John Berndt: Upcoming Performances
Friday, May 8th
John Berndt performing as part of Matana Roberts "Coin Coin" composition
www.redroom.org, Baltimore
Sunday, May 16th
John Berndt: "Three Algorithms: Strange connections between formal logic, disoriented experience, and experimental music." Lecture with concert.
Megapolis Festival, Baltimore
Saturday, May 22nd
John Berndt with Janel Leppin Group
at The Hexagon, Baltimore
Tuesday, May 25th
John Berndt (sax), Zach Branch (cello), Jon Rogerson (guitar), Will Redman (drums )
Out of Your Head Series
The Wind Up Space, Baltimore
Saturday, May 29th
DEADMIX DANCEBEAT
Baltimore old-school Relabi dance partyw/DJ Berndt & others
at The Hexagon, Baltimore
Showing posts with label John Berndt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Berndt. Show all posts
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
John Berndt in Boston
Performing in Boston this Thursday!
John Berndt: solo saxophone + Matt Samolis- flute, Joe Burgio- movement, Paul Erlich- microtonal guitars, John Voigt- bass, Katt Hernandez- violin
8PM, Thu Mar 25, 369 Congress St, Boston, 7th floor
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
John Berndt "Ecstatic Thought Experiments" opens big at Emily Harvey, Soho, NYC
Congratulations to John Berndt and the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery on the very successful opening of "Ecstatic Thought Experiments, 1989 - 2009".
Opening night saw over 500 people fill the gallery for music and art!
The show continues throughout this week with more music on Friday and Saturday.
Friday April 24th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of music by John Berndt and THUS, his 17-year long project with Neil Feather to invent a new idiom of music on original experimental instruments, with special guests.
John Berndt — solo acoustic and electronic saxophone
THUS (John Berndt and Neil Feather) — original music on original instruments
THUS with Michael Evans (drums) and special guests
Saturday April 25th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of solo and orchestral music featuring SECOND NATURE, a 15-person ensemble of virtuoso improvisers directed by Berndt, dedicated to the development of a new free improvisation musical ethic and aesthetic for the large group.
John Berndt — new electronic music compositions
Second Nature — improvised music, orchestral scale
Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery
537 Broadway at Spring Street - 2nd floor
New York, NY 10012
www.emilyharveyfoundation.org
Opening night saw over 500 people fill the gallery for music and art!
The show continues throughout this week with more music on Friday and Saturday.
Friday April 24th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of music by John Berndt and THUS, his 17-year long project with Neil Feather to invent a new idiom of music on original experimental instruments, with special guests.
John Berndt — solo acoustic and electronic saxophone
THUS (John Berndt and Neil Feather) — original music on original instruments
THUS with Michael Evans (drums) and special guests
Saturday April 25th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of solo and orchestral music featuring SECOND NATURE, a 15-person ensemble of virtuoso improvisers directed by Berndt, dedicated to the development of a new free improvisation musical ethic and aesthetic for the large group.
John Berndt — new electronic music compositions
Second Nature — improvised music, orchestral scale
Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery
537 Broadway at Spring Street - 2nd floor
New York, NY 10012
www.emilyharveyfoundation.org
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
John Berndt exhibition is Editors' Pick
John Berndt "Ecstatic Thought Experiments, 1989 - 2009" at The Emily Harvey Foundation is an EDITORS' PICK on Artcards NYC for Friday, April 17, 2009.
Monday, April 13, 2009
April 15 - April 30, John Berndt, Ecstatic Thought Experiments, 1989 - 2009
Official announcement from Emily Harvey Gallery:
April 15 - April 30, John Berndt, Ecstatic Thought Experiments, 1989 - 2009
Opening Reception and free concert: April 17, 7 - 10 pm
Performance Nights: April 24 & 25, 7 to 9 pm ($6 admission for each night)
This April, the Emily Harvey Foundation presents the first major retrospective of works by John Berndt (b. 1967). Berndt's vital and idiosyncratic cultural activity over the last thirty years has touched nearly every aspect of experimental culture. Best known to the public as a prolific musician, composer and improviser and as a key organizer in the scene around the international High Zero festival, Berndt's work from the very beginning also involved the creation of coherent novelties in a broader range of media, including personal behavior, film, visual art, text, installation and a variety of non-musical performance genres. Driven by his unique philosophy and collaborations, his panoramic sensibility is the subject of the show.
Hours: Tues - Sat. 2 - 6 pm
A series of performances by the artist, film-maker, writer, musician and second wave Neoist John Berndt, to coincide with his first retrospective exhibition. Berndt will be improvising with Elliot Sharp, Lukas Legetti, and Peter Zummo & Katt Hernandez amongst others. Events take place between 17 - 25 April. from Wire Magazine
More coverage in Networked Music Review.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
John Berndt NYC Experimental Concert Series
John Berndt NYC Experimental Concert Series
Three nights of music in Soho as part of the first retrospective gallery exhibition of works by the improviser, experimental composer, film-maker, writer, and installation artist John Berndt.
All taking place at:
Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery
537 Broadway at Spring Street - 2nd floor
New York, NY 10012
www.emilyharveyfoundation.org
Friday April 17th, 7PM-10PM, free
Opening reception and free concert. three very different collaborations between John Berndt and four legendary experimental improvisers.
John Berndt and Elliot Sharp — string delirium
John Berndt and Lukas Legetti — polymetric kaleidoscope syncopation
John Berndt, Peter Zummo, and Katt Hernandez — paradoxical dispersal music
Friday April 24th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of music by John Berndt and THUS, his 17-year long project with Neil Feather to invent a new idiom of music on original experimental instruments, with special guests.
John Berndt — solo acoustic and electronic saxophone
THUS (John Berndt and Neil Feather) — original music on original instruments
THUS with Michael Evans (drums) and special guests
Saturday April 25th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of solo and orchestral music featuring SECOND NATURE, a 15-person ensemble of virtuoso improvisers directed by Berndt, dedicated to the development of a new free improvisation musical ethic and aesthetic for the large group.
John Berndt — new electronic music compositions
Second Nature — improvised music, orchestral scale
About John Berndt
One of the more active experimental music performers on the East Coast for the past decade, John Berndt began his musical career by composing wildly abstract electro-acoustic and conceptual tape music in 1978 at the tender age of 11. His first compositions in this mode premiered on the radio at age 14, and by his late teens, he was active in an international cultural scene that included some of the most radical cultural activists of the 80's and 90's. From the beginning his work was singular, ranging over the disjoint subcultures of sound art, improvised music, industrial, musical instrument design, and language experimentation. His solo CDs are available on Stereosupremo (Italy), HereSee (Baltimore), Abstract On Black (Pittsburgh) and he has many published recordings of collaborations.
Berndt began as a composer with a distinctly "inhuman" style and severe set of conceptual preoccupations, but in an unusual development process expanded his sensibility in a variety of contradictory directions, such that his work today is so aesthetically varied as to seem the work of a number of unrelated artists. In 1991 Berndt had heard saxophonist Jack Wright, who became his saxophone teacher, and as a result began to focus on developing his abilities in spontaneous instrumental performance to a high degree. His rigorously strange aesthetic then broadened to incorporate lessons from a variety of clashing modalities: jazz, Indian and African music, and extreme modernist instrumental technique. In this transformation, he was also highly influenced by another collaborator and teacher, the philosopher Henry Flynt, whose critique of the western computational mind-set greatly enabled Berndt's own critical path.
Berndt has always had a wide range of intensive ensemble projects, many of which are only now receiving attention outside of Baltimore. Since 1992, his duo THUS with Neil Feather has produced an entirely unique idiom of "very strange" music on an orchestra of original instruments they invent. As a part of THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN, a quartet with Jack Wright, Michael Zerang, and Bob Marsh, Berndt participated in some of the most inspired "fast" free improvised music of the 90's. Today, he performs regularly with his groups DEATH IN THE MAZE (a post-reductionist chamber improvisation ensemble), GEODESIC GNOME (a super-group performing Berndt's "Impossible" conceptual compositions), directs SECOND NATURE (Baltimore's 16 performer free improvisation orchestra) and recently participated in EXPLODING GARDENS (a post-jazz composers collective with Katt Hernandez, Gordon Beeferman, and Will Redman). He is also a hired gun performer occasionally with the well known electronic group MATMOS.
Three nights of music in Soho as part of the first retrospective gallery exhibition of works by the improviser, experimental composer, film-maker, writer, and installation artist John Berndt.
All taking place at:
Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery
537 Broadway at Spring Street - 2nd floor
New York, NY 10012
www.emilyharveyfoundation.org
Friday April 17th, 7PM-10PM, free
Opening reception and free concert. three very different collaborations between John Berndt and four legendary experimental improvisers.
John Berndt and Elliot Sharp — string delirium
John Berndt and Lukas Legetti — polymetric kaleidoscope syncopation
John Berndt, Peter Zummo, and Katt Hernandez — paradoxical dispersal music
Friday April 24th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of music by John Berndt and THUS, his 17-year long project with Neil Feather to invent a new idiom of music on original experimental instruments, with special guests.
John Berndt — solo acoustic and electronic saxophone
THUS (John Berndt and Neil Feather) — original music on original instruments
THUS with Michael Evans (drums) and special guests
Saturday April 25th, 7PM-9PM, $6
A night of solo and orchestral music featuring SECOND NATURE, a 15-person ensemble of virtuoso improvisers directed by Berndt, dedicated to the development of a new free improvisation musical ethic and aesthetic for the large group.
John Berndt — new electronic music compositions
Second Nature — improvised music, orchestral scale
About John Berndt
One of the more active experimental music performers on the East Coast for the past decade, John Berndt began his musical career by composing wildly abstract electro-acoustic and conceptual tape music in 1978 at the tender age of 11. His first compositions in this mode premiered on the radio at age 14, and by his late teens, he was active in an international cultural scene that included some of the most radical cultural activists of the 80's and 90's. From the beginning his work was singular, ranging over the disjoint subcultures of sound art, improvised music, industrial, musical instrument design, and language experimentation. His solo CDs are available on Stereosupremo (Italy), HereSee (Baltimore), Abstract On Black (Pittsburgh) and he has many published recordings of collaborations.
Berndt began as a composer with a distinctly "inhuman" style and severe set of conceptual preoccupations, but in an unusual development process expanded his sensibility in a variety of contradictory directions, such that his work today is so aesthetically varied as to seem the work of a number of unrelated artists. In 1991 Berndt had heard saxophonist Jack Wright, who became his saxophone teacher, and as a result began to focus on developing his abilities in spontaneous instrumental performance to a high degree. His rigorously strange aesthetic then broadened to incorporate lessons from a variety of clashing modalities: jazz, Indian and African music, and extreme modernist instrumental technique. In this transformation, he was also highly influenced by another collaborator and teacher, the philosopher Henry Flynt, whose critique of the western computational mind-set greatly enabled Berndt's own critical path.
Berndt has always had a wide range of intensive ensemble projects, many of which are only now receiving attention outside of Baltimore. Since 1992, his duo THUS with Neil Feather has produced an entirely unique idiom of "very strange" music on an orchestra of original instruments they invent. As a part of THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN, a quartet with Jack Wright, Michael Zerang, and Bob Marsh, Berndt participated in some of the most inspired "fast" free improvised music of the 90's. Today, he performs regularly with his groups DEATH IN THE MAZE (a post-reductionist chamber improvisation ensemble), GEODESIC GNOME (a super-group performing Berndt's "Impossible" conceptual compositions), directs SECOND NATURE (Baltimore's 16 performer free improvisation orchestra) and recently participated in EXPLODING GARDENS (a post-jazz composers collective with Katt Hernandez, Gordon Beeferman, and Will Redman). He is also a hired gun performer occasionally with the well known electronic group MATMOS.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Retrospective of Works by John Berndt at Emily Harvey Foundation, Soho NYC
Ecstatic Thought Experiments, 1989 – 2009
A Retrospective of Auditory, Visual, Tactile and Language Works by John Berndt
Wednesday April 15th – Thursday April 30th
Open Tuesday – Saturday, 2PM – 6PM
Opening reception and free concert: Friday April 17th, 7PM-10PM
Performance Nights: Friday April 24th and Saturday April 25th, 7PM-9PM
($6 admission for each night)
Emily Harvey Foundation (Gallery)
537 Broadway at Spring Street - 2nd floor
New York, NY 10012
www.emilyharveyfoundation.org
The Emily Harvey Foundation presents the first major retrospective of works by John Berndt (b. 1967). Best known as a prolific musician, composer, and improviser as well as a key organizer in the scene surrounding the international High Zero festival, from the very beginning Berndt’s work also has involved the creation of coherent novelties in a broader range of media, including personal behavior, film, visual art, text, installation and a variety of non-musical performance genres. This panoramic sensibility is the subject of the show.
As a teenager in the mid-80s, Berndt became the youngest member of the international Neoist movement, contributing as a core member to the development of its philosophy adopting falsehoods, mythologies, mind games, and hoaxes. In the early 90’s, Berndt became a student of Henry Flynt, the visionary philosopher and original author of “Concept Art”. This relationship, which has recently deepened into collaboration, had a huge effect on the clarification of Berndt’s thought, and led to an increased emphasis on writing sincere philosophy, and framing his varied activities as manifestations of a unified, radical sensibility of consciousness. At the same time, Berndt became a student of world-renowned avant-garde saxophonist Jack Wright and of experimental instrument inventor Neil Feather. Through these relationships, he dramatically broadened his approach, developing extended technical ability on a variety of instruments, and developing novel approaches to sound production becoming an advocate of non-idiomatic, freely improvised music and performing in hundreds of freely improvised concerts and on many recordings, including collaborations with leading figures.
In Ecstatic Thought Experiments, 1989 – 2009, the Emily Harvey Foundation brings together the dimensions of Berndt’s work over a twenty year period, ranging from micro- to macro- experiences. A large installation submerges visitors in a uniquely disorienting visual space. A small book, made especially for the exhibit, contains descriptions of impossible objects. Novel optical illusions give the visitor new experiences. A dance solo continues fluidly forever without repeating. Original instruments expose new aesthetics and performance possibilities. Theoretical texts frame lived experience in ways that are destabilizing to faith in conventional knowledge.
The exhibit is also enriched by three nights of concerts, covering a broad range of Berndt’s solo and collaborative projects, starting with an opening concert on Friday April 17th, and continuing with two nights on April 24th and 25th.
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