The welcome return of Raw Tonk Records to Hundred Years Gallery features Jason Kahn & Colin Webster in an evening of solo and duo sets.
Doors 7:30 | music 8pm | entry £5
Jason Kahn
Born 1960 New York. Moved to Europe in 1990 and is currently based in Zurich, where he is active as a musician, artist and writer.
Kahn’s work with electronics involves chaotic feedback systems and placing his body in the circuit flow. Grabbing open leads with his hands makes and breaks circuits, causing the synth to overload or collapse. Various contact microphones and electro magnetic inductors and the synthesizer’s own output via a mixing board are used to modulate the parameters of the synth, which oscillates between saturation and a brittle sputtering, like the death rattle of a machine on its last gasp. Live radio captures during the concert and recordings made in the performance space and its environs provide further working material for each concert. These performances are essentially site-specific works, improvising with the space at hand, both in the sense of its physicality and the sounds found there.
Among many others, Kahn has collaborated with Kevin Drumm, Jason Lescalleet, Norbert Möslang, Günter Müller, Axel Dörner, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Magda Mayas, Mark Wastell, Olivia Block, Chris Abrahams, Arnold Dreyblatt, Alan Courtis, Ulrich Krieger, Sainkho Namtchylak, Z’ev, Shelley Hirsch, Peter Kowald, Taku Sugimoto, Elliott Sharp and Keith Rowe.
http://jasonkahn.net
Colin Webster
London based saxophonist Colin Webster is quickly establishing himself on the European avant garde scene. Collaborating with some of the key figures in improvised and experimental music, Webster is known for working from extreme sonic palettes – from minimal to maximal, constantly pushing boundaries.
“Webster belongs in a long line of sharp-toned alto players, and while he rarely explores the freakish registers of a Kaoru Abe, he could remind you, at different moments, of people like John Zorn, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Anthony Braxton or even Jackie McLean.
There is this ‘punk’ spirit in his playing as well, an unfettered abundance, but he never sounds like a loose cannon. Webster has become a razor-sharp thinker who keeps the link between thought and execution as short as possible, spraying his barrage of stuttering and sputtering morsels of sound with a fearsome precision, as if there is some formal structure behind his freedom.”
– Guy Peters (taken from the liner notes to ‘New Invention’).
