Math Rock and Experimental Bands at WestCo

Come see some bi-coastal Math Rock and Experimental action go down this Friday at the WestCo Cafe. The line up includes:

Little Women (Brooklyn, NY)
(myspace.com/littlewomensounds)

"[Little Women] are too tight to be called free and too post-punk (no wave?) to be called jazz/rock either. They are most exciting and even throttling at times. Some of the most potent and powerful sh*t I've heard in a long while!" - Bruce Lee Gallanter (Downtown Music Gallery)

YUKON (Baltimore, MD)
(myspace.com/yukon)

"With a sensibility made of equal parts jazz, hardcore, and math rock, Yukon's twining melodies and rhythms take risks in reinventing the ways a rock song can be strung together." - Baltimore City Paper

PRAYER BUDDIES
(Dana Matthiessen '09 + Prayer Buddy)

GEORGE PRITZKER ( San Diego, '10)
(myspace.com/georgepritzkermusic)
GP + Computer

Date: Friday, November 14
Time: 10:30pm
Place: WestCo Cafe

The Osc-A-Lot

Brendan O'Connell '08 designed a rather bizarre instrument while at Wesleyan called an "Osc-A-Lot" (osc as in oscillations), based partially on the oscillator sound generators in Wes alum Nic Collins' book Handmade Electronic Music.

It looks kind of like a balding Medusa's head, or a tangle of electrostatic vines, and sounds like what either of those might if you added some shrieking rainforest animals with laser guns.

Check out this crazy thing in action:

Henry Brant 1913-2008 and Meteor Farm

Composer Henry Brant, famous for pioneering spatial music, died last weekend. Wesleyan has commissioned several compositions from him, including a really cool one in 1982 written for all the world music ensembles here at Wesleyan that I can't remember the name of. He received an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan in 1998 for his 85th birthday.

Edit: it's called "Meteor Farm" for the Wesleyan orchestra, gamelan (this part was composed by Professor Sumarsam), jazz band, West African chorus, West African drummers, two other choruses, some South Indian musicians (if I remember correctly, this includes professor David Nelson), and a lot of percussion. It can be streamed here. 

Wesleyan Electronics Collective

Ever get frustrated because there are so few classes at Wesleyan that teach you to actually make things? Now's your chance to unfrustrate yourself. Brendan O'Connell '08 sends word:
The Wesleyan Electronics Collective will hold its first meeting this Friday, 5pm at Eclectic. Our first project (which we'll be building at this meeting) will be an electronic noisemaker based on a digital chip that can output six squarewave oscillator tones simultaneously, with a built-in speaker and a 1/4" output so it can be hooked up to an amplifier.
We'll teach everyone how to build one, let people build different prototypes with different settings, and finally, house it in any sort of case they want. Particularly cool case example: Link
All supplies will be provided at no cost, and everyone will get to take home a finished product of their own design, thanks to the SBC. Only 20 slots are available, however, so if you are interested you should RSVP to boconnell@wez AND dchoi@wez to be guaranteed a spot, or show up the day of if they just want to watch or grab the spot of someone who doesn't show up."

A little dose of class and pretense: Free concerts at MoMA

Here's something that I consider extremely exciting and would jump on in a heartbeat... but then again, Xue did tell me that I'm the most pretentious person she knows (and keep in mind she knows Adam Fishman '09**).

MoMA's Summergarden concerts: Free but Still Pretentious

Lincoln Center Jazz and the Juilliard School are putting on free concerts in MoMA's sculpture garden (speaking of which, do go see the Richard Serra exhibition there if you haven't already). It's been going on for a while, sorry I didn't post about it before. The last two concerts in the series are:

Sunday, August 19 8PM
The New Juilliard Ensemble plays contemporary classical music by composers Jukka Tiensuu, Andy Vorhes, and Paul Schoenfield. Knowing these people will put you one step above everyone else in Lucier's Intro to Experimental Music class. If you ever want to impress somebody with your knowledge of new music and contemporary composers, mention any of the above, especially Vorhes--the guy doesn't even have a wikipedia article!

Sunday August 26 8PM
Jazz Concert: Cyro Baptista's Antropo-Fagia. Nothing says it better than MoMA's own little blurb, which calls it "a musical manifestation of the process of eating, swallowing, and digesting all the tendencies that are part of the sonic landscape and our environment." If you have the nerve to pretend to know what that means, don't miss it.

**I mean that in the best possible way, Adam.