The Shaking Ray Levi Society will present Trevor Dunn and Shelley Burgon with Magicicada Live At Lamar’s on Wednesday, March 9, at 8:30 p.m. Lamar’s is located at 1020 MLK Blvd. and general admission is $8 and Shaking Ray Levi Society members are $5.
Review for Trevor Dunn and Shelley Burgon:
Trevor Dunn and Shelley Burgon form a unique, totally acoustic duo of bass and harp, and have been a part of the downtown music scene in New York City since 2001.Their repertoire consists of both strictly notated compositions as well as purely improvised music---a repertoire that walks the line between chamber music and extended technique.
Utilizing instruments that are typically buried by thick orchestration, Burgon and Dunn make the most of their distinct setting by exploring subtle and sometimes barely audible properties of sound. Their dynamic range is as vast as their sonic palette. Between haunting, minor melodies one may hear bass strings played with mallets and harp strings pummeled with a metal rod.
In the summer of 2004 the duo toured the North East U.S playing venues from Portland, Me. to Hampton, Va. Later, in the fall, they toured the West Coast appearing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, BC and the Oregon Festival of American Music in Eugene. In December the duo performed world premiers of pieces from John Zorn's Masada: Book Two in NYC. They have plans to release a recording in 2005.
Shelley Burgon is originally from San Francisco. She relocated to New York in 2002. Since her move Shelley has performed with John Zorn (Music for films by Joseph Cornell),a quartet with Chris Speed, Ikue Mori and Skuli Sverrisson, Tin Hat Trio, Marina Rosenfeld and Raz Mesanai. In November 2003 she was a part of the Ravished Limbs Improvised Music Festival where she shared the stage with Jim Black and Okkyung Lee.
Shelley received her MFA from Mills College where she studied and performed with Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Maggie Payne, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, William Winant, Jean Jerome along with many others.
Shelley has developed a unique solo project processing her harp using the computer software Supercollider. She recently performed solo at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space in Kingston, N.Y.
Trevor Dunn is known for his involvement in avant-rock bands Mr. Bungle and Fantomas, and has recently been playing with John Zorn's Electric Masada, David Krakauer's Klezmer Madness, Susie Ibarra, Marc Ribot and Jenny Scheinman. He can be heard on over forty recordings including his own Trio-Convulsant whose new CD "Sister Phanom Owl Fish" was released on Ipecac Recordings in July, 2004. The trio completed a six week tour opening for The Melvins in the Fall of 2004.
Mr. Dunn received a BA in music from Humboldt State, lived in San Francisco for eight years where he performed extensively with Ben Goldberg and John Schott, then moved to Brooklyn in 2000. In 2001 he was commissioned by the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center to write a solo bass piece for Jon Deak. Mr. Deak oerformed "Depaysemant" for prepared bass later that year at Merkin Hall, Lincoln Center. Trevor is currently writing an article for Bass Guitar magazine.
Magicicada hails from Atlanta. Christopher White performs under the name Magicicada. Inspired by the sounds of the "wonderfully strange and dysfunctional electrical wiring" of a 150 year old school house he once inhabited, Magicicada's live shows incorporate the sounds of acoustic instruments and found objects, including -but not limited to- voice, melodica, harmonium, sine wave generators, cassette decks for the blind, chord organ, guitar, saxophone, bells, whistles, sheet metal, buckets, and toy samplers.