MOSSWOOD SOUND SERIES
a weekly experimental sound series presented by sfSound every Sunday


mosswood chapel :: 3630 telegraph oakland ca :: 2 blocks from macarthur bart :: enter 2nd door on 37th st
masks recommended (performers will be unmasked)
$10-$25 sliding scale (cash & venmo accepted at door)
click here to purchase advance tickets ($20) online on eventbrite


sunday may 28, 2023 7p heglin + louchard / graves + er / michalak + looney + dimuzio
sunday june 11, 2023 7pm echo's bones / low bleeds
sunday june 18, 2023 7pm brett carson / john schott + cecilia e angelhart + ellen webb
sunday june 25, 2023 7pm nathan clevenger group / usufruct

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 SUNDAY MAY 28 2023  7pm  $10-$25

RON HEGLIN + RIC LOUCHARD
SARAH GRACE GRAVES + EDA ER
CRACKING THE SURFACE
(DAVID MICHALAK + SCOTT LOONEY + THOMAS DIMUZIO)






CRACKING THE SURFACE fuses Skatch, piano and live electronics while morphing, reversing and re-imagining music from electro-acoustic and noise to classical, dark ambient, drone and beyond. Skatchboxes, Skatchplates and Skatchplatters share timbres from the inside and outside of the piano as they’re electronically sampled, processed and reconstituted. Skatch flags flying high with love and respect for the legacy of inventor and CRACKING THE SURFACE co-founder, Tom Nunn.

Vocalists SARAH GRACE GRAVES and EDA ER build a narrative, aesthetic, and technical habitat for stories only they can tell.

RON HEGLIN and RIC LOUCHARD improvise delicate, emotive chamber music, filled with open spaces and some dense clusters. Ron speaks and sings in imagined languages, and Ric plays chromatic structures spaced widely to leave space for Ron’s voice. The music is liminal, intimate and generous.


THOMAS DIMUZIO (buchla synthesizer, live sampling) is a composer, musician, mastering engineer and label proprietor based in San Francisco. Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and studio techniques to create consistently compelling works, Dimuzio has earned a deserved reputation worldwide as an avant-garde sound artist in touch with the aesthetic pulse of time and technology. Effortlessly moving through various genres, Dimuzio's eclecticism bespeaks a career equally informed by profound dedication to his craft and collaborations with friends, artists and technologists alike. Among his collaborations include work with Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Matmos, Wobbly, DJ Qbert, Dan Burke, Paul Haslinger, Due Process, 5uu's and many others.

EDA ER, a native of Istanbul, is a composer, sound artist and singer currently based in San Francisco Bay Area. She primarily explores the potential of expressivity and narrativity in her music. Eda’s music evolved around exploring the possibilities of singing, composing, combining analogue and digital electronics, video, theatricality, and storytelling. She is interested in building augmented experiences centered on music by using multimedia tools. ​ ​She has had the pleasure of working as a composer with notable groups, musicians, organizations, and ensembles, including Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Multilarérale, Kugoni Trio, Hermes Ensemble, Hezarfen Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, Vertixe Sonora, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Nordic Trombone Quartet, Eco Ensemble, Nicolas Isherwood, Christine Cornwell, Tom Collier, IKSV International Theater Festival, Gaudeamus Festival, Festival Mixtur, Ikincikat, Mamut Art Project, Clout Theater, A corner in the world and Berika Collective. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the klank.ist, and besides composing and producing, she performs electronics, vocal and visuals. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition with a Designated Emphasis on New Media at the University of California, Berkeley in the Music Department, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) and BCNM (Berkeley Center for New Media).

Bay Area composer/vocalist SARAH GRACE GRAVES is a singer, composer, and improviser connecting the physical and emotional landscape of the performer with the inner life of the listener through intimate and rare uses of the voice. A composer by formation, she has spent the past several years building an experimental vocal practice mining layers of unstable vocal sounds and now works as a freelance composer- performer, drawing upon both pools of knowledge to compose music that is body-centered, person-centered, and site-specific.

RON HEGLIN is a Trombonist and vocalist exploring extended techniques on Trombone and Tuba and as a vocalist composing in real time spoken and sung imaginary sound language compositions in solo and ensemble (a kind of asemic composing). Among other studies he has studied North Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar Khan School,The Center For World Music,and with Pandit Pran Nath and is a long time participant in Bay Area music performances as well as performing internationally.

SCOTT LOONEY (piano, hyperpiano, electronics) has always been interested in the creation and performance of compelling sounds across a broad spectrum of contemporary, improvised, and experimental music. He has forged a signature style using the inside and outside of the piano, plucking strings, using metal implements and other quick preparations, in combination to playing the piano normally. He has also developed a flexible, expressive voice with electronics using Max/MSP which is as effective as his many piano textures. He has studied composition and improvisation with Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, David Rosenboom, Frederic Rzewski and Morton Subotnick.

RIC LOUCHARD is a composer, pianist and improvisor. He made four CDs of classical piano solos for children. He is proudest of a fan letter from a nurse at a preemie ward at a hospital in the Midwest telling him that his first CD, G’Night Wolfgang, was regularly being played for the babies there in their incubators. Ric’s improvisations tend to be very chromatic and range from spontaneous motivic compositions to waves of noise. Ric often tells true and surprisingly personal stories in his performances. Ric has been lucky to perform with local greats like Tim Perkis, Lisa Mezzacappa, Joshua Marshall, Roberto Gonzales, Monica Scott, John Worley, Diane Grubbe, Sarah Grace Graves and Jordan Glenn. Ric has been performing house concerts around the bay area lately and just finished a CD of one of the programs he likes to perform: "Slouching Towards Individuation".

DAVID MICHALAK (skatch, lap steel, phantom harp) is a filmmaker/photographer, musician and recording/mixing engineer living in San Francisco. Since 1978 he has operated "Earwax" selling rare records to support his 16mm production company "Eye-Full Films". Since 1995 Michalak has played and performed in various music ensembles including; Reel Change, Doctor Bob, Ghost In The House and T.D. Skatchit. Michalak's 16mm films have been shown at The No Nothing, The Victoria Thearter, The Castro, at Cannes and other unlikely venues. He received "The Best Skatchbox Player in the World Award" as part of the weekend long Skatch-Off Festival held in June, 2022.






 SUNDAY JUNE 11 2023  7pm  $10-$25

ECHO'S BONES
(SHELDON BROWN + AMBER LAMPRECT + JOSEPH NOBLE)
LOW BLEEDS
(JAY KORBER + RANDYLEE SUTHERLAND)





Pushing a duo of tenor saxophone & drums through the lineage of shearing notes / loud banging which produces a sonic contrast that teeters on the breaking point, LOW BLEEDS (JAY KORBER, tenor saxophone RANDYLEE SUTHERLAND, drums) chew upon the rigid boundaries of music and explore the total uninhibited free form. No deviation from raw direct performance.

ECHO'S BONES (SHELDON BROWN - Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Alto Flute, Bass Flute; AMBER LAMPRECT - Oboe, English Horn, Alto Flute; JOSEPH NOBLE - Flute, Alto Flute, Bass Flute) woodwind trio plays improvised music that has been described as “avant pastoralism in a chamber music mode”. Our music develops from the combined timbres of three different acoustic woodwind instruments blending, diverging and conversing, incorporating numerous musical traditions in free improvisational performances.

During the lockdown, a pattern started that has continued to this day: three musicians gathered regularly in a room filled with curly plants to play music together with zero plans, guiding points or directions. With such open parameters in place, they experimented with the sounds of our instruments and played with color, line and texture through free improvisation. The result was ECHO's BONES. Lately, they’ve come out of our living room and have been performing in book-adjacent venues around the Bay Area. They are honored to bring our complimentary flavors, counterpoints, splashes, grunts, squeaks, trills, haunting melodies, and fog horn blasts to Mosswood Chapel.


AMBER LAMPRECT, oboe, English horn, flutes. Besides Echo’s Bones, Amber is a member of The Red Room Orchestra, Marc and the Casuals, The Awesome Orchestra Collective, and does session work. She's performed with Sixto Rodriguez, Tony Danza, Jello Biafra, Bart Davenport, Noertker's Moxie, Mark Eitzel, The Vocal Arts Ensemble, The San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra, The Shotgun Players, Ted Brinkley’s big band ensembles, and many other groups. Recordings of her music have been used for films, radio, and samples for hip-hop.

SHELDON BROWN, clarinet and bass clarinet, alto and bass flutes, has been active on the Bay Area creative music scene for over 30 years. In 2014, he premiered his commissioned extended work, Blood of the Air, at SFJAZZ’s 32nd Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival, the studio recording being released in 2018. In 2019 he performed a set of his original big-band music at the Tabuleiro Jazz Festival in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He formed Sheldon Brown Group in 1996 to perform his original music. Sheldon Brown Group has performed at Yoshi’s, SFJazz and many other Bay Area venues. As a member Club Foot Orchestra he has composed and performed music for Club Foot’s scores for Pandora’s Box, Sherlock Jr. and others. He also performs or has performed with Omar Sosa, Anthony Braxton, Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Clarinet Thing, Ted Brinkley’s big band ensembles, Ben Golderg, and the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra.

JOSEPH NOBLE, flute, alto flute, bass flute. In addition to Echo’s Bones, Joseph also plays or has played in Ouroboros, Cloud Shepherd, Chamber Cloud, and Ornithos Loom at venues including The Center for New Music, Luggage Store, SIMM Series, Bird and Beckett, Oakland Freedom Jazz Society, and Sonoma Musica Viva: The Music of Edgar Varese and Friends. He has also published three books of poetry.






 SUNDAY JUNE 18 2023  7pm  $10-$25

BRETT CARSON
JOHN SCHOTT + CECILIA E ANGELHART + ELLEN WEBB










 SUNDAY JUNE 25 2023  7pm  $10-$25

NATHAN CLEVENGER + JORDAN GLENN + KASEY KNUDSEN + SAFA SHOKRAI + CORY WRIGHT
USUFRUCT (POLLY MOLLER + TIM WALTERS)












PROPOSALS


Our focus is on the bay area experimental and new music community, hopefully encouraging crossover among sub-scenes (composition and improvisation; established and emerging; institutional and underground; etc.) We strongly suggest local musicians attend concerts before requesting to perform on the series. Visiting aritsts are also welcome, ideally splitting a concert with local musicians. We are also seeking compositions (in all forms of notation) to be performed by the sfSoundGroup.

There is a "hall-like" reverberation in the space. Extremely dense or heavily amplified music isn't a great match for the acoustics, although it is possible to use drum kits and electronic music with some sensitivity. We have a 92-key (down to a Low F!) 1953 Bösendorfer 7’4” Model 225 Piano (no sostenuto pedal; inside/prepared is OK). There is a basic sound system with a mixer and two QSC K12 loudspeakers.

50% of ticket sales is given to the performers.

If you are interested in performing on the series, please send an email to series@sfsound.org.





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