A hybrid performance – part documentary, part conjuring, part performance art – MIND ON HEAVEN explores the boundaries of memory and embodiment. Using live audio and video mixes, original animation, archival texts, storytelling, and dance, two performers tune in to the vibrations of the late Dennis Palmer, a self-taught, avant-garde musician (The Shaking Ray Levis), painter of the American South, and a co-founder of the non-profit organization The Shaking Ray Levi Society.

Sound designer Ben Williams and filmmaker Brian Cagle perform their own special ritual with MIND ON HEAVEN: a serious meditation on death, a humorous exploration of an artist’s identity, a nostalgic and bittersweet exploration of stereotypes and cultural tropes of the American South from 1950-1990, and an attempt to channel a very personal feeling associated with a close friend – a spirit of creation, generosity, and originality.

Ben Williams works in the theater as an actor, sound designer, and director. He has collaborated with Elevator Repair Service, minor theater with Julia Jarcho, Christina Masciotti, Suzanne Bocanegra, Lily Whitsitt, Sibyl Kempson, Rich Maxwell and the NYC Players, The Wooster Group, and many others. New York Times article on Ben Williams.

Brian Cagle is a filmmaker (writer, director & executive producer) currently living in Chicago but originally hailing from the hills of East Tennessee. His films have been screened at a number of museums and film festivals around the US and particularly in the Southeast, such as Downstream International Film Festival, IndieGrits, and IndieMemphis.

MIND ON HEAVEN is supported by Axis Theater, Abrons Arts Center, The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“New Madrid is a study in contrasts. The band’s music is both earthy and interstellar, sweet, simple Southern rock blasted into the ionosphere” - Flagpole Magazine

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Cherries Jubilee featuring:
The Cherry Blossoms
Josephine Foster
Wu Fei

Saturday, May 27, 2017, 8:00 pm (doors open at 7:30 pm)
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$20 door
Update: advance ticket sales are now closed. Tickets may be purchased at the door.
NOTE to advance ticketholders: no paper tickets issued - your name will be on a list at the door

CHERRIES JUBILEE is a one-of-a-kind event at the otherworldly venue Wayne-O-Rama, Chattanooga’s history funhouse, featuring three acclaimed, world-class headlining acts: The Cherry Blossoms, Josephine Foster and Wu Fei. This mini music festival will also celebrate the release of the new Cherry Blossoms album The Hank Tapes featuring early songs from 1996 recorded when the late Marc Trovillion (a Chattanoogan and an original member of Lambchop) was the band’s bassist.

The Cherry Blossoms are to folk music what the Velvet Underground was to rock and roll: anti-commercial, rebellious, pure and unlike anything else. The “unclassifiable, sprawling folk collective” (Nashville Scene) deconstructs folk into a very special experimental music, but its members insist they’re a front porch band. Self-described as “Middle Tennessee’s finest anarchic post neo-skiffle collective specializing in kazoo-exotica,” the legendary Nashville band’s core includes Peggy Snow and John Allingham with percussionists Allen Lowrey and Chris Davis and has charmed audiences across the U.S. and Europe. Specializing in kazoo, 6-gallon bucket, poetry, carefully awry drum rhythms, guitar and vocals that span octaves, melodies and time, the Cherry Blossoms are unforgettable.

“One of America’s secret gems of the Underground”
- Violet Times, on the Cherry Blossoms

The Colorado-born singer/songwriter/guitarist Josephine Foster has built a remarkable career and earned fans across the globe for her folk-infused compositions and hauntingly beautiful voice, garnering comparisons to diverse artists such as Karen Dalton, Tom Waits and Nico. As a teen, Foster honed her vocal skills by singing at weddings and funerals, and while her initial career aspirations leaned toward opera, she was profoundly inspired by early British folk and Tin Pan Alley classics. Impossible to pin down, Foster has tackled varied styles including psychedelic rock, 19th century German Lieder, and children’s songs, and with singer (and husband) Victor Herrera, Foster has covered Spanish folk songs that were previously recorded by the poet Federico García Lorca in 1931.

“Her gainly vibrato and fireside intimacy place her in the company of illustrious dames of Americana such as Buffy Sainte-Marie and composer Ruth Crawford Seeger” - Uncut, on Josephine Foster

Wu Fei, a native of Beijing and a current Nashville resident, is a master of the guzheng, the ancient 21-string Chinese zither. She was trained as a Western classical composer and a vocalist, and plays beautifully in the guzheng’s vernacular–a musical language which is at least 2,000 years old. She mixes her Western and Chinese traditional sensibilities with a contemporary idiosyncratic, experimental dialect and has collaborated with many artists of different disciplines and genres, from Béla Fleck to avant-garde composer John Zorn. Wu Fei composes for choir, string quartet, chamber ensemble, Balinese gamelan and orchestra, and her worldwide touring destinations include the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing (composition premiere), the MoMA in New York City, and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN.

“Beautiful and complex, imagine a Chinese Joanna Newsom”
- Göteborg Post, on Wu Fei

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Cilla Vee
Davey Williams
Evan Lipson
with special guest Bob Stagner

Saturday, June 3, 2017, 8:00 pm
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$10 door

Cilla Vee (Claire Elizabeth Barratt) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of “Cilla Vee Life Arts” – an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration. Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art. Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts. Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded “Cilla Vee Life Arts” and began to develop and present her signature modes of work – including “Motion Sculpture Movement Installations” and “The Sound Of Movement” projects.

Davey Williams is one of the most unique musical figures to have ever come from the state of Alabama. Considered one of the “three founding fathers of American free improvisational guitar” (along with Henry Kaiser and Eugene Chadbourne), he is the only person to ever successfully - and honestly - bridge the gap between the disparate worlds of Robert Johnson and Sun Ra. As a 19-year-old protégé of the late Delta and Chicago blues master Johnny Shines (a protégé of Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf), Davey mastered the slide steel stylings of his teacher and expounded on the form by taking the blues in directions few knew it could go or dare try. Dubbing his style “convulsive blues,” he has quietly blown minds around the world through his unique deployment of old-school form and new school technique. Williams was a key member of the Raudelunas art collective, a co-founder of independent record label Trans Museq, and an important architect of the unholy sound of Alabama’s Rev. Fred Lane. Along with his longtime musical partner/foil LaDonna Smith, he has played on stages around the globe and collaborated with the likes of John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Andrea Centazzo, Tom Cora, Jim Staley, Gustavo Matamoros, Roger Turner, Anne LeBaron, The Shaking Ray Levis, Col. Bruce Hampton, Oteil Burbridge, Gunter Christmann and Mark Kramer.

Evan Lipson has operated as a musician since adolescence—intuitively seeking the liminal zones in which intellect and instinct, history and myth, and creative and destructive force intersect. He is currently active with Roughhousing and may or may not have some degree of involvement or affiliation with an organization known as Meinschaft. Recently, he has scored several films as well as written music for a new collaboration with Duplex Planet creator David Greenberger and Bob Stagner of the Shaking Ray Levis. Past units include Normal Love, Satanized, Wrest, Dynamite Club, Femme Tops, Psychotic Quartet, and the Weasel Walter Trio. Lipson's music has been released on a number of imprints including SKiN GRAFT, UgEXPLODE, High Two, Public Eyesore, Badmaster, Caminante, New Atlantis, and Damage Rituals.

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Shane Parish (of Ahleuchatistas)

Thursday, June 22, 2017, 7:30 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm)
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$10 door

We at Wayne-O-Rama are celebrating Wayne White's exhibition at the Hunter Museum (opening June 30) with a series of events called "WEEK OF WAYNE"! This is WEEK OF WAYNE Show 1!

American guitarist Shane Parish released his second instrumental solo acoustic album, Undertaker Please Drive Slow, late in 2016 on Tzadik Records. The music for this album was conceived in a single night of inspiration in February 2016 when Parish freely interpreted several Appalachian, folk, blues, gospel, and old English tunes into his tape recorder, allowing all of his background in classical guitar, country blues, jazz, and free improvisation to blend into a seamless and effortless flow. This demo caught the ears of the legendary NYC saxophonist and composer John Zorn, who immediately offered to produce the album. When guitar maestro Marc Ribot heard these recordings he said, “Shane Parish is one of the most interesting new guitar voices to come out of the country blues tradition of Mississippi John Hurt, Lightin Hopkins…” Having long established his creative voice as a radical electric guitarist in his long-running band Ahleuchatistas, Parish is now revealing a more elaborate and intimate inner world with his solo acoustic performances of whimsy, passion and virtuosity.



"A long time resident of the Appalachian town of Asheville, North Carolina, Shane Parish is the mastermind behind the cutting edge rock band Ahleuchatistas. Here he steps out with a remarkable and soulful acoustic solo project that digs deep into Appalachian roots. Taking classic old timey folk songs, Shane has abstracted them in utterly fascinating ways evoking the haunting and brooding world of the American South. At times reminiscent of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, at times of John Cage and Morton Feldman, Shane uses these beautiful songs as launching pads for his creative flights of fancy, at times boiling them down to their very essence. A spiritual project that will keep you riveted from first note to last." — John Zorn

"Shane Parish is one of the most interesting new guitar voices to come out of the country blues tradition of Mississippi John Hurt, Lightin Hopkins… via John Fahey, and the folkie fingerpickers….this recording finds Parish standing at the cross-roads between playing the country blues and… deconstructing? Devolving? Destroying?…them. Some of the miniatures are stunning, haunted by an Anton Webern-like economy. Check it out!" — Marc Ribot

"The longer pieces contain silences and pronounced dissonances that suggest a more than passing acquaintance with John Cage’s music for prepared piano, as well as melodic permutations that move as fluidly as Grant Green in a purposeful mood. Parish does not improvise according to any known set of jazz prescriptions, but like Django Reinhardt or Charlie Christian, his improvisations express a strong sense of form."--Bill Meyer, Dusted

"Parish's deeply personalized spin on roots music transcends any semblances of playing it safe. More importantly, he establishes a musical conduit that pays homage to tradition while unlocking new passageways, enacted with the utmost sincerity." --Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz

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What Cheer? Brigade

Saturday, June 24, 2017, 8:00 pm (doors open at 7:30 pm)
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$10 advance, $12 door

NOTE to advance ticketholders: no paper tickets issued - your name will be on a list at the door.

We at Wayne-O-Rama are celebrating Wayne White's exhibition at the Hunter Museum (opening June 30) with a series of events called "WEEK OF WAYNE"! This is WEEK OF WAYNE Show 2!

The WHAT CHEER? BRIGADE from Providence, RI is a big-band mobile party, like a marching band on an atomic fireball sugar rush that darts from New Orleans brass band tunes to Bollywood dance numbers to whirlwind Balkan folk to bombastic hip-hop, with a ton of surprises along the way.

Chattanoogans got their first taste of the What Cheer? Brigade in 2009, when they played two unforgettable performances, first crossing the Walnut Street Bridge as a raucous 19-piece marching band (to hundreds of wide-eyed spectators) then playing an outdoor set outside the Winder Binder Gallery on the north shore. Even tighter and bolder, the band returned to Chattanooga in 2013 for a furious set at Sluggo's North, whipping the audience into a joyous frenzy.

It has been four years since the SRLS brought their merry insanity to Chattanooga, and their return will guarantee to deliver an unforgettable dance 'splosion.




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Frank Pahl
Bill Brovold 
Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel
Wayne-O-Rama All Stars feat. Wayne White

Friday, June 30, 2017, 8:00 pm
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$12 advance/door

NOTE to advance ticketholders: no paper tickets issued - your name will be on a list at the door.

We at Wayne-O-Rama are celebrating Wayne White's exhibition at the Hunter Museum (opening June 30) with a series of events called "WEEK OF WAYNE"! This is WEEK OF WAYNE Show 3: the Wayne-O-Rama version of a variety show, with an incredible assortment of unique acts from across the country, including:

* Frank Pahl (Michigan), the award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, instrument inventor and creator of automated sound sculptures, also known as a member of the avant-folk outfit Only a Mother and Little Bang Theory which only uses toy instruments.

* Bill Brovold (Detroit/NYC), the guitarist, composer and visual artist who was a fixture on the downtown NYC scene in the '80s and worked closely with sonic pioneer Rhys Chatham before founding the visionary, Detroit-based rock incubator, Larval.

* Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel (Atlanta), the 10-plus-year strong duo that creates hypnotic pulses and dreamy drones that weave together to form a kaleidoscope of sounds and moods, like a long-lost soundtrack to a deep-sea documentary.

* Wayne-O-Rama All Stars, led by Wayne White (on banjo) himself, will put a new shine on classic tunes with an overflowing cauldron of local talent including Bryan Dyer, Eric Fairchild, Randy Fairchild, Joe Lance, Bob Stagner and Barry Wilde.

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Changing Lives Since 1979:
Jack Wright
Evan Lipson
"Borbetomagus: A Pollock of Sound" documentary

Friday, July 7, 2017, 8:00 pm
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$15 door (price includes music concert and film screening)

Alto and soprano saxophonist Jack Wright is a sax titan with a career that spans five decades in the world of free improvisation. With a command of the sax that is at the top of his field with a passionate, kinetic playing style and a huge sound vocabulary, he has been called “the most indispensable musician of his generation” and “the reference par excellence for all the generations who have followed.” (Jazzosphere).

In the fifties Jack Wright was a soprano choir boy and marching band saxophonist, in the early sixties a washtub bassist and college kid, in the late sixties and seventies a university lecturer in history, a revolutionist and community organizer. Since then he has been playing freely improvised saxophone, touring the US and Europe, and has been dubbed "the Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He is accused of impersonating pigs, ducks and human blowhards, but lately has been remembering the proper use of the saxophone - to support the tottering universe. His roots are in Philly, where he owns a house for wayward improvisers. Jack plays with everyone but performs and tours only with the finest, which usually means the most obscure, from Europe and the US. He and his partners are among the few true believers in absolutely free, unrestrained, unstructured, unselfconscious improvisation, played at soberingly high levels of musicianship.

“In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king” - Washington Post

Evan Lipson has operated as a musician since adolescence—intuitively seeking the liminal zones in which intellect and instinct, history and myth, and creative and destructive force intersect. He is currently active with Roughhousing and may or may not have some degree of involvement or affiliation with an organization known as Meinschaft. Recently, he has scored several films as well as written music for a new collaboration with Duplex Planet creator David Greenberger and Bob Stagner of the Shaking Ray Levis. Past units include Normal Love, Satanized, Wrest, Dynamite Club, Femme Tops, Psychotic Quartet, and the Weasel Walter Trio. Lipson's music has been released on a number of imprints including SKiN GRAFT, UgEXPLODE, High Two, Public Eyesore, Badmaster, Caminante, New Atlantis, and Damage Rituals.

"Lipson easily stands among the best bassists I've heard lately, his terrifically strapping tone epitomizing the decision to really learn how an instrument works." - Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes

"Borbetomagus: A Pollock of Sound" is the first feature-length documentary about the legendary improv / noise group Borbetomagus. Filmmaker Jef Mertens brings a raw, urgent, and unpolished vision focusing on a band that has spent almost four decades defining and redefining not just their music, but the boundaries of music itself. Band members Don Dietrich, Donald Miller, and Jim Sauter tell their story with the help of artists, writers, photographers, and filmmakers that include noted critic Byron Coley, drummer Chris Corsano, guitarist Thurston Moore, groundbreaking Japanese noise unit Hijokaidan, and Switzerland's masters of "cracked electronics," Voice Crack. Includes never-before-seen archival footage, amazing photographic finds, and previously unreleased recordings.

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abandoned ships Puppet and Shadow Show

Sunday, August 6, 2017, 6:30 pm
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
Free admission, limited seating (kids are welcome to bring a floor mat)

abandoned ships is geographer, teaching artist, storyteller and puppeteer Milissa Orzolek. She fell into the world of puppetry in 2010 as a puppeteer with a production of "Fantastic Mr. Fox" in New Orleans. Since that time, she has puppeteered in the New Orleans Fringe Festival, the New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival, Potpourri at the National Puppetry Festival in Hartford and Puppet Slamwich in Baltimore. In 2016, abandoned ships received a Jim Henson Foundation Family Grant for the original production "What Keeps Us."

abandoned ships will be performing two pieces at Wayne-O-Rama: "The Egg" and "What's Next?" "The Egg" is a short, funny shadow show inspired by the works of Richard Bradshaw. "What's Next?" is about a puppet who values the building blocks of society and becomes distraught when the blocks are stolen and no one else seems to care. The show combines rodded and stringed marionettes and paper puppets in a large, toy-theatre style stage to explore ideas of apathy, collective action and social responsibility.

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David Greenberger (Duplex Planet) and Prime Lens: My Thoughts Approximately Record Release Shows

TWO PERFORMANCES:
Friday, August 18, 2017, 8:00 pm (doors open at 7:30 pm)
Saturday, August 19, 2017, 8:00 pm (doors open at 7:30 pm)
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
$10 advance, $15 door

NOTE to advance ticketholders: no paper tickets issued - your name will be on a list at the door.

David Greenberger and Prime Lens will present a live experience featuring the Duplex Planet publisher and NPR contributor narrating written pieces to the interpretive sounds of long time collaborator Bob Stagner, double bassist Evan Lipson and keyboardist Tyson Rogers, to celebrate the release of the new CD My Thoughts Approximately.

Dennis Palmer of the Shaking Ray Levis died quietly in his sleep, succumbing to heart problems that had been shadowing him for a couple decades. Working with co-founder and drummer Bob Stagner, and David Greenberger, they had just completed a new album, Tramps That Go Think in the Night on the tenth anniversary of their first collaboration, Mayor of the Tennessee River. As part of a two-night concert event celebrating Palmer’s life and work in 2013, David and Bob were joined by bassist Evan Lipson and keyboardist Tyson Rogers for a performance. They debuted their new ensemble, David Greenberger and Prime Lens, at the Big Ears Festival in 2014 (festival founder Ashley Capps dedicated the three day event to the memory of Palmer and Lou Reed). Since it was Dennis who had brought them together in the first place, “and Prime Lens” is an anagram of “Dennis Palmer.” My Thoughts Approximately draws on four decades of conversations David Greenberger has had with elderly in various cities and circumstances, which are the starting point for the thirty emotionally, rich, character driven monologues.

For two decades artist David Greenberger (best known for 32 years of his periodical, The Duplex Planet) has been exploring the ways in which music can be wedded to spoken monologues. His conversations with old people are the basis for the text he develops. He presents characters who still find pleasure in the company of others, and who open up, sometimes in very small ways, to someone taking an interest in them. This is Greenberger’s art: eschewing oral history, abstracting dialogues by shaping them into works that resonate with shared humanity. Over the years he has worked with a range of musical collaborators, among them Terry Adams (NRBQ), David Hidalgo & Louie Perez (Los Lobos), Glenn Jones, Chris Corsano, Robyn Hitchcock, Wreckless Eric, 3 Leg Torso, Paul Cebar, and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.

Bob Stagner has been a percussionist, teacher, speaker, and leader in arts advocacy for thirty years. He co-founded the duo the Shaking Ray Levis, as well as the Shaking Ray Levi Society, an arts education organization that supports emerging artists in performance, visual art, and film. Stagner is the Southeast director of the Rhythmic Arts Project providing music workshops for people with disabilities. He has performed and recorded with a wide range of musicians, including Derek Bailey, Rev. Howard Finster, Wayne White, Bob Dorough, Vassar Clements, June Carter Cash, Tony Oxley, Fred Frith, Amy Denio, Shelley Hirsch, Col. Bruce Hampton, John Zorn, and Roger Alan Wade (with whom he tours regularly).

Evan Lipson tours with Roughhousing (featuring Jack Wright and Zach Darrup). Past units include Normal Love, Satanized, Wrest, Dynamite Club, Psychotic Quartet, Femme Tops, and the Weasel Walter Trio. He has collaborated in performance and on recordings with, among others, Susan Alcorn, Mick Barr, Kath Bloom, Peter Evans, David Grubbs, Col. Bruce Hampton, Mary Halvorson, Konk Pack, Byard Lancaster, Pauline Oliveros, Jessica Pavone, Ruins (Yoshida Tatsuya), Shaking Ray Levis, Veryan Weston, Wolter Wierbos, Davey Williams, and Nate Wooley.

Pitchfork magazine called Tyson Rogers a “wayfaring keyboard wrangler” for his multi-faceted abilities as a recording and touring musician. Tyson toured extensively with bluesman Tony Joe White and country legend Don Williams, playing on his Grammy nominated duet with Alison Krauss, “I Just Come Here for the Music.” Tyson’s original music has been featured by National Geographic, The North Face, and Tom’s Shoes. His recordings have received critical acclaim, earning “Best CDs of the Year” by Downbeat magazine and others.

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"Billy Goats Gruff & Other Stuff" Puppet Show

Sunday, September 17, 2017, 6:30 pm (doors 6:00 pm)
Wayne-O-Rama
1800 Rossville Ave., #108
Chattanooga, TN 37408
Free admission, limited seating (kids are welcome to bring a floor mat)

In this one-man performance utilizing hand, rod, and glove puppets, David Stephens (All Hands Productions) retells classic fairy tales as well as telling a few of his own original tales. You'll see what happens when three billy goats try to cross over a bridge belonging to a greedy troll in "The Three Billy Goats Gruff."  Parker Pig encounters some good luck when he stumbles over a watering can in a retelling of "The Three Little Pigs." One of Stephens' original stories, "The Two Farmers," involves Farmer Frick and Farmer Frack and how they learn to work together to make a pot of stew. All this, plus the antics of some silly chickens, in "Billy Goats Gruff and Other Stuff."

Originally developed in 2001, this show has entertained both children and their parents since that time. The Center for Puppetry Arts hosted an 8-week run of over 100 virtually sold-out performances of this production in 2002. Since then, the Center has hosted two equally successful revivals in 2004 and 2007. In 2005, this show was honored by receiving a Citation of Excellence from UNIMA-USA (Union Internationale de la Marionette): the equivalent of an Academy Award in the puppetry world.

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Earlier on Sunday, Sept. 17, bring your kids to the Hunter Museum between 2 and 4 pm for "Family Fun Day: Wayne's Wild World."

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Frequency Arts and the Shaking Ray Levi Society present
Roughhousing
Eleanor Epstein
Jack Wright: artist talk and discussion

Saturday, November 4, 2017, 8:00 pm
Frequency Arts
1804 E. Main St
Chattanooga, TN 37404
$8-10 door (sliding scale)

This diverse and provocative evening features three parts:
1) Improvised music set from Roughhousing (sax, double bass, electric guitar)
2) Performance art from Eleanor Epstein accompanied by harpist Cortney Flowers
3) Talk about art, music and performance from Jack Wright

ROUGHHOUSING is the right word for what this group does. At first you might think this is pure dissonance, even hostility, until you realize it’s all synchronized close listening to each other from years of playing together. The three musicians—Zach Darrup, Evan Lipson and Jack Wright—have all been residents of the Spring Garden Music House in Philadelphia, and Jack and Evan have been playing for over ten years together, most recently in Wrest with percussionist Ben Bennett.

Described 25 years ago as an “undergrounder by design,” Jack Wright is a veteran saxophone improviser based mainly in Philadelphia. In 1979, after an academic career teaching history at Temple University and activist politics, he returned to the instrument of his youth and began to tour extensively, exclusively playing free improvisation. Now at 74 he is still the “Johnny Appleseed of Free Improvisation,” as guitarist Davey Williams called him back in the ‘80s, and he continues to inspire players outside music-school careerdom, playing sessions with visiting and resident players old and new. He’s said to have the widest vocabulary of any, an expert at leaping pitches, punchy, precise timing, sharp and intrusive multiphonics, surprising gaps of silence, and obscene animalistic sounds. Wright’s new book about free playing and the socio-political situation of musical freedom is entitled The Free Musics.

Zach Darrup is an improvising guitarist currently living in Philadelphia. During his early teenage years in the rural coal region of Pennsylvania, a strange boy appeared like an angel, carrying a large CD booklet of wild musics of all sorts. This chance meeting at a pizza shop, plus tumultuous relationships with his home turf, school teachers, and other agents of law and rule enforcement led Zach to drop out and skip town, devoting himself to following music wherever it would take him—somewhere else. His techniques are informed by the musical possibilities of film language, jovial mockery and mimicry of plants, animals, and audience members, thoughtful room listening, word play, colors, and culinary experiments.

Evan Lipson (b. 1981) has operated as a musician since adolescence—intuitively seeking the liminal realms in which intellect and instinct, history and myth, and creative and destructive force intersect. Drawn towards aberrant perspectives at an early age, his formative experiences were primarily rooted in extreme and often discordant forms of rock, metal, free improvisation, modernist composition, jazz, oddball pop, soundtracks, noise, and electronic music. Lipson most frequently tours with Roughhousing (featuring Zach Darrup and Jack Wright). He is also active with Who’s Your Daddy? featuring dancer Cilla Vee/Claire Elizabeth Barratt and guitarist Davey Williams. Lipson has composed music for several films, as well as a recent collaboration with Duplex Planet-creator David Greenberger, Tyson Rogers, and Bob Stagner of the Shaking Ray Levis. He also may or may not have some degree of affiliation with an organization known as MEINSCHAFT. Past units include Normal Love, Satanized, Wrest, Dynamite Club, Hisswig, and the Weasel Walter Trio. Lipson has toured throughout North America, as well as Taiwan and Japan. His music has been released on a number of imprints including SKiN GRAFT, UgEXPLODE, High Two, and Public Eyesore.

Eleanor Epstein works in the realms of performance art, jewelry art, photography and filmmaking. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Epstein has exhibited in New York City and Providence, RI, and her pieces have been featured in film and in print in the interactive 3-D art book White Rabbit. By using unconventional means like those found in surrealistic art, she is inspired to find beauty within ugliness. Her works are the result of investigating the popular theory that looks are deceiving in order to debunk the tension between perfection and control, with the belief that only by releasing this pursuit for the ideal can one expose their real self.

The evening concludes with a talk and discussion from Jack Wright about the state of contemporary art and music. In his words: “Visual artists have been frustrated with the gallery system for some time and entering live performance. Improvisation has been expanded into instrument building, where all kinds of materials are collaged and activated sonically, with or without electronics. Music has become the arena for non-musicians, untrained on traditional instruments, and arousing curiosity from audiences. Also, I’d discuss what it means to be an artist, the usual term for those exclusively focused on visual art but since Modernism there have been many who start out as musicians of one instrument, then expand to other instruments, and also delve deeply into other art forms, such as painting, performance art, and poetry. The musicians most likely to do this over the past thirty years have been improvisers.”

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CoPAC and the Shaking Ray Levi Society present
Tom Carter (of Charalambides)

Tuesday, November 21, 2017, 8:30 pm
Barking Legs Theater
1307 Dodds Ave
Chattanooga, TN 37404
$10 door/advance

Tom Carter's electric guitar work weaves spare strands of melody and fuzz into towering long-form drones, sculpting a rich landscape of intricately detailed instant compositions from both high-volume grit and charged silence.

Although best known for his work with iconoclastic acid-folk improvisers Charalambides, which he co-founded with Christina Carter in 1991, Tom Carter has focused on solo performances and recordings since 2012. His 2015 double LP on Three Lobed Records "Long Time Underground" is the final installment of a trilogy begun in 2009 with "The Dance From Which All Dances Come" and continued with 2014's "Numinal Entry." "Long Time Underground" was selected as the number-one experimental album of 2015 by The Out Door/Pitchfork.

Tom Carter frequently collaborates with other musicians. His regular projects include a duo with No Neck Blues Band co-founder Pat Murano, free-rock improvisers Eleven Twenty-Nine (Carter, Marc Orleans, and Michael Evans), Spiderwebs (with Houston guitarist Sandy Ewen), Sarin Smoke (with Peter Swanson), Badgerlore (with Rob Fisk, Ben Chasny, and others), and various ensembles with Bay Area sound artist and composer Robert Horton.

Other fellow travelers have included Gate, Thurston Moore, Loren Connors, Jandek, Bardo Pond, Steve Gunn, Helena Espvall, Matt Valentine and many others.

"As American psychedelic music goes, Tom Carter is a modern titan...one of the most thoughtful, imaginative instrumentalists working today." - The Out Door, Pitchfork

"Tom Carter has demonstrated an uncanny ability to push his guitar playing to unearthly limits, while still retaining a spare simplicity that, while unusual and unorthodox, never ceases to remain completely engaging and steeped in majestic beauty." - Tiny Mix Tapes

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