Chris Brown & Thea Farhadian | Solos and Duo Performance
FREE and Open to the Public | In Person + Livestream
First set: Chris Brown will perform sections of "RhythmiChrome”with interactive electronics and video (by Johanna Poethig) and Thea Farhadian will perform to the experimental film "Brutiage" (by Hrayr Eulmessekian).
Second set: Electroacoustic improvisations. Chris Brown, grand piano with live computer processing and Thea Farhadian, violin with live computer processing.
The concert is in part a CD release for Farhadian's new album, Tattoos and Other Markings (Other Minds Records).
Chris Brown, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, makes music with self- designed sonic systems that include acoustic and electroacoustic instruments, interactive software, computer networks, microtonal tunings, and improvisation. His compositions are designs for performances in which people bring to life the musical structures embedded in scores, instruments, and machines. His early work featured electroacoustic instruments he invented and built, like the Gazamba (1982), an electric percussion piano featured in Alternating Currents (1984), for the Berkeley Symphony and three soloists. He designed and built his own computer-controlled analog signal-processing system for the environmental sound piece Lava (1992), for brass, percussion, and live electronics. Talking Drum (1995-2000), was a MIDI network installation that explored polyrhythm, distance, and resonance in large architectural spaces. He is a member since 1986 of the pioneering computer network music band The Hub, which received the 2018 Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. Throughout his career he has composed solos for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics using software he writes for his compositions and improvisations. Since 2005 he has written music in just intonation, often integrating rhythmic structures that parallel the proportions used in their tunings. Recordings of his music are available on New World, fo’c’sle, Tzadik, Pogus, Intakt, Rastascan, Ecstatic Peace, Red Toucan, Leo, and Artifact Recordings. He has also performed and recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, José Maceda, John Zorn, David Rosenboom, Larry Ochs, Glenn Spearman, and Wadada Leo Smith; as an improvisor he has performed and recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, William Winant, and Frank Gratkowski. From 1990-2018 he taught electronic music, theory, composition, world music, and contemporary performance practice as Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College in Oakland.
Thea Farhadian is a performer/composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work extends over a wide range of disciplines in projects including solo violin and interactive electronics, acoustic improvisation, solo laptop, radio art, and scoring experimental video. Her solo pieces for violin and electronics combine a classical music background with extended technique, digital processing, and extensive improvisation.
Generally speaking, Farhadian’s solo work comprises an aesthetic range from more textured, noise-based sound to more tonal and microtonal realms employing free tonality and extended technique. Her first solo album, Tectonic Shifts (Creative Sources), features real-time processing to create twisted echoes, jagged rhythms and microtonal landscapes and was highly praised by reviewers internationally (“What separates her from the typical...tedium- transmitting specimens is the ability to render the most absurd-sounding complications with sensible unambiguity. Furthermore...she’s not afraid of highlighting the magnetism of a romantic modernity through the use of purer tones across transitional environments.” -Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes). In her collaborative projects, she has worked with such artists as Tomomi Adachi, Kim Anno, Chris Brown, Shelley Hirsch, Heike Liss, Silvia Matheus, Amy X Neuburg, Tim Perkis and Dean Santomieri.
Her work has been heard internationally at the Issue Project Room, the Downtown Music Gallery, in New York City; Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Sowieso, and Quiet Cue in Berlin; the Center for New Music, the Room Series, and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco; the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Khachaturian Museum in Yerevan, Armenia; and the International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project at Bimhaus in Amsterdam, among others.
Farhadian started as a violinist and played in the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano for ten years. She has an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music from Mills College.
Johanna Poethig is a visual, public artist and performance artist who has exhibited internationally creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She received the prestigious California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award in 2021. Her multidisciplinary art practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day events, collaborative processes and scientific research. In her current work the mathematical patterns of life systems and the extraterrestrial quasicrystal non-repeating pattern provide ways to visualize seemingly impossible futures. Her most recent public projects are an architectural metal relief for the San Jose Fire Department, a large-scale painting installed in Chinook Elementary School in Washington State, the restoration of her 1984 nine story landmark mural on Filipino Immigration to the United States and the 1.5 million 9 mile public art project for AC Transit. Her video and performance work includes the Angelica Festival in Italy, the David Ireland House/ 500 Capp Street Project, Transi(en)t Manila, EARTH residency at Krowswork in Oakland and “Glamorgeddon: The Spectacle” at SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco. She has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery with the Great Wall of Los Angeles project, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Boston Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, SF Galeria de la Raza, Headlands Center for the Arts, Museo ng Manila among others. She is Professor Emerita at the Visual and Public Art Department, California State University, Monterey Bay.
Hrayr Eulmessekian: Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1958. Eulmessekian attended the Academie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA) 1982-1984. He moved to San Francisco in 1984 and attended the San Francisco Art Institute where he earned his B.F.A., and M.F.A. in 1992. His works have been exhibited, screened or broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Yerevan, Art Dubai, Sharjah Biennial March Meeting, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, UC Berkeley, UCLA, INALCO Paris, Gulbenkian Foundation Portugal, Columbia University NY, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is the guest editor of ArteEast Quarterly, 2014 Spring issue. He was the subject of a featured interview by Prof. Marc Nichanian, and his work was reviewed by Dr. Anahid Kassabian, both published in Gam Review 6. A founding member of the San Francisco Armenian Film Festival, he serves on its curatorial team. He currently lives in Los Angeles. ՀԱ
