The Misplaced Shapes carry out on the Outsound New Music Summit on July 28
Music curators, like taxonomists, are usually lumpers or splitters. The previous search for commonalities and connections, whereas the latter search to outline as many discrete classes as potential. Lease Romus is a lumper.
A saxophonist and composer of myth-powered musical epics, Romus can also be an impresario of the Bay Space’s teeming underground music scenes who resists the all-too-common impulse to pigeonhole artists. His wide-open aesthetic guides the initiatives launched by his label, Edgetone Records, and manifests most spectacularly onstage on the Outsound New Music Summit. The twenty first version of the four-night pageant takes place at Berkeley’s Finnish Corridor July 26–29, and it’s a useful alternative to catch music you won’t in any other case expertise.
“What I’ve at all times wished to do is bridge worlds,” Romus stated. “The Bay Space is packed filled with unbelievable practitioners [of new music], and plenty of are very numerous. From day one, I’ve at all times wished to characteristic that. From a advertising standpoint, it’s a tough nut to crack. I might simply name it a jazz pageant. So many individuals play quick and free with that. Aerosmith? Jazz pageant! However I actually wished to bridge these worlds and showcase completely different facets of individuals’s creativity.”
Lease Romus | Credit score: George Thomson
Romus is aware of all in regards to the multiplicitous nature of creativity as a result of he embodies it. In recent times, he’s been presenting an ever-expanding work, Manala, co-written with multi-instrumentalist Heikki Koskinen and primarily based on Finnish folklore. However that’s only one side of Romus’s artistry. “Folks don’t know I like to play jazz ballads,” he stated. “You see musicians taking part in one type and assume that’s what we do, however we’re extremely numerous, and many people do many alternative issues. That’s a part of what I’m attempting to seize with Outsound.”
Mission completed. This 12 months, Outsound opens with a triple invoice that features a solo set by Angela Edwards’s Sharkiface, a spooky electroacoustic undertaking honed in Mills School’s digital music program, and a solo set of synth noise by Colleen Kelly’s TanukiSpiderCat, created by way of an improvisational mix of electrical cello, modular synth, and samples. The headliner is Bat Noise, the self-described “haunted industrial-doom jazz deathwave duo” of LuLu Gammaray on theremin, synth, samples, vocals, and trombone and Roxy Monoxide on tenor sax, flooring tom, vocals, and results. The truth that all three acts discuss with animals of their monikers is likely to be a coincidence — or maybe not, contemplating that all of them share the pure habitat of dank garages the place “the darkish underground of digital noise music” takes place, Romus stated.
Guitars take middle stage the second night time, July 27, with a double invoice beginning with Regular, a duo that includes guitar icon Fred Frith and the singular instrument inventor Sudhu Tewari. For the second set, the Moe Staiano Ensemble performs the newest model of Staiano’s composition Away In the direction of the Mild (documented on a latest Edgetone album of the identical title). Carried out by Suki O’Kane, the piece options Staiano on drums, Jason Hoopes on bass, and 12 guitarists working in teams of three and 4.
An interesting sui generis determine who’s finest identified for his dramatic piece Loss of life of a Piano (no guitars will likely be harmed through the efficiency of Away In the direction of the Mild), Staiano is strictly the form of stateless musician whom Romus created Outsound to characteristic. “I don’t know if I match wherever,” Staiano stated. “I simply attempt to get in wherever as a result of I really feel I’ve one thing good to supply.”
Moe Staiano
The truth that Staiano is sharing the stage with Frith, whose two-decade run instructing improvisation at Mills profoundly formed the Bay Space’s experimental music scene, is a cherry on prime of Romus’s Outsound sundae. “Fred is a giant affect on what I do,” Romus stated. “It’ll be a distinction as a result of Regular is an improv duo that begins from the start with improvising off of one another and listening. [Personally] I’m coming from someplace else now, targeted on composing.”
The third program, on July 28, is a triple invoice that features the composer collective The Misplaced Shapes: bassist Safa Shokrai, vibraphonist Mark Pascucci-Clifford, alto saxophonist Beth Schenck, trumpeter Max Miller-Loran, and drummer Eric Garland (filling in for normal drummer Jason Levis). It’s the second incarnation of a bunch that brings collectively a few of the most persistently eloquent Bay Space musicians knowledgeable by jazz idioms.
“Everyone seems to be considering composing,” stated Shokrai, who’s a founding Misplaced Form. “We’re all excited to write down music for a daily group of individuals and make a sound out of that. Taking part in one another’s songs, we get influenced by one another, which is a extremely wealthy area to until. This incarnation has been taking part in collectively 5 – 6 years, and we actually developed throughout a month-to-month gig at Woods Bar & Brewery in Uptown Oakland. We had a three-hour time slot to fill, which was improbable and gave us the possibility to check out all types of issues.”
Pateka
Sunday’s program additionally consists of the experimental younger art-rock soul band Pateka (identified till not too long ago as Aaron Area & His Terrestrial Underlings), a rising Berkeley combo that includes keyboardist and vocalist Elihu Knowles, electrical guitarist and vocalist Dylan Ransley, electrical bassist Quinn Girard, and drummer Ryan Higley. For Romus, the group represents a rising era “and their unbelievable curiosity in cross-pollination,” he stated. “I’ve seen these bands doing 4 or 5 stylistic parts, going from experimental sounds and hip-hop to soul, funk, and again into jazz.”
Sunday’s headliner is The Soiled Snacks Ensemble, a hip-hop-inflected chamber jazz septet led by Pascucci-Clifford. The group launched one in every of 2022’s finest albums, You Would Do Well (Gradual & Regular), and consists of keyboardist Steve Blum, drummer Dillon Vado, cellist Crystal Pascucci-Clifford, reed skilled Cory Wright, electrical bassist Rob Ewing, and percussionist Robert Woods-Ladue.
The closing session on Monday, July 29 encompasses a convergence of expanded cinema and sound from Matt Robidoux, who deploys modular structure that interprets bodily enter from two “ears of corn” sculptures solid in aluminum, partnering with analog visible efficiency artist and sound designer Lori Varga. The opening set, Submit Doom Romance, brings collectively sound artists Seah (Chelsea Heikes) and Mykel Boyd, debuting not too long ago accomplished audio work combining authentic synth composition, bowed devices, and digital manipulation of area recordings from their one-month artist residency within the Finnish archipelago.
Mark Pascucci-Clifford
Outsound isn’t the one place the place a broad spectrum of experimental music may be discovered within the Bay Space. Romus books the twice-monthly Luggage Store Creative Music Series in San Francisco, the Bay Space’s longest operating new-music showcase. Reasonably than focusing completely on experimental music, Romus has expanded to incorporate singer-songwriters and nearly any artist performing authentic music.
A block north, there’s the Center for New Music, one other important outpost. Within the Mission District, The Lab is a multidisciplinary dynamo with in depth digital sources, and the bookstore Medicine for Nightmares hosts the Friday night time sequence Different Dimensions in Sound, curated by reed participant David Boyce. Within the East Bay, clarinetist and composer Matt Ingalls’s sfSound sequence has discovered a brand new residence on the Dresher Ensemble Studio in West Oakland, whereas the Temescal Art Center hosts Shapeshifter Cinema on second Sundays and month-to-month improv performances and jam periods. UC Berkeley’s CNMAT has been a longtime hotbed of audio and technological experimentation. Other Minds is one other flagship group the place main composers and musicians come collectively.
However together with his catholic strategy to programming, Romus has turned Outsound right into a wide-open portal for musicians and audiences of all stripes. For Shokrai, the occasion fosters connections between scenes that may be insular and unapproachable. “I believe the Bay Space has an unbelievable array of proficient musicians, composers, and artists,” Shokrai stated. “It’s unlucky that we’ve got a scarcity of venues via which artists and audiences can join. That’s what makes [Outsound] very beneficial. Even for us as listeners and musicians, I’m into my issues. Anyone else is into their factor. Outsound is that this house the place so many alternative approaches and takes on making artwork occur. It’s improbable to be uncovered to one another’s stuff.”
