Jason Kahn (Switzerland)
Jean-luc Guionnet (France)
Adria Otte/Kristina Dutton/Kanoko Nishi-Smith (Oakland)
Jason Kahn kindly supported by Swissnex and Prohelvetia
Doors at 3pm
Bring something cozy to sit on.
Percentage of donations go to the mare island shoreline preserve
Jason Kahn is a musician, artist and writer. He was born 1960 in New York and grew up in Los Angeles. He re-located to Europe in 1990 and is currently based in Zürich.
As an electronic musician, vocalist and drummer Kahn collaborates regularly with many musicians, both in improvised settings and in the context of graphical scores which he composes for specific groups.
Kahn has exhibited his installations in museums, galleries, art spaces and public sites internationally. These works focus on the idea of space: the conceptual and physical juncture points, its production and dissolution, and our relation to it as a political, social and environmental medium.
Kahn's other activities include sound pieces for radio, film, dance and theater. He has also designed numerous CD, LP and cassette covers. As a writer, his work has appeared in books, magazines and as liner notes to many audio publications.
Performing regularly around the world, Kahn has given concerts throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia, China, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Turkey and South Africa.
In 2011 Kahn started the Editions imprint to publish his own recordings and writings.
Jean-Luc Guionnet
My musical work subdivides itself into as many ways as occasions arise for me to think and act with sound. Those occasions have always to do with a strong meeting with an outside element : an instrument (saxophone/organ), a theoretical idea (what is "rumour"?), and mainly a collaborating friend (André Almuro, Éric Cordier, Éric La Casa, Franck Gourdien, Taku Unami, Seijiro Murayama, Lotus Edde-Khouri) or long-term teams (Ames Room, Hubbub, Pheromones)... There then follows a collection of themes which, in turn, influences the evolution of the musical work and define the direction of meetings to come: the thickness of the air, the pidgin, the musical instrument considered as affective automaton, listening dark unto itself, the algebra of and in hearing, sound as a signature of space, signature of objects, signature of what it is not... the fact that French uses the same word – le temps – for time and weather, propagation and spread of forms in time etc. Music is, then, a way to test reality. Conversely, it’s a test whose experience defines a new distribution of the whole body by artificially localizing it in an unknown and purely physical environment, all the while being able to think, count, make relations or understand places, and so forth. The emotion I look for in music is made out of all these strata and the sliding of one over the other during the act of listening.
Adria Otte
Adria Otte is a multi-instrumentalist whose primary focus has been on violin and guitar. She has performed in ensembles ranging from string quartets to rock bands to free improvisation groups and currently frequently collaborates with Dohee Lee and Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater, focusing on sound design and electronics.
Kristina Dutton
Violinist/composer Kristina Dutton works in a wide range of musical settings, moving freely between improvisation, new music, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Conservatory trained, she has performed on more than 30 albums of various genres, appeared with numerous orchestras, and a handful of internationally acclaimed rock groups.
Konoko Nishi-Smith
Although her primary training is in classical piano performance, Kanoko Nishi’s most recent interest has been in improvisational music making, both in a solo context and in collaborations with other artists. She has been exploring on the piano, as well as on her second instrument, koto (13, or 17-string Japanese zither), various extended techniques, in addition to more traditional techniques, in order to widen the range of vocabularies on each instrument and to enable them to adapt to different musical genres. Her frequent collaborators so far include: Jacob Felix Heule, Jon Raskin, Theresa Wong, Maryclare Brzytwa, and Shayna Dunkelman, but she has performed with various other musicians in the Bay Area, as well as in Europe. Kanoko also enjoys collaborating with dancers, such as Paige Sorvillo, Yuko Kaseki, Isak Immanuel, Sherwood Chen, as well as poets and visual artists to push the limits of her musical language.