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Search Result for Artist Zerang
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FTR 712LP
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"At last, the trade edition of Schiamachy has appeared, following the test-press/tour version by more than a couple of months. The album's title is a term used to describe mock battles between warriors. It's a fair description of the music on this record, although it's safe to say the battle was a friendly one. Michael Zerang is a very well-known percussionist, composer and improviser from Chicago, with an amazing jazz-based discography. He previously appeared on the Illinois Glossalia LP (FTR 285LP, 2017) playing with Spires That in the Sunset Rise. Asheville-based guitarist Tashi Dorji is a generation younger than Zerang, but has been an unstoppable force since he hit the scene in 2009, playing in all manner of rock and improv situations. He has appeared on four other Feeding Tube releases, most often with his free form power duo, Manas. It's also worth mentioning that both musicians are nice guys. But even nice guys can get a thrilling mock battle raging, and Schiamachy is surely one for the books. Recorded at Chicago venue, The Hideout, in August 2016, the music ranges from splotchy plucking in the British plink-plonk tradition to something more akin to sophisticated post-rock noise explorations. I kept expecting passages to emerge styled more in the vein of the free-fusion ecstasies explored by McLaughlin with Tony Williams, or what Bishop, Chasny and Corsano do with Rangda, but Michael and Tashi always opted to keep their battle plans more smudged and confounding. The music is not about edges and momentum, it's about textures and collaging. Zerang stays away from any sort of standard set-up here, choosing instead to play an instrument he calls 'Queequeg's Coffin.' He describes this as 'a large hurdy-gurdy like instrument where four cello strings are bowed simultaneously with a friction wheel that is hand-cranked.' It looks as wild as it sounds, creating vast fields of whizzing and ringing, while the guitar strings and knobs wrench and wobble and throb. The sounds on Schiamacy are all about unexpected interactions and the pleasure of new discoveries. The deeper you let these sounds into your head, the farther they'll transport you. Be not a moldy fig, embrace the unknown." --Byron Coley, 2023
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HOL 122LP
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Chicago-based percussionist Michael Zerang presents his first solo recording after a long career as an exploratory musician and composer, Assyrian Caesarean. Recorded and mixed by Matt Bordin in the woods at (the new) Outside Inside Studio, the album features a range of approaches to percussion that Zerang has developed over the years, including the use of vibrating drumhead surfaces, expressive friction passages, multiple timbre percussion, and straight-up trap-set drumming -- all infused with a rich sense of melodic, rhythmic and textural innovation. Zerang has performed and recorded with some of the most adventurous artists of his era, including a fourteen-year stint with The Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Joe McPhee's Survival Unit III, and an extended collaboration with drummer and percussionist Hamid Drake. Frequent collaborators also include cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, pianist and synthesist Jim Baker, bassist Kent Kessler, trumpeter Axel Dorner, along with an ever-widening pool of international improvisors. He also recently began performing with the experimental Middle-Eastern super group Karkhana, with Mazen Kerbaj, Sharif Sehnaoui, Maurice Louca, Tony Elieh, Sam Shalabi, and Umut Çağlar. Edition of 300.
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FTR 285LP
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Beginning in January of 2011, composer, percussionist and improviser Michael Zerang joined Spires That In The Sunset Rise for a year-long collaboration to explore a broad range of sonic and textural improvisations, in a series of live concerts throughout the year. The collaboration culminated in residency at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, as a part of their Artist Residence Program, where the trio was able to perform and record a massive amount of material. The partial result of this effort is the Illinois Glossolalia LP. Since 2001, Spires That In The Sunset Rise have been unsettling and thrilling audiences with their brand of sonic alchemy. Described by Jack Rose as a "female Sun City Girls," they contributed a different slant to the new folk movement by incorporating various avant-garde and world music influences into their sound. They have been compared to artists ranging from The Raincoats to Meredith Monk to Comus to Harry Partch. Their most recent album, Beasts In The Garden (2015), was described by Marc Masters as "some kind of long-lost Terry Riley/Angus MacLise collaboration, equally devoted to divine repetition and center-seeking ritual." They have eight full length albums, a few side releases, and several solo efforts. The band is now the duo of multi-instrumentalists Kathleen Baird and Taralie Peterson. They have collaborated with musicians in the realm of pure improv, worked with dancers, and been involved in various theatrical productions. Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois, and has been a professional musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms. As a percussionist and composer, Michael has over 90 titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 35 countries since 1981, and works with and ever-widening pool of collaborators. He has performed with Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Joe McPhee's Survival Unit III, Liof Munimula, Musica Menta, Johannes Bauer Berlin Quintet as well as countless other projects with musicians from around the world. Michael has collaborated extensively with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in collaboration with Redmoon Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000. Edition of 400. Includes download code.
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