Spiders with Kalashnikovs / Adam Lion, Laura Steenberge, and KCM Walker
Thursday, July 6th 2023 at 7pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $8 General Admission (at the door) / Free for BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
Spiders with Kalashnikovs is a duo featuring Heather Lockie (viola, voice, & electronics) and Clay Chaplin (laptop) that makes electroacoustic experiments. Their sounds can include: tonally ambivalent layers in deep space – annoying, relentless patterns of noises and bleeps – somewhat formal electroacoustic compositional stylings influenced by analysis algorithms – sampled-based obliterations of field recordings or viola loops – the occasional blanket of noise with a hint of a song – and many other rogue rarefactions.
Clay Chaplin is a computer musician, improviser, and audio engineer from Los Angeles who explores the realms of audio-visual improvisation, sound synthesis, field recording, electronics, and computer processing for creative sonic expression. Throughout his career he has worked on many projects involving experimental music, video, audio recording, and interactive computer systems. Chaplin studied composition and computer music with Morton Subotnick, Tom Erbe, Mark Trayle, Ichiro Fujinaga and Gary Nelson. He studied audio engineering with Tom Erbe, Ron Streicher and Jurgen Wahl.
Clay’s works have been performed internationally including performances at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, the Bent Festival, the Busan International Computer Music Festival, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Elektroakustiche Musik (DEGEM) studios, the Ear Zoom Sonic Arts festival, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conferences, the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College (CCM), the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the Olympia Experimental Music Festival, the Korean Electro-Acoustic Society Festival, the Sonic Circuits Festivals, the Santa Fe Electronic Music Festival and many others. Clay has been composer in residence at STEIM and the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College.
Heather Lockie is a performer/composer, teaching artist and visual artist based in Los Angeles. She plays viola and piano, writes songs, plays in several contemporary musical groups, writes and arranges music, teaches music, gardens, and uses paints for both fun times and for compositional work. She has a BA in Comparative Literature (French, English) from Occidental College and an MFA in music composition and viola performance from the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied with Sara Roberts, Wolfgang Von Schweinitz, Mark Lowenstein and Ulrich Kreiger.
Heather releases her own solo music as Marshweed and recorded a collection of songs called “Marshweed in the Garden”in 2017. Other recent projects include writing string arrangements, recording, and live playing for David Kendrick (DEVO, Sparks), Wand, OCS (Thee Oh Sees) and Cory Hanson solo. She has played and toured as a backing musician with international artists including Syd Straw, Fun., Spiritualized, Arthur Lee/LOVE, Eels, OCS, Cory Hanson, as well as with various independent bands (Listing Ship, Leather Hyman, Wild Acoustic Chamber Orchestra). She has performed in a wide variety of musical venues that reflect the diversity of her musical output: the Royal Albert Hall in London, The David Letterman show, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Hammer Museum, artist-run galleries and theaters, and various DIY spaces throughout America.
Adam Lion, Laura Steenberge, and KCM Walker Adam Lion (percussion), Laura Steenberge (bass viol), and KCM Walker (hurdy gurdy) look for the minimalist textures, acoustic noise and harmonic patterns in the convergence of their instruments. They have been playing music together since 2021 and are based in Asheville, NC.
Laura Steenberge is a composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist at the crossroads of music and language, composition and improvisation, instrument and object, research and performance. From 2017-2018 she presented The Imaginary Music Radio Hour on NTS.com, and since 2019 has been transcribing and recording 11th century Aquitanian Chant as part of the EnChanted Images project at Stanford University. Recent recordings include Harmonica Fables (Nueni Recs) and The Four Winds (New Focus Recordings). She has taught about experimental sound practices and medieval chant at the California Institute of the Arts and Stanford University and currently resides in Asheville, NC.
