Krispen Hartung - Boise Experimental Music Festival Coordinator (BOISE, ID)

http://www.krispenhartung.com

www.myspace.com/krispenhartung

Krispen Hartung's 25-year musical background is an experimental and continuously evolving road trip marked by many excursions and detours - from classical guitar, progressive rock, and world-beat, to fusion, traditional jazz, and avant-garde. However, Hartung's true musical identify and creative direction came to fruition when, in 1993, he began studying the method of real-time looping, the technique of digitally recording live performance, playing it back in real-time, and repeating this process indefinitely to produce multiple layers of interweaving and complimentary instrument parts. Since then, he has become one of the North West's most prolific real-time looping artists and Idaho's leading member of the international looping community Looper's Delight. Hartung's debut solo looping CD Places was released for sale in April of 2004 and consists of a series of colorful, innovative, and thought/mood provoking looping compositions that he improvised and recorded on the spot in one take. Since then, Hartung has produced and released seven additional CDs, including his most recent solo improvisational release "Fragments." His upcoming release, "Mandolin from Mars," will go on sale the summer of 2007 and will consist of pieces performed on the 6-string mandolin and laptop computer. Krispen performs frequently at venues that foster artistic expression and diverse human discourse, such as coffee shops, art and music festivals, art galleries, and art exhibits. He is also the founder of the Boise Experimental Music Festival, now in its second year of success in placing Boise, Idaho on the map of music festivals for the creative arts.

Rick Walker (SANTA CRUZ, CA)

www.looppool.info

Composer, multi-instrumentalist and master percussionist/drummer, Rick Walker has been on the cutting edge of music for the last 25 years. One of the original founding architects of the World Beat movement, and now one of the leading lights in the emerging live looping movement in Northern California, he incorporates a vast array of world music and pop styles in his repertoire.

He is an exceptionally versatile and sensitive musician and is eccentrically creative, finding rhythm and melody in hundreds of everyday objects.

He has also produced 21 live looping festivals,including the World's First Women's Live Looping Festival, the First Bass Live Looping Festival, the First Bass Live Looping Tour (with fellow loopers Michael Manring, Steve Lawson and Max Valentino), and this past summer, the Y2K2 Live Loopfest, which featured 48 live looping artists from all over the country --the largest gathering of live loopers in history-- playing 22 hours of continuous music on 2 stages in 2 days. Rick has just become an endorsee and clinician for the Gibson/Oberheim EDP (with LOOP IV software by Aurisis; the cadillac of live hardware loopers) and has embarked on a California tour with the Looping Trio (Andre LaFosse, of Los Angeles, and Steve Lawson, of London) with special appearances by Michael Manring, Jon Wagner, Cara Quinn and Hans Lindauer. He is currently planning his first solo live looping tour of 12 countries in Europe and the British Isles for summer 2003.

Lumper/Splitter (OAKLAND, CA)

www.kingtone.com/lumper_splitter.html

www.kingtone.com (Lucio)
www.joerut.com (Joe)

Lumper/Splitter is the mind meld of two 'obsessive soundhounds' - Joe Rut and Lucio Menegon. Combining their extensive experimental and
improvisational experience, the Oakland, CA based duo create sonic tapestries using effects manipulation, looping, amplified objects,
homemade instruments, found sound, and even some honest guitar playing. You decide - are you a Lumper or a Splitter?

Ted Killian (MEDFORD, OR)

www.pfmentum.com/flux.html

Jeff Kaiser (VENTURA, CA)

Quarter-Tone Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Electronics

http://www.JeffKaiser.com

Jared Hallock (BOISE, ID)

email

Jared Hallock's years as a performer have led him down many roads. Holding a degree in Percussion Performance from the University of Idaho, he has shared many a stage. From jazz combos to funk bands, orchestral work to the avante garde, he thrives on exploring all avenues of performance art. Recently Hallock has created theatrical/musical stage shows, acted in plays, and performed with a variety of musical groups. Using a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts, Hallock also works with the community to help nurture young artists.

One of his current projects is exploring the world of experimental music. Following in the footsteps of Phillip Glass and John Cage, he creates music using both traditional and non- traditional instruments. Some of his compositions include the use of cups, body percussion, spoons, electronic percussion, and anything else within reach. As a result of his eclectic explorations, Hallock has become a regular performer as a drummer, marimba player, composer, and clinician in the Pacific Northwest.

Unicorn Feather (BOISE, ID)

Unicorn Feather recalls names and dates; opposing death and dynasty like cinder. Immersed in greenery / excited by handwriting.

www.theunicornfeather.com

Gretchen Jude (BOISE, ID)

Moe! Staiano (Oakland, CA)

Moe! Staiano is a percussionist who usually uses found objects, but has moved to doing drumming on found objects on his trap set (i.e. prepared percussion). Moe! (yes, he includes the exclaimation mark in his name) has experimented through the years though solo percussion using pipes, food pans, pressure caps, sheet metals, nick-nacks & other stuff that has been found, given or stolen (mainly from Pizza Hut when he worked there including a nifty Spatula that he bows). One can expect to see Moe!'s show as a visual eye pleaser: running around throwing pipes on concrete, walking on pans with his feet to mute sounds or running amok, throwing his body into old cassette tapes or two dozen cymbals in any given performance. His shows can sometimes expect a big mess in one fashion or another (which he replies that the aftermath of his performances represents his life) with implements of mixers & vibrators on objects spewed throughout the set. He's been a good boy cleaning up after himself, too. He has two CD's out of his solo/collaborative recordings. The second CD, "The Lateness of Yearly Presentations" was released in 2002 on his micro-label Dephine Knormal Musik, a release split with a French label, Amanita Records. The first solo CD The Non-Study of First Impressions, is now out of print. He finished recording and mixing a third solo CD due next year, entitled The Absolute Tradition of No Traditions and will be released through Psychform Records.

He's collaborated with many musicians including Ron Anderson (the Molecules, RonRuins, PAK), Tom Nunn, David Slusser, Karen Stackpole, Ches Smith, Michael Evans (God Is My Co-Pilot), Caroline Kraabel & John Edwards (Shock Exchange), Gino Robair, William Hooker, and has performed with all these plus Henry Kaiser, Mark Growden's Electric Pinata, Amy Denio, Cheer-Accident, sfSoundGroup, Ettrick among others. He occasional does a duo with Vicky Grossi called Duo Referal and plays with Thomas Dimuzio and Kanoko Nishi called KaMoTo Trio.

Formaly, Moe! was a member of two important bands: Vacuum Tree Head (formerly doing metal percussion and then playing trap set) and with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (doing THE metal percussion), a band that consist of Carla Kihlsteadt, Nils Frykdahl, Dan Rathbun (all from Charming Hostess, two from Idiot Flesh) and Mathias Bossi. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum has one release on Seeland (Negativland's label) and a live CD on Sickroom Records from Chicago as well as a second studio album out on Web of Mimicry, Of Natural History. Many of the members, including Moe!, collaborates with the butoh dancer Shinichi Momo Koga under that company name Inkboat & have performed around Seattle, Mendocino & San Francisco. Moe! has formed a new band called Mute Socialite with guitarist Ava Mendoza and bassist Alee Karim and are currently looking for a second drummer, a trumpet player and someone who can sing very well. Performances with this band will soon follow.

Moreover, he does text/graphic scores for a collective ensemble for what he calls MOE!KESTRA!, which employs many musicians, well at least between 15-45 players (and sometimes more, sometimes less than those numbers), and play scores Moe! has written including a piece for destroying a piano (Piece No.1: Death of a Piano), sex toys (Piece No.2: Death by Dildo; which once got sponsored by Good Vibrations...seriously) among four other pieces that have been performed though 1997-2005 (seven pieces in all; about 40 performances & counting). Fellow employees has included ROVA's Bruce Ackley, George Cremaschi, Michael de la Cuesta, Cheryl Leonard, Matt Ingals, Fred Frith, William Winant, John Shiurba, Bill Horvitz, Tom Yoder, Aaron Bennett, Dan Plonsey, Garth Powell, Peter Valsamis, Kris Force (Amber Asylum), Jonas Muller, Adam Lane, Matthew Sperry, Jonathan Segel (Camper Van Beethoven), Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu, They Might Be Giants), Michael Evans (God Is My Co-Pilot), Sean Meehan, Shelley Burgon, Danny Tunick (Guvner), David First, all past and present members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum among many other musicians. In 1999, he wrote & conducted a piece written for the Seattle ensemble, the Degenerate Art Ensemble, entitled "Piece No.6: And They Swore They All Slept Soundly", which was also performed by the Moe!kestra!. The debut disc of Moe!kestra! was released in June of 2003 of two conducted improvisations entitled "Two Forms of Multitudes: Conducted Improvisations". He's currently planning on releasing more Moe!kestra! material in the near future and hope's to write more in the near future. One piece entitled "Piece No.7: An Inescapable Siren Within Earshot Of Hearing Distance Therein And Other Whereabouts", was written for guitars (played with all low E-strings played with a coiled implement), strings, percussion, u-bolts, wine glasses and sirens. A recording of that piece along with another large orchestra piece is now out and available on CD through Rastascan Records/Amanita Records. He completed a piece that was performed at the San Francisco International Arts Festival called Piece No.8 for strings, percussion and prepared guitar last year. May of 2007 will mark the 10th anniversary of Moe!kestra! and is planning on performances in Portland and San Francisco (and maybe Seattle) with a massive 100-piece (give or take, of course) ensemble with a new composition as well as performances of Death of A Piano. Any inquireries for spaces and musicians are welcomed.

Moe! has still not yet gone through any music theory.

Amy Vecchione (Boise, ID)

Craig Green (Idaho Falls, ID)

Gregory Taylor (Madison, WI)

http://www.rtqe.net/

Margaret Noble (audio) and Edyta Stepien (video) (Chicago, IL)

M A R G A R E T N O B L E - audio

Margaret Noble started her career in the sound-arts as an electronic music DJ in the underground club community of Chicago. From 2003 to 2004, she traveled as performance DJ throughout the United States and Mexico. In 2004, she branched out from dance floor DJing into more experimental interests and created a monthly sound arts showcase in Chicago called, "Spectacle." Throughout this period she received multiple write-ups in UR, Newcity, The Sun Times, The Reader, The Chicago Tribune and Vogue. From 2005 to 2007, she completed an MFA in sound art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She now performs locally and nationally as an experimental composer in solo and in collaboration with video artists. Her collaborative works include short experimental films and audio recordings which have been exhibited in a variety of film festivals and art openings nationally and internationally.

E D Y T A S T E P I E N - video

Edyta Stepien is a multimedia artist that lives and works in Chicago. Born and raised in Poland she moved to Chicago in 1998 where she became involved in the local media arts scene. Her artistic practice encompasses photography, film, video, video installation and sound. She has created a number of short narrative video pieces as well as large multi-channel video installations. Her video installation work is an attempt to activate a space visually and sonically and to immerse the viewer into an environment that is partially organic and partially synthetic. The viewer gets seduced by the esthetics of the video and becomes a part of the simulated reality. In 2004 she was awarded a Full Tuition Chairman Merit Scholarship at The School of Art Institute of Chicago where she completed her BFA degree. She is frequently collaborating with sound and performance artists and expanding her work into a live performance. As a member of the collective Video Janitor she has performed live video mixing, working with djs, musicians and sound artists at different venues in the Chicago area and beyond. In December 2006 she co-curated and performed a multimedia event at the Chicago Cultural Center as a part of the Ohm Curators Series. In November 2006 she presented her collaborative work at the 1st Reno Interdisciplinary Festival of New Media, University of Reno, RIFNM 2006. In February 2007 her collaborative project "Sonata" played at the Directors Lounge 2007 experimental media festival in Berlin.

Patrick Benolkin (Boise, ID)

Patrick Benolkin is a 26-year-old electronic music composer and producer based in Boise, Idaho. He creates warm, emotive, beat-ridden soundscapes as Electricwest for Boltfish Recordings (London, UK) and Expanding Electronic Diversity (New York), and also produces lush, droning, beat-less ambient music as Eluder for Infraction Records (Ohio). When not hiding out and working in his home, Benolkin (also an accomplished local DJ) can be found spinning enjoyable sets all over downtown Boise.

This year at BEMF 2, he will navigate through pure, psychedelic sound design and atmospheres, editing and looping various found-sound and samples with a multitude of realtime effects, all from his laptop.

Rob Price & David Grollman (New York, NY)

Stefan Smulovitz (Vancouver, B.C.)

http://www.kenaxis.com/

http://lotfive.ca/Home.html

Tom Baker (Seattle, WA)

Tom Baker has been active as a composer, performer and music producer in the Seattle new-music scene since arriving in 1994. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States, in Canada and in Europe. He has studied composition with Chinary Ung and John Rahn, and received his doctorate in composition in 1996 from the University of Washington, where he currently teaches theory and composition.

Tom has appeared as guest conductor for the Seattle Creative Orchestra and as composer-in-residence for the a cappella vocal ensemble The Esoterics, and has received awards and grants from several organizations including the Meet the Composer, the Jack Straw Foundation, the Washington State Arts Commission, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the King County Arts Commission.

As the artistic director and curator of the new-music concert series, the Seattle Composers' Salon, Tom is dedicated to producing and promoting the new and adventurous music which is being created in the Pacific Northwest. He is co-director of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO) and co-founder of the new-music recording label Present Sounds.

Tom began playing the guitar at age four, and that instrument has been a constant through every phase of his creative life. He played rock, jazz and bluegrass throughout his childhood, and eventually began studying classical guitar during his college years. He received his Master's degree in classical guitar performance from Arizona State University in 1993, after finishing his Bachelor's degree in music from Boise State Univeristy in 1988.

In 1996, Tom started to play the fretless guitar, mostly to explore the microtonal implications that the instrument offered. After several years of learning this new and rather enigmatic instrument, he started performing again. He released a solo fretless CD in 2002, and another is forthcoming in 2005. He performs on both fretted and unfretted instruments, and is the leader of the Tom Baker Quartet (TBQ), a band featuring clarinet, guitar, bass and drums.

In addition to his work as a composer and a performer, Tom has presented papers on a wide variety of topics at various festivals and conferences including the College Music Society National Annual Conference in Santa Fe; the Contemporary Opera at the Millennium Symposium at Hofstra University; the International Conference on Cybernetics and Systems Research in the Arts at Baden-Baden, Germany; and the Society of Music Theory National Conference at University of North Carolina. His article, The Composers' Studio, A New Paradigm, was published in the 2002 edition of the College Music Symposium. He also serves as contributing editor to Open Space Magazine and is an associate editor for Perspectives of New Music.

In the spring of 2005, Tom was awarded an associate artist-in-residence position at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He spent three weeks working and playing with the innovative composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill, as well as working with musicians, writers and painters from all over the world.

Tom lives in Seattle with his wife Alissa Rupp, who is an architect and a painter. They work on many projects together, including the upcoming opera The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars. Tom is also an avid fly-fisherman, and has fished in rivers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia.

The Transhumans (Ventura, CA)

http://myspace.com/thetranshumans

www.thetranshumans.com

Justin Cassidy and Patrick Rodriquez are the synth/FX/loopers who have teamed-up with Acoustic drummer Bob Sterling to form The Transhumans. Over the last year and a half they have performed at various underground venues and New Music Festivals in California and have produced two CD efforts culled from their prodigious collection of live, in-studio recordings. The first, "Five Stories," is a five mini-disc compilation that includes a small booklet of "stories" based on their music. Their latest effort, "Into the Maelstrom," has just been released on the pfMentum label.Their music is spontaneous, improvised and uninhibited.

Z'EV

http://www.radoncollective.org/artists/zev/home.html

Since the 1970's, the currently Uk -based text/sound artist Z'EV has been at the forefront of the movement that became known as "industrial".

A precursor even to Neubauten, his brand of scrap-metal/found object percussion originates in intense musical training and background. Beginning with his days at the California Institute of the Arts, Z'EV has studied techniques such as Balinese Gamelan, EWE (Ghana), Tala (south India), and Vou Dun (Hati).

Incorporating these traditional methods into his distinctly personal musical vision of sound, Z'EV has consistently produced vital examples of his craft for a host of noted labels including Soleilmoon, C.I.P, Touch and Die Stadt and a commissioned piece for John Zorn's "Radical Jewish Music" series on Zaddik. His record "Bust This" was chosen in 1988 by The Wire as one of the greatest 50 percussion albums of all time.

Z'EV has graced the stage and created installations for an immense variety of venues in Europe, the US and
Japan. The list of his collaborators over the years includes such luminaries as Keiji Haino, David Jackman, Francisco Lopez, KK Null, Stephen O'Malley, Charlemagne Palestine, Genesis P 'Orridge and Chris Watson.

In 2007, Radon presents 'Bust This', the premiere full-on American tour by Z'EV. These appearances will be his
first state-side performances (excluding NYC and LA)in well over 20 years.

The concerts will occur in a mixture of conventional venues as well as delving into underground contexts which few artists of Z'EV's history and stature have explored. The return of Z'EV to the United States is highly anticipated in the wake of his recent activity. A new generation of listeners have come to the realization that much of what they consider to be the original wave of avant garde music, owes a huge debt to the creative pathways forged by Z'EV.

Breccia

http://www.vud.org/breccia/

Melissa Wilson - Cello
Jessie Proksa - Cello
Brittany McConnell - Violin
Gretchen Jude - Koto
Daniel Cross - Trumpet
Ted Apel - Clarinet
Austin Amaya - Tenor