DJ /Rupture & Zs played Ecstatic Music Fest (pics); Clogs & Sarah Kirkland Snider (w/ Shara Worden) play this week

February 5, 2013

DJ /Rupture @ Ecstatic Music Fest, 2/2/2013

“There’s nothing you can do to avoid a museum-ification of your own work when you put out a retrospective box set, but we’re doing everything we can to keep it fresh,” said [Zs’ saxophonist Sam] Hillmer, a thoughtful and passionate performer for whom Zs (“It just means us.”) has always held a firm creative perspective.

Influenced by overlapping currents of radical sound–free jazz, the 20th century classical avant-garde, punk rock and underground noise–the musicians applied rigorous technique to embrace its enthusiasms without cliché. “One thing that was really prevalent at the time was this kind of salad-bar approach to creating innovative music,” Mr. Hillmer said later, flashing back to the early 2000s, when a certain canned hybridization was in vogue. “‘Classical music that rocks!’ That’s a view of music that tacitly renders styles as alienated from one another. We find that to be philosophically untenable and untrue.” – [Wall Street Journal]

Avant garde ensemble Zs are celebrating their 10th anniversary this year, and just played a collaborative show over the weekend (2/2) with DJ /Rupture at NYC’s Merkin Concert Hall as part of The Ecstatic Music Festival. Zs and /Rupture did alternating mini-sets that fed off each other. Pictures from that performance are in this post.

The Ecstatic Music Fest continues on Wednesday (2/6) with Clogs and Sarah Kirkland Snider & Orchestra for the Next Century. Snider will be presenting Unremembered, a “13-song cycle set to poetry (and with accompanying projected artwork) by New-York-based poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows,” and features vocal performances by DM Stith, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden (who performed the opening night) and Padma Newsome. The latter will also appear with band/chamber ensemble Clogs. More info is here and tickets are still available.

Clogs (which also features Bryce Dessner) have a new EP out titled The Sundown Song and you can check out the video for the title track below.

More pics from the 2/2 performance below…

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Clogs – “The Sundown Song”

SETLIST:

Zs: Wolf Government (2012)
XE (2012)

DJ / rupture: Selections

Zs & DJ /rupture: Weakling (2012), an improvised mash-up
This collaborative piece combines improvisation with Zs’ Weakling (2012) and a new composition for Dj /rupture’s Sufi Plug-Ins Drone instrument.
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