JOIN US the evening of May 8th for two very special musical experiences. As usual the bookstore re-opens it’s doors at 8pm and the music begins at 8:30. Please bring cash for the show, 100% of your entrance fee goes to the musicians. First come first served by the numbers.
Breath of the Magi is improvisational ensemble of multi-instrumentalists: Che Davis, Orlando Johnson, and Peter Redgrave. Theirs is a magic shifting. Experience this magic.
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Roger C. Miller is a guitarist, pianist, bassist, composer, singer, percussionist and
occasional cornet player. He has been a band leader since 1967. His recordings have
appeared on Matador, Fire, Ace of Hearts, SST, New Alliance, Forced Exposure,
Cuneiform, Atavistic, Feeding Tube, Fun World, World in Sound, and others. He has
toured nationally since 1979 and internationally since 1998. His career officially began
in 1979 when he co-founded the influential post-punk band Mission of Burma on guitar
and vocals. The band is in Michael Azzerad’s book on indie rock “Our Band could Be
Your Life”. He is also the keyboardist for the Anvil Orchestra silent film composing
ensemble with recent shows at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the
Roger Ebert Film Festival. He has performed in too many ensembles aside these, and
made too many wildly diverse records to mention here, generally pushing the
boundaries of sound and composition. He has scored soundtracks that appeared at
the Sundance and the Telluride Film Festivals, and his art installation “Transmuting the
Prosaic”, has been at two different art museums.
For this concert, Miller will be performing compositions from his newest album on
Cuneiform Records “Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble”.
He currently uses a customized stratocaster 6-string electric guitar and three lap-steel
guitars on stands, two of them loaded with alligator clips or bolts, the other tuned to a
post-Glenn Branca unison E. Using bass and tenor guitar strings, this melts his
previous prepared piano ideas into more portable guitars, resulting in percussive
grooves and bass-lines. Combining advanced looping technology with new stomp-
boxes, many in stereo, he truly creates a “solo ensemble” sound.
To organize the compositions, he turned to his “Dream Interpretation” technique. By
tightly following and translating a specific dream into music, a new type of structure
was available: organic and personal, yet universal. Realizing the essentially surrealistic/
psychedelic nature of dreams, the type of guitar sounds he was interested in now had
an appropriate context.
On “Curiosity” he also revisited his “Natural Phenomena” composing technique, in this
case using five photographs taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover to structure the
music of a longer composition. Space Music indeed.
