Flame Keepers 44: Ledah Finck

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Ledah Finck

December 13, 2022

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About the Artist

Ledah Finck is a violinist, violist, improviser, and composer who currently resides in NYC. A passionate creator, performer, and curator of contemporary classical music, she is a member of the contemporary-music string quartet Bergamot Quartet, currently the Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the New School where the group is mentored by the JACK Quartet. Her pursuit of contemporary music is strongly supplemented by performing and collaborating in other genres such as jazz manouche, Appalachian and Celtic folk, and experimental music. Compositional projects include commissions by Imani Winds, Alarm Will Sound/Now Hear This, the Bridge Ensemble, The Peabody Community Chorus, and a work for the Bergamot Quartet and percussionist Terry Sweeney, which received a New Music USA grant. She released her first solo album, Mayfly, in 2020 and is at work on her second. More »

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Flame Keepers 43: Raquel Acevedo Klein

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Raquel Acevedo Klein

December 6, 2021

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About the Artist

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Raquel Acevedo Klein is an active conductor, vocalist, composer, and instrumentalist. Raquel has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, Town Hall, BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Celebrate Brooklyn!, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller Center, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, WNYC, and elsewhere.

Recently, Raquel was commissioned by Little Island to premiere Polyphonic Interlace: a surround-sound music experience she composed using 40 layers of her own singing voice. Polyphonic Interlace went on to be performed by American Composers Orchestra in their first concert since the pandemic. As part of NY PopsUp, Raquel curated the four-week festival entitled NYC FREE, to celebrate the opening of Little Island. Her performances and curations have caught the attention of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York.

Raquel conducts for the Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra among other projects. She has premiered works and operas by Philip Glass, Caroline Shaw, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Paola Prestini, Bryce Dessner, and George Lewis to name a few. She has recorded and performed with artists including Glen Hansard, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, The National, Grizzly Bear, Cory Smythe, Sufjan Stevens, The Knights, NY Philharmonic, and International Contemporary Ensemble among others. More »

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Flame Keepers 42: Maria Takeuchi

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Maria Takeuchi

November 29, 2021

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About the Artist

ÉMU aka Maria Takeuchi creates sonic and visual poems, merging organismic soundscapes with generative art and illuminating objects inspired by nature. Using piezo microphones attached to wood bark wound or bamboo with guitar strings and porcelain bowls carefully tuned with water measurements, Maria plays and conducts the sound objects with a delicate yet intentional focus. The subtle sound textures created solely with touches by hand, stones, leaves, sandpaper, and shells on the handmade instruments, processed for added aesthetic atmosphere. More »

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Flame Keepers 41: Sam Torres

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Sam Torres

November 22, 2021

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About the Artist

Sam Torres (he/him) is a musician and audio engineer based in Troy, NY. He is also a founding director of Organ Colossal, a nonprofit presenting music in the New York Capital Region. He grew up in the Bronx listening to and playing salsa, jazz, and Bach, and then received degrees in jazz performance and computer music composition. All of these musical interests continue to live and evolve through his own work, which is itself striving to be as honest and simple as possible. His debut full length album of music for saxophone and live electronics will be released sometime in the next several years. More »

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Flame Keepers 40: Alicia Enstrom

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Alicia Enstrom

November 15, 2021

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About the Artist

Alicia Enstrom is a classically trained violinist, composer, producer and reformed circus runaway (Cirque du Soleil) who plays high and loud, tinkers with tech, and loves to use music to stir the pot of your subconscious. She is a unique artist who’s work spans that of classical, orchestral, pop and ambient electronic.

Alicia has performed on stages throughout the world as a soloist, for blockbuster movie soundtracks and video games (Call of Duty, Madden NFL, Harriet), alongside Billboard 100 artists (Willie Nelson, Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton), on TV awards shows and with the most recognized symphonies in the world. More »

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Flame Keepers 39: Shayna Dunkelman

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Shayna Dunkelman

November 8, 2021

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About the Artist

Shayna Dunkelman is a musician and percussionist based in Brooklyn, NY. Dunkelman is known for her versatile and unique techniques, and use of electronics to access a sonic pallet not found in acoustic percussion. In addition to solo performances, Dunkelman tours Balún, Emily Wells, Attacca Quartet, Ali Sethi, and her percussion duo Nomon with her sister Nava. Born and raised in Tokyo to an Indonesian mother and an American father, Dunkelman became a multi-instrumentalist performing alongside her mother. Dunkelman is currently working on the piece Answer to (XX), a performance and documentary film exploring relationships and power dynamics between “band leaders” and “band members.” This is made possible by the support of Franklin Furnace and is the musician in residence of Pioneer Works for September, 2020. More »

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Flame Keepers 38: Claire Dickson

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Claire Dickson

November 1, 2021

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About the Artist

Claire Dickson is a creative vocalist, songwriter, and producer from Medford, Massachusetts currently based in Brooklyn. In addition to her solo work improvising with voice and electronics, she co-leads the duo Myrtle (with singer/songwriter Camila Ortiz), and collaborates Chase Kuesel, Grey Mcmurray, and Lesley Mok, among others. Her music has been featured on numerous Spotify playlists including Dummy’s Best New Artists. She is a Presidential Scholar in the Arts and has studied music at Harvard, the Banff Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and Esperanza Spalding’s Sonic Healing Lab. More »

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Flame Keepers 37: Florian Herzog

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Florian Herzog

October 25, 2021

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About the Artist

Florian Herzog, (1989) bassist and composer, is a pioneer of the German and international jazz and avant-garde scenes. After living and working in the Netherlands, Cologne and finally New York, he now writes for projects that are avant-garde jazz, pop or electronic, but also always all of the above. His bass playing has been described by the press as "emancipated, spirited and sensitive."

His collective projects such as Just Another Foundry, Turn, and Trillmann have won multiple awards (e.g. Young German Jazz Award, Avignon Jazz Award) and released over a dozen albums between them. As a leader, Herzog's projects such as Moon Tree, his quartet and his soon-to-be-released solo album are peppered with international collaborations. He has worked with established greats like Theo Bleckmann, Jim Black and Nils Wogram but also with the new generation and musicians like Anna Webber, Elias Stemeseder and Nick Dunston.

He has previously worked with Metropolis by contributing a biome to the "Biophony" project, is also active as a sideman in Germany and the U.S. and has curated the "Monday Meetings" series at Loft Cologne for over four years. More »

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Flame Keepers 36: Isabel Lepanto Gleicher

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Isabel Lepanto Gleicher

October 18, 2021

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About the Artist

Flutist and sound artist Isabel Lepanto Gleicher has been called “excellent” by The New York Times. Isabel is an artist member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wild Up, new music sinfonietta Ensemble Echappe, the Annapolis Chamber Music Festival, and the band ShoutHouse. She is also a founding member of Song Sessions Collective: a collective of four improvisers who create an ever-changing work based on the structure of whale songs through the use of flutes, clarinets, sine-tones, and an LED light installation. Isabel has had the opportunity to premiere works by Steve Reich, George Lewis, Missy Mazzoli, John Zorn, Augusta Read Thomas, and Dai Fujikura among others. Isabel has been called a “rising talent and stand out performer in the new music scene” by Miller Theatre. In 2018, she was featured in a solo recital on Miller Theatre’s Pop Up series. In 2020 Isabel has presented several solo performances that included original works: Experimental Sound Studio's The Quarantine Concerts, International Contemporary Ensemble series Tues@7, ChamberQUEERantine Virtual Festival, Recital Stream and George Mason University’s Mason Arts at Home. You can hear Isabel on Wild Up’s latest album Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine, The Bells Bow Down: The Music of Ilari Kaila, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aequa, and San Fermin’s The Cormorant I. Isabel has earned an MM in Contemporary Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from the Yale School of Music, and a BM from SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music. More »

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Flame Keepers 35: Christina Vantzou

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Christina Vantzou

October 11, 2021

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About the Artist

Christina Vantzou is a Kansas City native of Greek descent who resides in Brussels, Belgium.  Her practice has evolved over the past decade to encompass composing, recording, performance, installation, and filmmaking.  Her work deals with space, sound, time-expansion, atmosphere and harmonies through electronics and acoustic instruments. Her work has been describes as 'feeling music;' She often works in a group process, inhabiting the role of composer while the entangled nature of collaboration takes its course. Space left for chance and improvisation alongside rigorous periods of research and experimentation mark the work as both personal and about the space and time of its making.  Her releases include four albums on Kranky, 2020's Multi-Natural–a foray into abstract electronics, hybrid, hallucinative chamber music and field recording on the Belgian label Edições CN, two full-length albums with John Also Bennett as CV & JAB, and many collaborative works.  Recent collaborators include Minna Choi of Magik*Magik Orchestra, ACME, Echo Collective, Félicia Atkinson, Steve Hauschildt, Holland Andrews, Lieselot De Wilde, and Heinrich Mueller, among many others. More »

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Flame Keepers 34: Weston Olencki

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Weston Olencki

October 4, 2021

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About the Artist

Weston Olencki is a musician, composer, and sound artist. They are currently making work centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts/constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of rural space/time. Weston has performed and presented work at the Borealis Festival, ISSUE Project Room, REDCAT, bludenzer tage zeitgemäßer musik, Ghent Jazz Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, philharmonie luxembourg, Squeaky Wheel, Festival Musica, the American Academy in Rome, Frequency Festival, Indexical, and the OPTION series, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse. Various recording projects have been released by HatHut, Not Two, Sound American, Parlour Tapes+, Carrier Records, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Anticausal Systems, SUPERPANG, Dinzu Artefacts, Creative Sources, and their first solo brass release SOLO WORKS, which featured on Bandcamp Daily’s Best Experimental Music of 2020. Weston is an active member of RAGE THORMBONES, Ensemble Pamplemousse, the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, and performs regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments and various electronic media. More »

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Flame Keepers 33: Juraj Kojš

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Juraj Kojš

September 27, 2021

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About the Artist

My name is Juraj Kojš, and I am an artphibian artist from Slovakia and USA, exploring the fields of music, sound art, theater, poetry, mixed media, multimedia, bioacoustics and technologies as a maker and performer. Collaborating with artists and scientists, producing other people’s works, doing scholarly research and teaching also give me joy, as does living in Miami, FL. Miami New Times described my muscle-powered multimedia Neraissance as "striking and unforgettable," MiamiArtzine called Signals "enthralling and immersive," and Miami Herald praised Bang for the Train as "the most profound…unexpected and enjoyable.” More »

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Flame Keepers 32: Sam Nester

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Sam Nester

September 20, 2021

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About the Artist

Sam Nester is a trumpet player and composer. Nester has performed for Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival & Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, Paris Opera Ballet, Wordless Music Orchestra, Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, Mark Morris Dance Group and the Festival of New Trumpet Music among others. For these ensembles and others, Nester has premiered works by Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Luther Adams, John Cale (Velvet Underground) and John Zorn.

He has been the artist-in-residence for Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, and Bruny Island (Australia). He has received commissions for the creation of site-specific sound installations from George Mason University, Colby College, and EcoArt Project.

He currently serves on Music History faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, as well as trumpet faculty for The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program. More »

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Flame Keepers 31: Hallie Smith

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Hallie Smith

September 13, 2021

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About the Artist

Hallie Smith is a musician based in the Bay area. Her practice is oriented towards building soft circuits/sensors, coding, installations, and emotional music. Hallie’s pieces have been featured in festivals such as the Yellow Barn Young Artists’ Program, Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice, the SPLICE Institute, and the Valencia International Performance Academy. Previous and upcoming collaborations for Hallie include: the Eco Ensemble at UC Berkeley, Splinter Reeds, the SMASH ensemble, saxophonist Drew Whiting, The Boston Conservatory Contemporary Performance Ensemble, and producer Felix M. Hallie currently produces and releases music on New York -based Geryon Label. More »

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Flame Keepers 30: Sonya Belaya

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Sonya Belaya

September 6, 2021

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About the Artist

Sonya Belaya is a Russian-American pianist, singer, composer, and improviser, who divides her time between Michigan and New York. Committed to multiplicity, she is a diverse music-maker invested in vulnerable art and the development intimate, meaningful collaborations. Her work explores the integration of women’s trauma and the immigrant experience as musical narrative by centering power-sharing and storytelling as a symbol of vulnerability. Sonya’s awards include the 2021 American Composers Forum Create Award and the 2020-2021 Resident Artist at Roulette Intermedium, made possible by the Jerome Foundation. More »

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Flame Keepers 29: Clara Warnaar

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Clara Warnaar

August 30, 2021

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About the Artist

Clara Warnaar is a NYC based drummer, percussionist and composer. Clara performs regularly with the International Contemporary Ensemble and American Modern Ensemble, and has guest performed with So Percussion and Yarn/Wire. Recent premieres and recordings include: Ted Hearne (PLACE), Missy Mazzoli (Proving Up), Steve Reich (Reich/Richter) and Ellen Reid (Run/Playground). Clara’s own compositional style merges field recordings, classical music and electronics. She is the curator of the series “A New Age for New Age” which aims to re-imagine and critique New Age music. Clara plays drums in the post-rock band Infinity Shred, and the antiphonal chamber metal band Real Loud. More »

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Flame Keepers 28: Cristina Spinei

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Cristina Spinei

August 23, 2021

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About the Artist

"Composer and performer Cristina Spinei (pronounced spin-AY) has written for orchestra (Racine Symphony Orchestra, Lafayette Symphony Orchestra) and chamber ensemble (New York Piano Quartet, Intersection) but she is most known for her work with dance, having been commissioned by Nashville Ballet, the New York Choreographic Institute, Parsons Dance, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and many more. Growing up with dreams of becoming a ballerina, Spinei has channeled her love for dance into a devotion to musical movement, resulting in a style infused with “lyricism and rhythmic vitality.” (Nashville Scene)

Cristina has made her home in Nashville since 2014, and has since established herself as one of Music City’s most versatile, forward-thinking musicians: Nashville Arts dubbed her “gifted and engaging”, while The East Nashvillian praises her “adventuresome imagination.” Self-described as “minimalish,” Cristina anchors her musical ideas in melody, movement, and loops." More »

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Flame Keepers 27: George Cory Todd

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George Cory Todd

August 16, 2021

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About the Artist

George Cory Todd is a multimedia artist and engineer based in the Bay Area. Combining programming, audio and video frameworks, and other experimental practices, he explores an array of approaches to digital production, from sound and visual design & engineering to installation work, performances, and composition. His experience has lended him to national and international tours with renown artists of various disciplines, collaboration in a multitude of settings, and extensive studio work. Projects have been featured in Pitchfork, NPR, Bandcamp Daily, The Quietus, NTS Radio, Dublab, and more. More »

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Flame Keepers 26: Tristan Kasten-Krause

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Tristan Kasten-Krause

August 9, 2021

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About the Artist

Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn, NY, praised for providing his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (The New Yorker) such as Argento Chamber Ensemble, Wet Ink, Ensemble Signal and Contemporaneous. As a composer his music has been described as “heavenly” (the Guardian), “beguilingly frictionless” (Steve Smith) and full of “beautiful, unearthly soundscapes” (WNYC’s New Sounds). As a bassist he has performed and recorded music with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Caroline Shaw, Kid Millions and David Lang. His most recent album, Potential Landscapes, showcases transcendental, sample-based collaborations with artists such as Eliza Bagg (Lisel), Jayson Gerycz (Cloud Nothings), Matt Evans, Brendon Randall-Myers and Carol Johnson. More »

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Flame Keepers 25: Grey Mcmurray

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Grey Mcmurray

August 2, 2021

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Guitarist and singer Grey Mcmurray has been called “simultaneously chilling and moving”(The Deli Magazine), “sublimely odd”(New York Magazine), and “the world’s least obtrusive guitarist”(The Guardian). He has performed/recorded with artists including Gil-Scott Heron, Meshell Ndegeocello, Tyondai Braxton, Alarm Will Sound, Du Yun, Skuli Sverrisson, Beth Orton, Colin Stetson, Sam Amidon, Ali Sethi, John Cale and Laraaji among others. He released his solo debut, Stay Up, on Shahzad Ismaily’s Figureight Records in September 2019. The new collaborative quartet of Grey, Melvin Gibbs, Greg Fox and Sasha Frere-Jones, Body Meπa, released their “transient oasis, heady but cautiously optimistic”(Robert Christgau) debut in December 2020. He hopes everyday to provoke joyful tears in strangers' eyes. More »

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