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Intersections Festival

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Today we are in Washington, DC for our 3rd concert in as many days! We are playing this afternoon at the Intersections Festival with Vivre Musicale. The festival is held at Atlas, a great old theater turned music venue. Our concert features Vivre Musicale performers and a dance troupe. Should be a great show!

Here’s a bonus photo from our Vivre concert last night:

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Vivre Musicale

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We had a great concert at An Die Musik in Baltimore last night! This was the first of 3 concerts we are playing this weekend for Vivre Musicale. We’ll be in Arlington, VA tonight and at the Intersections festival in DC on Sunday.

Our first two concerts are titled SeNsuALitY and feature works by Ryo Noda, Evan Chambers, Kati Agócs, Astor Piazzolla, and the premiere performances of Miguel Bolivar’s 2nd sax quartet: Phases of Love.

For full concert info check out our events page.

Hymn – by Kati Agócs

Earlier this year we commissioned Eli Stine to create a video to perform with Kati Agócs’ piece Hymn at Red Room. We really loved Eli’s video so a few months ago we recorded Hymn during a practice weekend. Above is Eli’s video synced with the recording. Enjoy!

Video from YouTube.

Music of Matthew Burtner

This weekend we are in Baltimore for two concerts presenting the music of Matthew Burtner, composer, performer and metasaxophone inventor. Matthew is a pioneer in electronic and multimedia compositions for saxophone. These concerts will share his music ranging from metasaxophone (sax with oodles of custom electronics), experimental turntablism and film improvisations to performances of two unprecedented compositions for nine acoustic tenor saxophones.

We’ll be performing Matthew’s Incantation S4-X and joining in for his tenor nonets Endprint and Portals of Distortion. All of his work is awesome and you should check this out.

1st Concert: Friday, Oct 14 @ noon – MICA
2nd Concert: Saturday, Oct 15 @ 8pm – Sonic Circuits at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center

Players: Matthew Burtner, Mike Straus, Andrew Landau, Rachel Winder, Sheri Oyan, Sean Dynan, Ian Richter, Jeremiah Baker, Cara Salveson, DJ Dubble8 (Erik Spangler)

Image (from concert poster) by Intangible Arts

Lots of Projects!

After a few months off, AM/PM is getting in gear for some exciting projects!

We are going to be releasing a recording of Kati AgócsHymn synced with commissioned video by Eli Stine on YouTube (screenshot above). This video was premiered at our Red Room concert last Spring and we’re pumped to finally make it available online.

AM/PM is also excited to be performing two concerts of Matthew Burtner’s music! We will be at MICA on Oct 14 and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center on Oct 15. AM/PM will perform Burtner’s Incantation S4-X and join more saxophonists for Burtner’s tenor sax nonets Portals of Distortion and Endprint.

We are also prepping a great program called SeNsuAlitY for Vivre Musicale. We will perform on two days (March 9 in DC and March 10 in Baltimore) and then perform on the third day (March 11) at the Intersections Arts Festival with Vivre Musicale. 3 days of performing is going to be great!

For full details check our Events page.

Red (Blue) Room

We had a great time playing at Red Room last night! Though they recently repainted and are now blue (but no name change). It was great to have a packed house and our thanks goes out to everyone who stuck it out sitting on the floor! We also want to thank our fantastic guest performers: Karin Kilper, Domenica Romagni, Esther Hae-In Choi, and Martha Morrison.

While there’s nothing on our official calendar we are busy planning:
-more performances of our multimedia concert
-a new (acoustic) program
-recording some pieces this summer
-performing Kathleen Bader’s awesome/huge work Tentative Embrace

Coming Together

Well, everything for our concert Saturday is finally coming together (yes, pun intended). We had a great set of rehearsals last weekend in Baltimore. Many thanks go out to our guest performers Karin Kilper, Domenica Romagni, Esther Hae-In Choi, and Martha Morrison for kicking butt on Coming Together (rehearsal pictured above). Eli Stine recently finished a stunning video to accompany Kati AgócsHymn. Our DVD for Heartbreakers cracked in half and JacobTV was kind enough to quickly FTP us another copy. Plus Red Room installed a brand new projector that we get to use!

See you Saturday…

Jerry Springer + prision riots + conspiracy theories

AM/PM is only a few weeks away from our multimedia show at Red Room! We just had a great rehearsal weekend and can’t wait to share all the music we’ve been working on. Our program is a blend of “classic” pieces and newer works. They range in topics from Jerry Springer (hence the Red Room / Jerry Springer image, haha) to prison riots to conspiracy theories. We are also excited to bring in guest performers Karin Kilper, Domenica Romagni, Esther Hae-In Choi, and Martha Morrison. Here’s the full concert details:

Saturday, March 12 @ 9pm
Red Room (Normal’s Books and Records)
425 E. 31st Street
Baltimore, MD
$5 door

Program:

Thom Limbert: Numbers/Dates (quartet and audio)
Matthew Burtner: Incantation S4=X (quartet and audio)
Jacob Ter Veldhuis: Heartbreakers (quartet and audio/video)

Paul Leary: “I Have A Past Life Memory From The War That Blew The Fifth Planet Into The Asteroid Belt” and other stories from AM Radio (quartet and audio)
Kati Agócs: Hymn (quartet and commissioned video by Eli Stine)
Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together (ensemble and audio/video)

We hope to see you there!

Metro Gallery

We had a great time playing at Metro Gallery last Saturday. Many thanks to everyone who braved the cold weather to be there! Baltimore-based mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen wrote a very kind blog post about the concert. For those who missed it, we performed:

Thom Limbert: Numbers/Dates
Kati Agócs: Hymn
Jacob Ter Veldhuis: Heartbreakers
Matthew Burtner: Incantation S4=X
Paul Leary: “I Have A Past Life Memory From The War That Blew The Fifth Planet Into The Asteroid Belt” and other stories from AM Radio

With the exception of Hymn, each piece includes prerecorded electronics that the quartet performs with. We will be performing these pieces again as part of a larger program at Red Room (Baltimore, MD) on March 12th @ 9pm, so you’ve got another chance to check them out.

Jammin’

Thanks to a Peabody Career Development Grant, we were finally able to get the equipment that we needed for our first JamLinks rehearsal on Friday.  I had a school event in Baltimore, Miguel had another rehearsal, and Zach came straight from teaching in New Jersey, and we were still able to have an hour and a half of rehearsal on an otherwise busy night.  Jeremiah and I took a while to set up the equipment, but were really proud that when we plugged everything in and logged on to musicianlink.com, we were able to hear Zach and Miguel!  It took a long time to get the levels set correctly, but we were able to play through Jacob Ter Veldhuis’ “HeartBreakers,” and tried a little of Paul Leary’s piece, and it sounded just like we were in the same room together.  You can see what our Baltimore rehearsal looked like up above.  Maybe we need to check those mics again, because apparently things in New Jersey were going a little differently than how we thought they were…