February 14, 2018: 7:30 PM
With primary focus on the interplay between the uttered sounds of the mouth and vocal chords, Minton and Chen plumb the depths of their most inherent and bodily instruments. Their improvisations are fearless, fragile, hungry, passionate, riotous, ululating and animalistic, yet are also in all respects, human. Chen and Minton have been performing as a duo for more than a decade with concerts/tours across Europe, China, Argentina and Brazil. Their duo album, By the Stream, was released by SUBROSA in 2013.
Phil Minton for most of the last forty years, Phil has been working as a improvising singer in groups, orchestras and situations, in various locations worldwide. Some composers have written pieces that especially employ his extended vocal techniques and improvisations. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher and ongoing duos with all the above.
Phil also sings with many other musicians including Audrey Chen, with whom in the last ten years, he has performed worldwide. And recently, after a long break, he’s been involved in several of American composer Bob Ostertag’s projects.
Since the eighties, his Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for Anyone Who Wants to Sing, has performed in over twenty countries. http://www.philminton.co.uk/
Over the past 15 years, Audrey Chen’s predominant focus has been her solo work, joining together the extended and inherent vocabularies of the cello, voice and analog electronics. In the last few years, she has more recently begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument, delving even more deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. She derives her sound material in continuous process, championing the “in-between” and over looked. Regardless of instrument, her mode of experimentation touches both the abstractly beautiful and the aggressively unsettling, creating a kind of curiously imagined architecture, non-prosaic song or ritual that reaches beyond gravity or language.
Recent projects, aside from performing solo, include her long running voices duo with London based artist, Phil Minton, and duos with NYC abstract turntablist, Maria Chavez, BEAM SPLITTER, with Norwegian trombonist, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, the “romantic noise duo” AFTERBURNER with Doron Sadja (electronics/light projections), with modular synth player, Richard Scott, and a collaborative project with German conceptual artist, John Bock.
Chen has performed across Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the USA. Since 2011, she relocated to Berlin, Germany from Baltimore, MD USA and continues to maintain an active international touring schedule.
David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet has described her work as “fascinating and gripping” and “possessing something extremely vital and vivid….” http://www.audreychen.com/