FESTIVALS

Aurora Picture Show presents the 9th Annual Media Archeology Festival from Thursday, September 20 to Saturday, September 22, 2012 in Houston. Presented by Aurora Picture Show in collaboration with both the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and Nameless Sound, the multi-media festival showcases artists who use, manipulate, recycle and reinvent electronic media to create live multidisciplinary performances.

Media Archeology: Real Time will present artists whose work is a hybridization of moving images and acoustics to explore the relationships and open the definitions of film, music, art and performance. From innovative new technologies to traditional analogue methodologies these artists fuse genres to create a contemporary interdisciplinary experience grown out of sound and light.

Text of Light
Co-presented with Nameless Sound
Curated by Aurora Picture Show and Nameless Sound
Saturday, September 22, 7:30PM
Location: Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex, 2201 Preston Street

Lee Ranaldo (New York): guitar
Alan Licht (New York): guitar
Ulrich Krieger (Los Angeles): saxophone, electronics
Tim Barnes (Louisville): drums

Nameless Sound and Aurora present a unique night of Text of Light. Text of Light does not perform soundtracks to the films of Stan Brakhage. Rather, it uses the film as a further element for improvisation, almost as a fifth (or sixth) performer. While Brakhage intended for these films to be screened silently as films , when framed in and of themselves in a movie theatre, in Text of Light presentations they are being juxtaposed with the music, in a kind of real-time performance, mixed-media collage.

The Brakhage films included will be Mammals of Victoria, Beautiful Funerals, and Aftermath.

"The Text of Light, a stunning 71-minute montage of rays reflected through a glass ashtray, might be Stan Brakhage's most abstract work ... Text of Light explores similar spaces -- the area between sound and picture, and between finished work and live improvisation -- as well as the infinite ways those elements can interact." The Wire

Alan Licht (b. New Jersey, 1968) has released five albums of compositions for tape and guitar and has exhibited his sound and video installations in the US and Europe. His diverse musical associations range from titans of the avant-garde (Peter Brotzmann, Rashied Ali) to electonicians and experimental DJs (Fennesz, Christian Marclay) to cult figures from the world of outsider rock and roll (Tom Verlaine, Arthur Lee, Jandek). He's also well-known as a writer, who's criticism has appeared in such publications as The Wire, Village Voice, Artforum, and Modern Painters.

Lee Ranaldo (b. Glen Cove, Long Island, 1956) is best-known as the guitarist and founding member of Sonic Youth, but he's lived concurrent lives as a cutting-edge solo musician, as a painter, and as a poet.

Ulrich Krieger (b. Frieberg, Germany, 1962) calls his approach to playing the saxophone "acoustic electronics," using the instrument as an "analogue sampler" with which to produce quasi-electronic sounds with are then electronically processed and amplified. He's toured and recorded as a solo performer, as a composer, and as an ensemble and orchestra member, and has collaborated with figures throughout the landscape of modern music, including Lou Reed, Merzbow, and LaMonte Young.

Tim Barnes is a sound designer, composer, and archivist as well as an accomplished drummer who's gestural and pointallistic style has enlivened the work of John Zorn, Jim O'Rourke and Tower Recordings. Barnes is equally at home on country-folk sessions as he is on expansive elctro-acoustic drone pieces; these wide-ranging interests and activities have prompted Time Out New York to call him "the missing piece of the New York avant-garde puzzle."