7/7 - Che Chen/David Watson duo & Tristan Dahn FREE/Donation
fire museum presents
Che Chen/David Watson duo & Tristan Dahn
Saturday July 7th 7:30 PM
Art Department Collective
1638 E. Berks Street
FREE/Donation
Near Berks stop Market/Frankford line
Che Chen/David Watson duo:
Che Chen is a musician and sound artist based in Brooklyn and Stony Brook, New York. For the most part a self-taught musician, Chen uses the guitar, violin, tape recorders and other musical and “non-musical” objects as a means to explore improvisation, folk forms, tuning and perceptual phenomena. Since 2012 Chen has been most active playing guitar in the band 75 Dollar Bill. While principally a duo with percussionist Rick Brown, 75 Dollar Bill’s modal, polyrhythmic music often manifests itself in expanded lineups varying in size from small ensemble to 25-piece marching band.
David Watson is an experimental musician. Originally working with guitar, he began performing and composing for highland bagpipes in 1993, launching a new era in his career. Developing an experimental approach for bagpipes led him to projects with vocalists Shelley Hirsch and Makigami Koichi, The Afternoon Saints (a group project with Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay and Günter Muller) and Glacial, an ongoing trio with Ranaldo and Tony Buck. He has been commissioned to write experimental pieces for traditional pipe-bands, and Phill Niblock created the piece “Bag” using his sounds.
Pitting the sustained tones of their bagpipes and amplified violin against discreet gestures, silence, and noise, Watson and Chen’s strategic approach to improvisation emphasizes the scale, duration, and position of sounds in space.
Based
in West Philadelphia, Tristan Dahn improvises on a wide range of
instruments. Employing both standard instruments like guitar and piano,
as well as more adventurous instruments (among them guzheng and shruti
box), Dahn creates atmospheric soundscapes that are simultaneously
abstract and highly narrative. His compositions (often Terry Riley-esque
minimalist drone) stretch themselves out over time, with Dahn giving
them ample room to loom and fall.