Primate Arena : Adam Bohman, Valerio Tricoli, Fritz Welch, Dylan Nyoukis, Sharon Gal, Daniel Davidovsky, Nico Teen, Tom Roberts, Moshi Honen, Alex (Drool) Yunovich
PRIMATE ARENA – Israel’s first consistent platform for a wide palette of experimental and improvised music touches down at Cafe OTO to collaborate with a clutch of like-minded souls from the UK including Sharon Gal, Dylan Nyoukis/Blood Stereo and Fritz Welch.
This event is supported by the British Israeli Arts Training Scheme (BI ARTS) a British Council initiative in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and Sport in Israel.
Hosted by Eran Sachs and Alex DROOL, PRIMATE ARENA is a bi-weekly freeform happening for experimental & out muzak events (mostly in Tel Aviv), dedicated to Psych, EAI, Noise, Speech/Sonic/Concrete Poetry, Avant Rock, post millennial obscurities, pre millennial obscurities, the history of 20th century experimental music & other adventurous ventures.
Over the past three years they have created a platform - central to Tel Aviv's now vibrant, thriving scene - that has nurtured a community of adventurous local musicians including Maya Dunietz and Yoni Silver and hosted visiting internationals such as Jérôme Noetinger, Arnaud Rivière, Ignatz Schick, Daniel Padden, Bob Ostertag and many others.
ALEX (DROOL) YANOVICH
Alex (Drool) Yonovich (b.1976) is a self-taught drummer, "non-musician" and improviser living in Rehovot, Israel. he has collaborated live with a diverse selection of international musicians such as Steve Noble, Adam Bohman, Jérôme Noetinger, Steve Mackay, Dora Doll, Sharon Gal, Arnaud Rivière, Valerio Tricoli, Daniel Padden, Mattin, Ignaz Schick, Eric Boros & many more. utilizing a simple setup of modified acoustic instruments, tape loops and sometimes analogue synths he creates a variety of dynamic sounds that shift from sparse crystalline movements to dense fog shrouded avalanches, which have as much in common with the likes of John Cage and Bob Cobbing as it does with Wolf Eyes and The New Blockaders. regarded as one of the busiest experimental sound artist in Israel he has performed in many local events and festivals and collaborated with countless local artists which helped establish him as one of the most pivotal figures in the Israeli avantgarde circuit. Together with Sachs and conductor Ilan Volkov he organizes a series of ground barking performances of international visiting artists such as Daniel Higgs, King Kahn and BBQ, Susan Alcorn and others. His duo Wreck & Drool has released several recordings on labels such as Red Bootkeh, that Canadian label and Tophet Prophet.
ERAN SACHS
Eran Sachs has released albums on labels such as Sub-Rosa and Mille Plateau and has worked with artists such as Philip Jeck, Keith Rowe, Mattin, C. Spencer Yeh, Oren Ambarchi, Sophie Angel and Valerio Tricoli, mainly playing his version of a No-Input-Mixer, which he has been playing since 1998. He is currently in his second year of the summer MFA program at Bard College, NY, where his teachers include David Behrman, Richard Teitelbaum, Matana Roberts and Tony Conrad. While there he founded, as Primate Arena, a festival called THRICE, which ran for the past two years and featured artists like Bryan Eubanks, Bonnie Jones, Andrew Lampert, Vic Rawlings, Laetitia Sounami and many others. He has presented his works, lectures and compositions in such festivals as Sonorities (Belfast), Transmediale/CTM (Berlin), Festival for Jewish Culture (Krakow), Theaterformen (Hannover), Musica Genera (Sczeczin) and Skanu Mesz (Riga)as well as spaces and platforms such as Sonic Square, RecycleArt (Brusseles), Podewil, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, O Tannenbaum, M-12 (Berlin), Melkweg (Amsterdam), ITP-NYU “guest speaker”program at NYU, Death By Audio (NY), Kulturbunker (Cologne), Muffathalle (Munich), Worm (Rotterdam), THE WIRE magazine (London), Upgrade!, Sonic Process, Heara, Israeli Cinemateques (Israel) and many others.
Daniel is a composer, musician, and an active artist in the improvisation scene in Israel (electro-acoustic, experimental, noise). He is a member of a number of ensembles and collaborates with artists from Israel and abroad. Davidovsky’s work explores the connections between improvisation routines in different musical environments and the development of performative tools. His work deals with "controlled randomness" in various contexts creating a unique improvisational language in music and sound.
ZOHAR SHAFIR / NICO TEEN
Shafir (aka Nico Teen) is a musician and performer based in Tel Aviv. In recent years she has been performing extensively in key experimental music events in Israel and abroad including at the Herzliya artbiannale, C-sides festival, No-No Logic Festival in Barcelona and Dream Team Festival in Jerusalem andOz in The City Festival in Tel Aviv. In 2010 she was featured in the Wire Tapper compilation by UK’s WIRE magazine and had released a new album on Uganda records.
In 2009 her releases included: Domestic Pop, LOAF Records, UK; Cassexxe Vibrato, in collaboration with Ola Savchuk, Uganda Records; Love & Pop, in collaboration with Spark-O on the E.P. Ak-Duck Records.
Shafir is a graduate from The School for New Media and Music Musrara in Jerusalem.
Emerging from a Techno background, Ofir Bachmutzkigraduated from Muzik – School of Creation and Production. Having previously learned the guitar, he traded the six strings for a set of two extended turntables. In the past few years he has joined the improvising community of Tel-Aviv, carefully and consistently developing and refining his control of his apparatus into a highly personal vocabulary of nuanced grunts, fractured collages and minute crackly stutters.
A stalwart of the younger generation of Israeli improvisers,Bachmutzki has collaborated with local musicians such asEran Sachs, Alex Drool, Daniel Davidovsky, Mites, YaelBarolsky and many more.
SHARON GAL
Sharon Gal is a cross-disciplinary artist, performer & musician who had developed a wide range of vocal expressions and techniques through years of musical exploration, free improvisation & performances.
Besides organizing concerts & performing solo regularly she also preforms in duos with pianist Steve Beresford & double bass player John Edwards and as part of the London Improvising scene and has performed in Colour out of Space festival in Brighton and LMC festival in London.
She also released an album (Mouthcrazy - Open/openwide) through Thurston Moore & Byron Coley's American label Ecstatic Yod, and 2 CD's of her previous trio VOLTAGE & has appeared on various compilation CDs. Sharon has also been involved in setting up London's first art fm radio station - Resonance Fm. and presents a weekly show with Wire magazine's writer Edwin (savage pencil) Pouncy.
FRITZ WELCH
Fritz Welch is a drummer, percussionist and vocalist determined to stretch the escalator of possibilities into the bloodshot eye of results. He currently plays with Brittle Hammer Trio, FvRTvR, Peeesseye and a duo with guitarist Neil Davidson. He has played with Tamio Shiraishi, Assaf Talmudi, Blood Stereo, Michael Vorfeld, Usurper and John Butcher among others. A longtime Brooklynite of Texas origins, he is now pleased to be based in Glasgow.
DYLAN NYOUKIS
Dylan Nyoukis's work exists on the fringe of contemporaryavant garde art and underground DIY insurrection. As a leading light in the UK's tape/CD-R scene, Nyoukis has long functioned as a rallying point for artists working to clear a space for original, non-idiomatic sound and feral performance modes. Alongside his sister and long-term collaborator Lisa (Dora Doll), he founded the Chocolate Monk label in 1993, an early experimental music imprint that combined hi-jacks of outmoded media - cassette, CD-R, pen and paper - with cutting edge investigations of the limits of form, while functioning as a home for Nyoukis's own projects, Prick Decay, Decaer Pinga, Ceylon Mange, Blood Stereo and countless one-off collaborations. Prick Decay's 2001 album, Guidelines For Basement Non-Fidel, has long been regarded as one of the founding documents of the new weird century, alongside Harry Pussy's "Smash The Mirror" and Sun City Girls Torch Of The Mystics. Nyoukis's early material paralleled international developments in post-noise syntax but his approach has become increasingly sophisticated while still retaining a refusenik energy, interrogating sound-poetry and musique concrete strategies while always working outside of their inherited strictures.
His current group, Blood Stereo, is a duo with his wife, the musician and artist Karen Constance, that explores hand-cranked 20th century technology in combination with epiglottal gymnastics and free music modes inherited as much from punk rock's mutilated aesthetic as utopian art styles. His solo vocal and tape work continues to push the envelope in terms of the expressive options offered by amplified physicality while his rejection of any kind of theoretical backdrop liberates him from servitude to any specific agenda. He remains a singular voice. Over the years he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Ludo Mich, ChrisCorsano, Thurston Moore, Sun City Girls, Bill Nace, Heather Leigh Murray, Phil Minton, Neil Campbell, Usurper and Wolf Eyes.
Bio taken from www.UBU.com , written by David Keenan, Glasgow, June 2009
VALERIO TRICOLI
One Italy's more enigmatic electronic musicians - Tricolihas been investigating the complex relationship between self, sound and devices for more than a decade - Psychic processes translated in soundscapes, and vice versa. He is a member of 3/4 Hand Been Eliminated (Häpna / Die Schactel) - a super-group drawn from Italy's improvising community that carries on the mantle handed down by This Heat, intertwiningmusique concrete and free improv with rock dynamics. His two solo works on Bowindo 'Metaprogrammingwithin the eye of the storm' and 'Did They? Did I?' offer up two slabs of brilliantly baffling musique concrete and his nimble production work added much to the distinctsoundworld of Autistic Daughters' two records and Dean Roberts 'Be Mine Tonight' (Kranky).
ADAM BOHMAN
“As a free improviser Adam Bohman has pretty much everything required for the job. He weilds an armouryof soundmaking devices - a disassembled violin, springs, lightbulbs, a barbecue grill, a wire record rack, a wooden box with wires stretched across - and creates a post-serial slipstream of variegated events, where more detail is pressed into a split second than ought to be allowed.” - The WIRE
MOSHI HONEN
Born in Haifa Israel but now based in London, Moshi Honen is a musician, guitarist, composer, performer and instrument maker.
As well as working alone, on solo projects and compositions, Honen has also been collaborating with other musicians and artists in the fields of free improvisation, experimental music, live performances, art exhibitions, dance performances, musical instruments making and instrument design.
