelius is recognized as one of Europe’s most important sound pioneers. Equally at ease with the most abstract of electronics and the most evanescent of piano solos, Roedelius has exerted an indelible, global impact on ambient, electronic, experimental, and wholly undefinable genres of music.
Plural from Lunz 3 by Roedelius/Story
ABOUT KATE ST JOHN AND NEILL MACCOLL
Kate St John is a composer, arranger, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist (oboe, cor anglais, accordion, saxophone and piano). She is a founder member of The Dream Academy and Channel Light Vessel (with Bill Nelson & Roger Eno). She has two solo albums: Indescribable Night and Second Sight.
Tours and album credits include Van Morrison, The Waterboys. The Black Rider (Tom Waits), Philip Glass, Marianne Faithfull, Blur, Everything But The Girl, Richard Hawley and Phil Cunningham and XTC. Kate was MD for the late Hal Willner’s Rogues Gallery and Amarcord:Nino Rota concerts. She has done orchestral arrangements for Laura Marling and Kris Drever and strings arrangements for many other artists.
Neill MacColl is a composer, song-writer, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. He is the son of folk music legends Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl (writer of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Dirty Old Town) and a founder member of 80’s indie band The Bible. Tours include David Gray, Marianne Faithfull, James Yorkston, Jessie Buckley. Album credits include Steve Earl and the Pogues, David Gilmour, Nadine Shah, Roedelius. Production credits include Bombay Bicycle Club, Hafdis Huld and Kathryn William.
Kate and Neill have worked together on many multi-artist concerts including The Way To Blue Tribute to Nick Drake series, Blood & Roses: A tribute to Ewan MacColl and Bright Phoebus Revisited. They have produced two albums together for Marry Waterson and The Gift Band with Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy. They also work in Film providing on-set music. Recent productions include: Far From The Madding Crowd (2015) My Cousin Rachel (2017), The Little Stranger (2018), Dirt Music (2020), Wild Rose (2018-Neill), Black Narcissus TV series (2020-Kate). They have both performed and co-written songs on Peggy Seeger’s forthcoming new album First Farewell.
Dreaming Spires (with Roger Eno) from the album Second Sight by Kate St. John
TIM STORY
Grammy-nominated American composer Tim Story has been called “a master of electronic chamber music” (CD Review, USA), and a “true artist in the electronic medium” (Victory review, USA). Through three decades of influential recordings and live performances, Story’s unique blend of careful composition and innovative sound design has garnered a dedicated worldwide following.
A timelapse video of the setup of Tim Story's The Roedelius Cells installation at the Arnulf Rainer Museum in Baden Austria, 2019.
ABOUT WOBBLY
Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) makes electronic music. Recent collaborators include Negativland, Thurston Moore Group, Jennifer Walshe, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Cheryl Leonard, People Like Us, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Laetitia Sonami, Thomas Dimuzio, Tim Perkis & Xopher Davidson, Pamela Z, ROVA, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Tania Chen, Sue C., The Freddy McGuire Show and Sagan. His lectures on electronic & collage music have been presented at Mills, Stanford, Oxford, UC Berkeley / Davis / Santa Cruz, MACBA and Peabody Conservatory. In 2015, he inherited Negativland's long-running Over The Edge radio live mix program, broadcasting from Berkeley's KPFA FM.
Negativland - This is Not Normal
Participating Artists:
Amanda Berlind
Bjarni Biering
Heavy Color
Kate St John and Neill MacColl
Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Tim Story
Wobbly