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

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.

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.

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.

Ehse Records set to release new LP by Baltimore’s Needle Gun

Ehse Records set to release new LP by Baltimore’s Needle Gun

Hailing from Baltimore, MD, Needle Gun is an avant-free-noise-punkish outfit equal parts Jack Patterson, Max Eilbacher, Gram Hummell, and Mike Allison.

The group has been playing since the summer of 2006 and has released several platters on local and DIY labels. The latest release -- an energetic, noisy, and challenging full-length LP on Ehse Records (Harrius, Snacks, Little Howlin’ Wolf, Blaster Al Ackerman) -- was recorded at Diamond Eyes Studio and was produced by Twig Harper of Nautical Almanac.

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' NOW AVAILABLE from Ehse Records

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' Soundtrack now available in LP format from Ehse Records.

"Some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself." -- Arthur Magazine

Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando release the soundtrack for their experimental Western featuring a 70-year old female gunslinger seeking redemption.

"...discrete passages that vary between ominous guitar drone, suggesting rumbling thunder, drizzled with piano melody; solemn monastic chant; cryptic tape manipulation; and H0 scale clatter. This is just in the record's first 10 minutes." -- City Paper

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.

Blast from the Past: Review of Harrius' 'Enter the Cotton Ring' (2007) from KFJC FM

Harrius - “Enter The Cotton Ring ” - [Ehse]

Jenny Graf Sheppard (Metalux) and Chiara Giovando are the mistressminds behind Harrius. This is a bizarre dream of a record, indeed “Ringer’s Glove” sort of reminded me of the sleep sequences from the outstanding film, “The Manuscript Found At Saragoss.” Something about the succubus sounds and the tick-tock plunking percussion re-conjured up images of drinking from a skull. Indeed the music here is allegedly from an unsound soundtrack to a “psychedelic Western recently shot in the Badlands” (and that’s straight out of the horse’s web site). The title track is a sort of ladies lost in the canyon free-fall-folk ditty. “The Wedding Ring” has many bands, chopped and wobbly bands of sound. “L’OK” feels like a small slice of Fursaxa heaven. “Ebolatime” has a low rumble guitar and more voice-acting song could be a cross between Obuh records and Mauve Sideshow… but really this is willfully weirdly its own brand of wonder! “Proud Flesh” works a deep subconscious rupture…like a blood vessel mic’d up to volcano level? Lastly “Uppera” is another oddly divine number, like angels pacing back and forth in some scrambled universe. And then a very faint looked groove at the end! This is a fantastic twisted, yet intricately so, release! Do not miss!

- Thurston Hunger

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' Movie Trailer

It is 1886 in South Dakota, and Harrius, a 70-year old wounded wanderer, seeks redemption. Through her encounters with a parched landscape and beings both physical and metaphysical (including a virtual labyrinth of mounds, geisha dancers and her pious lace-maker double, Alma), Proud Flesh is no mere re-visioning of the American Western. It is a meditation on the iconography and gestures contained within the genre itself. -- Jenny Graf Sheppard / IMDb

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' reviewed in Arthur / Feb 09

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' reviewed in Arthur.

It’s a beautiful thing, made from a private, internal symbolic system and some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself.

Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' reviewed in City Paper / Jan 09

City Paper review of Harrius' 'Proud Flesh' Soundtrack

Knowing that the score's creator, Harrius (Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando), is the main duo behind the movie helps explain why this record makes so much sense, why it feels so, well, cinematic, functioning as its own taut, affecting narrative. It starts in quick successions of beeps/squeaks, like a computer rendered chew toy. It gives way to a brief, lovely verse of traditional vocal folk , which is abruptly cut off by a percussive blast (gunshot, perhaps). Those vocals return throughout the 35 minute composition, breaking up discrete passages that vary between ominous guitar drone, suggesting rumbling thunder, drizzled with piano melody; solemn monastic chant; cryptic tape manipulation; and H0 scale clatter. This is just in the record's first 10 minutes.

Harrius: 'Proud Flesh' -- New LP Release on Ehse Records

Harrius -- the musical duo comprised of artists Jenny Gräf Sheppard (of Metalux) and Chiara Giovando -- has recorded a sound program for the film 'Proud Flesh', also directed and produced by the pair. It will be released on February 24, 2009 by Baltimore’s Ehse Records (www.ehserecords.com ).

“'Proud Flesh' is the sound program to a movie of the same name by Chiara Giovando and Jenny Graf Sheppard. The film was shot largely in the South Dakota Badlands and stars the artists' mothers. An introspective study of the balance between wilderness and civilization within individuals and groups, it is comprised of a set of personal symbols, textural, behavioral, topographic, and through the casting of friends and family members who make up the cast, both archetypal in a way that is drawn from direct human relationships. Like the film, the sound that adjoins it is a gauzy world of private experiences interwoven into a taut narrative, something far more alien and beautiful than you're used to hearing on a record. There are references to American-ness; there are unexpected and intuitive structural leaps; there is the strong sense of something awry and rebalanced by the anxiety which results from it; there is a sense of vast and difficult terrain, through the sheer variety of sounds of styles of ordering them. But it's all finely wrought with lacemakers’ hands, and the result is something stunning that I don't quite have a handle on, and for the sake of a respect for wonder, I'll keep it that way.”
-Ian Nagoski, Baltimore

“Consider it 'Persona' by way of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergio Corbucci, scored to hybridized folk music that bleeds into disorienting drones.” - City Paper