FOH180920_AlcornRG_Syrynx_WaxyFire Over Heaven returns from summer break with a polychromed lineup featuring SF Bay Area outsider electronic acts Waxy Tomb and Syrynx and a first time duo performance by legendary Baltimore pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn and (now) local violinist, banjo player and singer Anna Roberts-Gevalt.

Thursday, September 20th Doors 7:30pm // Show 8pm

10pm – SUSAN ALCORN & ANNA ROBERTS-GEVALT
9pm – SYRYNX
8pm – WAXY TOMB

Outpost Artist Resources
1665 Norman st. Ridgewood, NY (Queens)
$10 advanced tickets / $10-15 suggested donation at door.
All proceeds go to performers.

From Fire Over Heaven organizer Che Chen:
Hot on the heels of some summer touring with her much lauded folk ballad duo, Anna & Elizabeth, Anna teams up with Alcorn for what is sure to be a memorable first time collaboration. What the proportion of stretched folk and trad forms to the unknown will be is anybody’s guess…Ever since spending some formative early times amongst the Mills College/Caroliner/Buchla/Noise Pancakes milieu of the early aughts, I’ve often marveled at the esoteric and deeply weird electronic music that comes out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Worlds away from the more academic, black clad, euro-rack recitals coming from both sides of the Atlantic, Bay Area noise/electronics has always seemed more, well, colorful, to these eyes and ears. And perhaps it’s the deep history of the region’s relationship to the development of electronic music (SF Tape Music Center, Don Buchla, etc) but I often get the feeling that our west coast friends may be better than we are at remembering that technology is a tool to be used in the service of radical ideas, rather than as an end in it itself. Waxy Tomb is one of two Bay Area acts on this bill, (one of) the alter ego(s) of Jules Litman-Cleper, whose bracing performances combine classic “costume noise” moves with a heightened sense of identity obfuscation/expansion along audio/visual and digital/biological lines. Syrynx is the solo project of another Bay Area native, Yasi Perera, and I believe the name comes from a musical instrument possessed by the character, Mouse, in Sam Delany’s 1968 novel, Nova. I haven’t read it but rooting around online I found this: “Early in the novel, the syrynx is referred to as an ax, inviting the notion of more than one use: certainly as an innovative, futuristic musical instrument, but also, potentially, as a weapon. The syrynx — an allusion to Pan’s pipe[…]— can create music, scents and images.” I guess I’ll leave it at that.

SUSAN ALCORN & ANNA ROBERTS-GEVALT
One of the world’s premiere musical innovators on her instrument, Baltimore-based Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country and western swing music. Known among steel guitarists for her virtuosity and authenticity in a traditional context, Alcorn first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands. Soon she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of modern classical music (Messiaen, Varèse, Penderecki), the deep listening of Pauline Oliveros, Astor Piazzolla’s nuevo tango, free jazz, and world musics (Indian raags, South American songs, and gamelan orchestra). Her pieces reveal the complexity of her instrument and her musical experience while never straying from a very direct, intense, and personal musical expression. The UK Guardian describes her music as “beautiful, glassy and liquid, however far she strays from pulse and conventional harmony.” Susan, along with Joe McPhee was recently awarded the first ever Instant Award in Improvised Music.
https://www.susanalcorn.net/

Anna Roberts-Gevalt is a multi disciplinary artist working in Brooklyn, moving outwards from her immersion in folk music. Following an ethnomusicology degree at Wesleyan University, she spent the last decade studying with masters of traditional fiddle and banjo music in Kentucky and Virginia.
For the last seven years, she has been creative director of a traditional ballad-based collaboration with Virginia singer Elizabeth LaPrelle, Anna & Elizabeth. They conduct creative research in archives, and reworking the old songs and texts through multi-media performances with song, sound, illustration and story. They have collaborated with Jim White, Susan Alcorn, and Irish composer Linda Buckley, tour the US and UK extensively, including the Newport Folk Festival, Big Ears, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, and have their Carnegie Hall debut this fall. Smithsonian Folkways released their third record The Invisible Comes to Us, which Anna co-produced and was heralded by the New Yorker as “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do.” She currently serves as a guest curator of traditional music at the Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville; has been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Berea College Traditional Music Archive, Bang on a Can’s Found Sound Nation; teaches fiddle and banjo across the country.
http://annarobertsgevalt.weebly.com/anna-solo-music.html

This show is a special occasion marking the first duo exploration between pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn and violinist/banjo player, Anna Roberts-Gevalt.

SYRYNX:
(with respect to plants)
drum elongation, too quiet to work properly, rotates basis.
loud sound, completely inside-out sound,
partially inside-out sound,
hegemonic numerical technique put in service of telling a magic joke to undo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGWYCUguT_U

WAXY TOMB:
A “Waxy Tomb” is the pet name of a disequilibrium chamber, which is used for the cooling process after transformational self-columns have been thoroughly collapsed and dis-localized by ocular-temporal shifts in phase space. This is necessary for the identification of the sutures and seam-lines between modified supra-objects. These sutures are exemplified in their local state as space between skin and skeleton, building and infrastructure. But they can also be localized by temporal states: layered embalming allows a shifted object to also contain its own system formation manipulation. To make the sutures re-identifiable and enclose them in a material, they must be dislocated from their state or process between. Their re-enclosure involves a repeated re-enactment of their original surface tension patterns and finally nodal-substrate recollection. This results in a diffusely situated self-embedded temporal column. Waxy Tomb (Jules Litman-Cleper) a Bay Area native, explores the themes of internalized urban landscapes, identity transformation and the tension of the dehumanizing yet symbiotic relationships we form with technological interfaces. Releases include Weird Forest, Weird Ear and BradGrammar tapes and an upcoming EP on Gilgongo records.
soundcloud.com/waxy-tomb