Coaxial
1815 S. Main St.
Los Angeles, CA 90015
VOLUME is pleased to announce Roarke Menzies (NYC) and Samson Stilwell (Portland, OR) will join Los Angeles-mainstays Sam Rowell and Gabie Strong at Coaxial for the southernmost stop of their West Coast tour.
Menzies returns to Los Angeles to celebrate the night of his fourth solo record’s release, Breath’s Length. The work for amplified voice, loop station, and audio effects considers both the indeterminate length of a breath and the indeterminate length of time one has left to breathe (i.e. to be alive), attempting to poetically extend each with technological assistance. This will be the first Los Angeles performance for Stilwell, whose 2017 debut release Signals navigates the threshold between experience and interpretation, exploring the mutability of sound through field recordings, synthesizer, and software.
About the Artists
Roarke Menzies is a New York City-based artist and composer who uses his voice, mouth and body, along with audio hardware, software and field recordings, to create electronic and electroacoustic sound works. His music has been described by The New Yorker as “a layered electronic throb, coming and going, always enhancing but never overpowering.”
Menzies’s work has been presented at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City, the Spring Break Art Show in New York City, the Untitled Art Fair in Miami, VOLUME in Los Angeles, CHANNEL in Toronto, the Knockdown Center in Queens, and many others. His music has also been presented on WNYU’s Bentwave FM, KFFP Freeform Portland, KCHUNG Radio, and BBC Radio 3 as part of the series “New Year New Music: exploring iconic masterpieces, avant-garde experiments and the next generation of talent.”
Menzies is releasing his fourth solo recording, Breath’s Length, on his own Coup de Glotte label in June 2017. In a recent profile, Musicworks Magazine described his recorded output as “a consistently compelling collection… Menzies has developed his own take on this rich sonic stream, emphasizing his own voice as the primary signal for processing.”
In addition to performing and recording, Menzies has created scores for contemporary dance, performance and installation, as well as content for games, television and film, with work appearing in the New Museum, the Kitchen, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Watermill Center, the Tribeca Film Festival, IFC Films, VICE Media, the American Dance Institute, the Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, and many others.
Sam Rowell is a musician, creative broadcaster, and investigator of sonic phenomenon.
She is the bass player in longform improv project Eloe Omoe and curates the radio program Special Collections on KCHUNG. She also performed as an ensemble musician with the likes of Richard Lerman, Keith Rowe, and Nick Hennies.
This performance features her work as a researcher of photosonic technologies. Concentrating on the confluence of light and sound within the aesthetic, scientific, and visceral planes, she combines analog audio signal with an immersive color field experience that is at once challenging and meditative.
Samson Stilwell is a Portland, OR based sound artist and musician. He works with modular synthesizers, field recordings, and software to create electroacoustic compositions that explore the liminality or between spaces of language and sound, physicality and interiority. His first album Signals was released by Sounds et al in May, 2017.
Gabie Strong is a California artist and musician exploring spatial constructions of degeneration, drone and decay as a means to improvise new arrangements of self-reflexive meaning. Strong uses sound performance, radio broadcasting, environmental installation and video as a mediums for experimentation. Current themes in her work address the use of ritual incantation for revealing feminine knowledge.
In 2016 Strong launched the Crystalline Morphologies music label to release work referencing the mineralogical process of crystal growth – the process by which organic materials take shape under the influence of environment and time. As a musical concept, it speaks to the self-reflexive dialectic formed between structured composition and improvisational acts as they unfold over time. Strong hosts the experimental music program “Crystalline Morphologies” on Kchung Radio every Thursday night from 7-8pm pacific time.
Her work has been presented at The UCLA Hammer Museum, Sierra Nevada College, Current LA: KPARK, MOCA, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, Knowledges at Mount Wilson Observatory, Pitzer Art Galleries, University Art Gallery UC Irvine, LAXArt, Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Human Resources, SASSAS, LACE, High Desert Test Sites, LACMA, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and Jabberjaw.
