April 18, 2008
live visuals by Marge
BROWN WING OVERDRIVE: Chuck Bettis, Mikey IQ Jones, and Derek Morton are mad jugglers of oddly-shaped musical eggs. Processed banjo, shamanistic chants, and fried electronics set up against lattices of stuttered beatboxing and found-object percussion to confound and delight.
Chuck Bettis and Derek Morton met each other in Washington DC, crossing paths as part of that city’s burgeoning experimental music community. Upon relocating to New York City, the two began collaborating as a duo before IQ Jones
joined them in early 2007. IQ’s alarm clocks, duck calls, and array of unlikely sound devices provide a lively counterpoint to Bettis’ machine noise and Morton’s chaotic circuits.
In the 90’s, Chuck Bettis shook up Washington DC with no-wavers the Metamatics, his solo electronics moniker Trance and the Arcade, and the genre-traversing collective All Scars before relocating to NYC in 2002. He has since collaborated with revered “downtown” improvisers John Zorn, Fred Frith, and Ikue Mori (amongst others), and has recorded with such groups as Nautical Almanac, Yellow Swans, and Measles Mumps Rubella.
NYC-based vocalist/percussionist/one-man bomb squad Mikey IQ Jones has presented frankensteined collusions of performance art theatrics, mutant soul harmonies, beatbox & extended vocal technique, kitchen-sink live sampling aesthetics, and onomatopoeic wordplay in solo performances since 2003. His otherworldly rhythms, created exclusively
with the sounds of IQ’s voice and a small handful of household objects, have captivated crowds and crossed genre-lines, resulting in performances from CBGB’s and the downtown improv school to uptown hip-hop block parties and choreography collaboration.
Derek Morton has generated and manipulated sound since the early 1990’s. From his days as a rock guitarist and record
label owner to more recent forays into performance curating and gallery installation, he has relentlessly investigated
the possibilities of audio in all contexts. He is equally interested in live improvisation, studio research, exploratory composition, and electronic reconfiguration. Morton’s sound experiments have attacked everything from cutting-edge technologies like surround-sound to reinvented tools like handheld video game consoles and controllers. His work with violinist John Coursey in the duo Mikroknytes has resulted in numerous performances around the U.S. as well as four full-length CDs.
MIKRONESIA (Michael McDermott) is a producer, composer and musician. For the past decade he has been performing at theaters, clubs, events and galleries along the U.S. East Coast as a multi-instrumentalist, laptop based performer and DJ. Mikronesia has been doing collaborative production and performance, concentrating on lending his ambient and DSP skills to artists from all musical genres. His main ensemble, Gemini Wolf, is a seven piece electronic/chamber/rock band for which Mikronesia plays keyboards, laptop and arranges, including traditional rock instrumentation and a string trio. Mikronesia is an original member of the multi-disciplinary improvisation music / dance ensemble Perpetual Mvmt< >Snd. He has also worked with modern classical music collectives like Arts in Motion and The Philadelphia Composers Forum. In April 2007, he was part of a deep listening ensemble with Pauline Oliveros who performed at the Annenberg Center for The Performing Arts in Sound Exchange 2007. Mikronesia has released two albums with ambient label Gears of Sand. Tissue Paper Ghosts (2006), is an ethereal glitch album about the psychic remains of a car crash and Iris Or Comfortable Too (2007) is a breath taking work of minimalist piano and warm electronics. In early 2008 Mikronesia released 'vxvii' on Kikapu which had over 5000 downloads in its first month. Currently Mikronesia is working on sound installations for 2008 at Little Berlin Gallery and Rocket Cat Cafe for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Other works in progress are a string trio for the Paraphrase/Nexus series and an opera for The Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2009.
MYO is Cory O'Brien, an improviser who works with digitally processed voice and objects. Described by Vital Weekly as "louder, dirtier, gritty and angular, but still with ingredients of microsound." Collaborations include Kenneth Yates (of Harm Stryker, Insects with Tits), video artist Metaphreaq, and visual artist Jesse Hartgraves (as Clouds-Out). He currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
