Steve Barsotti & Dave Knott present an evening of subdued electro-acoustic music featuring sound transformed by spaces and materials.
Steve Barsotti is a Seattle based improviser, sound artist, instrument inventor and educator. His work explores notions of reduced listening through close examinations of easily bypassed sonic details; sounds that can only be heard through contact microphones and amplification or the sonic qualities of materials and objects found in everyday life. He invites the listener to forgo an attempt at literal connections with the sounds and to focus on the sounds in and of themselves. He is an original member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, a group of field recording-wielding improvisers. His two solo CDs, Along These Lines and Say “tin-tah-pee-mic”, contain improvisations with object recordings, location recordings, phonography, and electro-acoustic processing. His album with fellow instrument inventor Eric Leonardson, Rarebit, features improvisations on invented instruments. His work has been described as “quite cinematic and unsettling”, and as “ushering the listener across an ambient divide”.
David Knott is a Seattle music therapist, instrument maker, improviser and composer. He specializes in using improvisation to engage and facilitate therapeutic change with critically ill children. Since 1981, he has been playing and recording his own music solo and in collaboration with others. His interest in music and sound-making comes from a personal, intuitive response to vibration gleaned from early years spent exploring his grandfather’s junkyard, the process of building his guitar at the Roberto-Venn School in 1994, and every improvised musical experience. With instrument building, performances, workshops and recorded works, he seeks to stimulate the listener to a point of resonance and discovery of their own musical being. He is a founding member of animist orchestra – an ensemble that uses natural materials to create very quiet, subtly evolving soundscapes. He also performs and records with the graphic and text notation dedicated ensemble Eye Music as well as Omake & Johnson, Messenger Girls Trio and the Yes, Well…