ALBEDO: PERFORMANCE

An evening of two improvised sound and music performances with Sholeh Asgary, Jorge Bachmann, Roco Córdova*, Kevin Lo, La Macacoa, Michael Mersereau, Adrián Montúfar, Kim Nucci, and Gabby Wen (in no particular order) in sonic and spatial collaboration with Asgary’s installation, ALBEDO at Incline Gallery.

Doors Open at 6:30 pm

Performances begin at 7 pm

Doors Close at 7:15 pm

Second Set follows an Intermission

Event Ends at 9 pm

Organized by Sholeh Asgary + Michael Mersereau

Masks are required throughout the event regardless of vax status

Suggested Sliding Scale Donation, all proceeds will go to: Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (PCRF) https://www.pcrf.net/

Limited Tickets Released over Time. Please contact organizers if you cannot attend so a waitlisted guest can take your spot.

"ALBEDO" is a solo exhibition of work by Sholeh Asgary that uses radio waves, fluorescent light tubes, and water as mediums that situate the site's history as a portal to explore relationships between interment and frequency. Fluorescent light tubes line the inclines and landings of the gallery, creating an unbroken sight-line that overwhelms with bright light, while radio frequency interference of the tubes is made audible through the resonance of water basins. It also includes an apocryphal video that translates local stories about a bird into equivalent statements from a historical text.

PERFORMER BIOS

Sholeh Asgary // https://www.sholehasgary.com/

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose works implicate the viewer-participant in future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary is heavily influenced by her early somatic experiences in constant movement across borders. From this positionality lies an inherent tension throughout her work: between visibility and opacity, history and myth, worldmaking and death--with none in opposition to the other. This complexity drives the core of her work. Asgary is featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue” and has been supported by numerous residencies, including Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, UCLA ArtSci, ARoS Kunstmuseum, and Berkeley Art Center. Her work has been presented through exhibitions, performances, and screenings by such institutions as Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Project, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Charlotte Street Foundation, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Flux Factory. Asgary is a recipient of a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant for her solo exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Project Grant with Dance Elixir, a 2020 California Arts Council Grant for her program MAJLES, a 2022 SECA (SFMOMA) nominee, and recipient of the 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for curatorial initiatives as Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery, where she founded The Project Room. Asgary’s ongoing collaborative projects include those with Abou Farman, Julie Ezelle Patton, Dena Al-Adeeb, and Heather Kapplow. Currently residing in Oakland, CA, she is a Lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and serves on the Curatorial Council for Southern Exposure. Asgary holds an MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University.

Jorge Bachmann // https://bandcamp.com/ruidobello

Jorge Bachmann aka [ruidobello] has worked as a media artist, experimental composer, and curator. He is a founding member of MEI.collectiv, a multi­disciplinary group of artists. His eclectic work ranges from subtle musique concrete soundscapes to analog synth minimalism. Since the early 1980's he has been exploring the strange, unique and microcosmic sounds of everyday life, collecting field recordings and creating soundscapes meant for deep listening. In addition to Collision Stories he is one half of the synth duo Snowsteps.

Roco Córdova // https://linktr.ee/rococordova

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Roco Córdova (also known as Rodolfo Córdova-Lebrón) is a vocalist, composer, producer and improviser based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They possess a B.Mus. in Composition from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and an M.A. in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, California. They have studied under the guidance of Carlos Carrillo, Manuel Ceide, Roscoe Mitchell, Zeena Parkins and James Fei. As a singer they have trained under the instruction of countertenor Paul Flight and have participated in vocal advancement workshops with Meredith Monk.

Their music has been described as "slow-boiling, apparently timeless" with "an odd momentum of its own" (The Washington Post). Cordova's work fuses diverse influences with electronic media, chance operations, gradual processes, noise, improvisation, and timbral techniques of composition. Their compositions explore intersections with literature and visual arts and engage with issues of colonialism, gender, geopolitics and migration. Voice is at the core of their music making: they incorporate extended techniques like throat singing, overtone singing, falsetto, yodeling, and vocal clicks and pops into live performances that emphasize the electronic processing of these sounds. Recently, they have been focused in exploring the intersection between their practice as vocalist-improviser with electronic dance musics.

As a touring vocalist and improviser with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, they have performed in venues including but not limited to: The Tennessee Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee; The Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago, Illinois; SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, Brazil; The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.; and the Maison des Arts in Créteil, France. At a local level, Córdova has performed in important venues like The Lab in San Francisco, Pro Arts, and The Uptown both in Oakland. They're also an active member of the improvising bands Monopiece and Temoleh, with whom they have toured internationally and published recordings with. Other collaborators include Dirt and Copper, Kris Force, Theresa Wong, Timothy Russell and GeraldCaselDance.

Kevin Lo // https://kevincklo.com/

Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer and artist living on Chechenyo Ohlone land (Oakland). In his compositions for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale.

He is also one half of the experimental interdisciplinary duo, DROUGHT SPA, alongside alex cruse. They have performed or presented at Cloaca Projects, Brown University, San Francisco State University's Poetry Center, UC Berkeley's Center for New Media and Audio Technologies, Gray Area (San Francisco), CounterPulse (San Francisco), SOMArts (San Francisco), B4BEL4B Gallery (Oakland), the Oakland Museum of California, H0L0 (NYC), Vaska Emanouilova Gallery (Sofia), Aeromoto (Mexico City), Audio Foundation (Auckland), the International Symposium of Electronic Art (Vancouver), and elsewhere.

La Macacoa // https://www.instagram.com/lamacacoa/

LA MACACOA, aka Alexandra Buschman-Roman - a performance artist, composer, improviser and music space creator from Puerto Rico based in Oakland. Her work centers around decolonizing music, deconstructing modern Caribbean pop, and reviving traditional music.

Michael Mersereau // https://www.michaelmersereau.net/

Michael Mersereau (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California and Montréal, Canada. He uses the boundaries of genre in cinema and television, such as horror, suspense, and soap operas, to create experimental sound, video, performance, and installation works that elevate particular production elements to create absurd and uncanny worlds. Mersereau’s work has been internationally exhibited at institutions and galleries such as Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, The Diego Rivera Anahuacali Museum, Eastern Bloc in Montréal, Wassaic Project in New York, Artists' Television Access in San Francisco, and Les Territoires Gallery in Montréal. His video works have been screened at Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Toronto Underground Film Festival, Fagelbo Film Festival, and at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark, amongst numerous other film festivals and galleries. As a composer and experimental musician, his collaborations have been premiered at the Activation Series of Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, The Lab with Jeanie Aprille Tang, Galerie B312 in Montréal for Thomas Begin, Mills College Art Museum with choreographer and dancer Molissa Fenley, and Hexagram, Montreal with CCRMA, Stanford University. Mersereau is faculty at Mills College, where he teaches in the Music Department and consults on projects for the Mills College Art Museum. Mersereau holds an MFA from Mills College and BFA from California College of the Arts.

Adrián Montúfar // https://www.adrianmontufar.com/

I am a composer and improviser currently in the second year of my PhD in Music Composition at UC Berkeley. On the practical side, I am interested in using sensor technology and controller design to build new musical instruments and sound installations. On the artistic side, my music often plays with the relationship between the musician and their instrument or, more recently, between the voice and the body. I mainly work in the worlds of contemporary concert music and free improvisation. Between 2017 and 2019, I completed MMus programs in Composition and Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London under the supervision of Roger Redgate and Freida Abtan. My work has been presented in Italy, Spain, Ecuador, the United Kingdom, and the United States. My music has been performed by InConcerto (Ecuador), Nomos Group (Spain), counter)induction, Duo Damiana, and Kayleigh Butcher, among others.

Kim Nucci // https://kimnucci.com/

Kim Nucci is an Oakland-based media artist, composer, and technologist. Kim claims to be the Pope of facebook and worships dollar slice pizza as the one true god, while living in the god(pizza)less land of California.

As a musician, they perform on electronics, modular synthesizer, and saxophone. As a visual and sound artist, they create interactive installations using architectural interventions, sculpture, arduino and other microcontrollers, idiosyncratic interactive design, painting and projections. They also VJ, and create generative and audio-reactive video art for live musical performance.

Gabby Wen // https://www.gabriellawen.com/

Born 1995 in Toisan, Canton, raised in Shenzhen, currently live in Oakland, CA, Gabby Wen is an electroacoustic music composer and improviser, working with synthesizers, electronics, guqin, field recordings, and miscellaneous instruments and objects to create captivating auditory experiences and narratives. Gabby works towards bringing aesthetics and musical traditions that are valuable but overlooked to the forefront of the improvised music scene. Their works include solo and collaborative live improvisation performances and fixed-media electroacoustic compositions, fueled by spontaneity and uncertainty, reflecting introspective experiences and their relationship to their upbringing, memories, desires, impulses, and surroundings. During improvisations, they pay close attention to the subtle changes in consciousness and perception as the textures of sound alters and unexpected ways communications occur. Gabby is also interested in new ways of parameter control in sound synthesis, especially a system that involves interdependent segments affecting each other. Their sound designs are inspired by manufacturing machinery, insects, neighborhoods, traffic, home appliances, storms, forests, and the ocean. Gabby is keen on traveling, discovering, and studying the profound use of improvisational elements in traditional music around the globe. Gabby holds a BA in Art & Technology from Mills College, where they studied electronic & electroacoustic music composition, improvisation, new media art, coding, and audio circuit design. They currently work as a technician at Sequential (formerly Dave Smith Instruments).

About Incline Gallery:

We are an alternative art space that fosters relationships between community and artists. We create opportunities for emerging as well as established artists to exhibit in a non-cube format that challenges and encourages experimentation in exhibition design. Our role continues to expand by facilitating outside curators, international exchanges and partnerships within a community based organization.