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"Live Concert with Keith Rowe's Voltage Spooks"
Keith Rowe, Rick Reed, Michael Haleta
 Press Kit
Event Date: Saturday, April 14, 2007
Location: Slought Foundation
Live Performance Series
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Dustin Hurt
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Please join us on Saturday, April 14, 2007 from 8-10pm at Slought Foundation for a live concert with “Voltage Spooks," featuring electronic musicians Keith Rowe, Rick Reed, and Michael Haleta. Please note that a pre-concert conversation will take place at 7pm, featuring Keith Rowe in conversation with Jon Abbey of Erstwhile Records and Rowe biographer Brian Olewnick. This concert is presented in conjunction with Bowerbird (bowerbird.org).
Keith Rowe (born March 16, 1940 in Plymouth, England) is an English free improvisation guitarist. Rowe is a founding member of AMM in the mid-1960s (a group from which he quit in 2004) and a founding member of M.I.M.E.O. After years of obscurity, Rowe has achieved a level of relative notoriety, and since the late 1990s has kept up a busy recording and touring schedule. He is seen as a godfather of electroacoustic improvisation, and many of his recent recordings have been released by Erstwhile Records. Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960's--notably with Mike Westbrook. His early influences were guitarists like Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel. Eventually, however, Rowe grew tired of what he considered the form's limitations, and gradually expanded into free jazz and free improvisation, eventually abandoning conventional guitar technique. "How could I abandon the technique? Lay the guitar flat!" Rowe thus developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pickups in unorthodox ways enabled him to produce sounds that have been described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien. He has been known to employ objects such as a library card, rubber eraser, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, and common office supplies in playing the guitar. A January, 1997 feature in Guitar Player magazine described a Rowe performance as "resemble a surgeon operating on a patient." Rowe sometimes incorporates live radio broadcasts into his performances, including shortwave radio and number stations (the guitar's pickups will also pick up radio signals, and broadcast them through the amplifier) AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost reports that Rowe has "an uncanny touch on the wireless switch", able to find radio broadcasts which seem to blend ideally with, or offer startling commentary on, the music. On AMMMusic, towards the end of the cacophonous "Ailantus Glandolusa," a speaker announces via radio that "We cannot preserve the normal music."
Rick Reed (b. 1957) is an entirely self-taught composer/visual artist who has been working in the Austin music underground for the past 25 years. Using old battered electronic devices like sine wave generators, short wave radios and a vintage EMS analogue synthesizer, Reed has performed solo and with various electronic/noise groups including Frequency Curtain, Abrasion Ensemble, FTC and many others. The Spring 2006 issue of Signal To Noise Magazine said of his most recent CD release, Dark Skies at Noon, that "(Reed works) a complex weave of sounds plucked from the dawn of electronic music-or maybe stolen from some future fading memory of it's passing". Since the early 90s, Reed has released several LPs and CDs on labels such as Ecstatic Peace, Beta-Lactam Ring, Pale Disc Japan and Elevator Bath. Among other projects, he's been the host of Commercial Suicide, a long running 'other worldly' music radio program heard on a local station, KOOP FM . He is also the musical director of an experimental music concert series called Toneburst, which is dedicated to promoting unheard,or underexposed musicians from the Austin new music community. Since 2004, he has worked closely with New York filmmaker Ken Jacobs on three soundtracks for his Nervous Magic Lantern displays, one of which, entitled "Capitalism:Child Labor", had it's world premiere at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival. Reed has 3 new releases due out later this year, a new CD on Spectral House, a Ken Jacobs DVD project and a picture disc LP on Elevator Bath.
Michael Haleta (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New Jersey. A classically trained cellist turn electro acoustic composer interested in individual sounds and bits rather than complete things. (BG) Has released audio for: Alienation, Raw Special Effects (RSE), Carpark and Hoss records. Michael and his wife Dawn run the small edition label/shop, Raw Special Effects (RSE) which is scheduled to release material by EVOL, Peter Rehberg and others within the upcoming year.
To Cite this Page using MLA Style:
Keith Rowe, et al. "Live Concert with Keith Rowe's Voltage Spooks." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[14 April 2007;
Accessed 13 October 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11358/>.
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This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of Bowerbird
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