mattie barbier / Ellen Arkbro
Jan 19th at 8pm
TreePeople
Program
- Ellen Arkbro Chords
- mattie barbier no dirt to call
About
About Darkness Sounding
We welcomed the return of our winter festival in partnership with floating and TreePeople. Darkness Sounding is an on-going project that explores how sound and music shape our understanding of the world. It convenes around mindfulness and nature, featuring drone, minimal, and ambient music. Through deep listening, intentional gathering, and thoughtful questioning, we foster awareness and understanding to expand our connections to ourselves, each other, and the natural world.Artists
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mattie barbier
Mattie Barbier is an LA based musician and sonic researcher focused on experimental intonation, noise, and the physical processes and latent irrationalities of acoustic instruments. Their playing has been described by the LA Times as being “of intense, brilliant, virtuosic growling that gave the striking impression that Barbier was dismantling the instrument while playing it,” by the Wire as “exploring the nooks of instrumental tone far beyond the reach of most mortals,” and by the New Yorker as being a “diabolically inventive trombonist-composer.”
Mattie engages in collaborative relationships with a range of musicians including Clara Iannotta, Michelle Lou, Weston Olencki, Catherine Lamb, Kaori Suzuki, Sarah Davachi, Jacob Kirkegaard, and Katherine Young. As an interpreter they have given premieres by and collaborated with a broad spectrum of composers including George Lewis, Liza Lim, Lester St. Louis, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Kevin Drumm, Scott Walker, and Raven Chacon.
Mattie is a member of RAGE Thormbones, Wild Up, echoi, and is an active soloist and improviser on low brass instruments and bagpipes.
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Ellen Arkbro
Composer, musician, and sound artist Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) works with precision-tuned harmonic sound and the forms of spatial dimensionality emerging from it, both in the case of textural qualities of tones in phase-locked interaction and in spontaneously unfolding imaginative listening. Ellen composes for acoustic instruments, for synthetic sound, and for combinations of both. In all aspects of her practice, Ellen’s primary focus is on the qualities of sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
About Endless Season
Art in LA has been about freedom and an abundant eschewing of history. With intersecting methods and intentions, humble, aspiring, a city appealing to the aesthete and the mystic in all of her citizens. Here, famous artists are also street-side sign painters, our best restaurants drive or live in strip malls, and our landmarks are geographical before architectural or fleetingly experiential instead of permanent monuments to their own lineages. Here, our religious and secular musics sound the same.
Endless Season gathers around these uniquely West Coast traits. We ask lead artists to question, reinterpret, and challenge the past, modality, and genre. We hold a space of intersectionality and dialogue surrounding every aspect of our work. Together, we will explore the breadth of work and practices, discovering the many shapes of music and ideas in LA today.
Endless 2023 – 2024
This season puts Wild Up members at the center more than ever, showcasing the creative energy of this community of artists. There will be a dozen concerts featuring members not only as brilliant performers but also as composers and creators. The nexus is ENCLAVE, a weekend festival of Wild Up Composers and Creators in December, featuring Andrew Tholl, Shelley Washington, Jodie Landau, Sidney Hopson. Like most of the season, this weekend highlights the many shapes of music and ideas in Los Angeles today and starts codifying an LA school of composition.
Milestones run through the season, including revivals and seminal works from Julius Eastman and Gérard Grisey and more than a dozen World and West Coast Premieres, including workshops of three new large-scale works-in-progress: a new multi-disciplinary work by Sarah Hennies, with visual artist Susan Silton and L.A. Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson, portraits of genius emerging artists Leiliehua Lanzilotti, inti figgis-vizueta, and claire rousay, a new opera by David Longstreth, and the very beginnings of a deep dive into Arthur Russell.
In 2024, we welcome the return of Darkness Sounding, a festival that explores how listening, sound, and music shape our understanding of the world.