The Event Horizon concert series takes place at The Rotunda, on the University of Pennsylvania campus. It features Electronic, Avant Garde, and Experimental music along with the work of live video, laser and analog projection artists. The concerts are always free and open to all.
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Upcoming Shows:
Past Performances:
June 5th – Sonic Foundry, Neil Cippon and Tim Motzer
Sonic Foundry is a collaboration between the Dorety Brothers’ Dimension Step and the creative imagination of guitarist Karl Fury. The blending of the two camps is improvisational, intuitive, comprehensive and logical. They share similar interests, yet there are enough differences to create a contrast and diversity in the music. Karl’s love for the ambient can be heard in his guitar playing and use of numerous standard and home made electronic sound devices. That said, his technical skills on guitar can bring space and ambient music to another level bordering on the Prog Rock realm. As Dimension Step, Christopher uses synths, acoustical piano sounds and voice. Arthur uses an array of synthesized sounds inspired from old analog synths to modern keyboards. In addition to that, there is a generous use of synth percussion. The group as a whole has roots in yesteryears ambient and electronic origins as well as the old school prog rock. Combine Karl’s use of guitar to generate a plethora of sounds, combined with the spatial keyboards, melodic and arpeggiated approach of Dimensions Step and you have a broad canvas with an assortment of brushes, that paints a cosmic landscape ranging from sparse and delicate to dense and, rhythmic. Truly a factory of sound.
Neil Cippon is a Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist and visual artist best known for his ambient soundscapes and immersive video projections. For ambient Music Cippon explores ambient atmospheres and soundscapes primarily through a six-string electric bass.
After two decades of world touring, 17 solo guitar soundscape albums, and a multitude of stunning collaborations including over 100 albums of credits, Tim Motzer continues to “traverse manifold territories in music” (Guitar Player magazine). Tim is a sonic pioneer and widely known for his distinct textural acoustic-electro guitar voice utilizing looping, bowing, electronics, and prepared techniques. He has collaborated with numerous musical luminaries including David Sylvian, Burnt Friedman, the late Jaki Liebezeit, poet Ursula Rucker, King Britt, Questlove, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Vernon Reid, Isaac Hayes, David Torn, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Markus Reuter, Pat Mastelotto, and Percy Jones, among others. Tim’s solo concerts are filled with wonder and surprise that take the audiences on imaginative and surreal journeys in cinematic sound. A longtime improviser, Tim’s concerts and recordings are created in-the-moment. Composing in real-time, his process is fascinating to watch and listen to as it occurs. Through improvisation, new musical material is discovered and continues to be explored with concentration, listening, and responding – letting the music unfold as it will and following where it goes instinctively. As a solo artist, Tim has performed at WXPN’s studio for Stars End radio show, The Gatherings at St. Mary’s Church, Ardmore Music Hall, Sellersville Theatre, The Cutting Room (NYC), The Strand Theatre (Hudson Falls, NY), Muhlenberg College (Allentown, PA), ProgStock (East Rutherford NJ), and international festivals in Wroclaw, Poland, and Berlin, Germany. He has appeared as a special guest for acclaimed progressive artists including Gong, Stick Men (featuring Tony Levin), Tu-Ner, and Soft Machine. Throughout his distinguished career, Tim has also performed at major international festivals and venues including Montreal Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, Madison Square Garden, The Apollo Theater (NYC), Ronnie Scotts (London UK) and Elbephilharmonie (Hamburg, Germany). His music has been heard in film and television including True Blood and the feature film Miami Vice. On his own label, 1k Recordings, Tim has released multiple albums of his immersive, improvisational solo work including: Soak, Euphoria Cycles, Beacon, ditties & deities, Luminous, Inside, Pilgrimage, Live at the Sellersville Theatre, Angels and Demons, among others. For additional information about Tim, visit: timmotzer.com. Visit Tim’s label 1k Recordings here: 1krecordings.bandcamp.com
May 16 – Gordon Kurowski, Laura Feathers nd Huron
Gordon Kurowski considers his compositions as freeform aural paintings, each tone a stroke of the brush. Frequency and color a synesthetic experience. Gordon brings his history of playing classical, rock, jazz, and free improvisation to bear on each performance to share the emotion and experience of a moment in time with listeners. Gordon uses traditional and electronic instruments both analog and digital in the construction of his sonic environments.
p.s. – an Aubstraction is an aural abstract.
Laura Feathers is an experimental sound artist whose compositional process relies heavily on improvisation using synthesizers and loopers. Her improvisations can be found on SoundCloud under the name Magic Sun. Laura has performed with the Dark Circuits Bunker Orchestra, whose album Ten Minutes Late with No Bus in Sight and No Taxi Either was released on Gold Bolus Recordings in 2017. She is also featured on the recently released Dark Circus Orchestra Tribute to Phill Niblock Concert at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn on Philippe Petit’s label Modulisme available on Bandcamp.
Johnny Lancia realizes blissed-out ambient works and concerts under the name Huron. His music is filled with heady drones and intriguing rhythms that reflect the natural world – filtered through a variety of modular synthesizers, analog electronics and digital manipulation processes. Lancia’s synthesizers, a paradise of hidden synergies, conspire with the composer to realize a beautiful, untouchable sonic realm – as electrical currents spill out into the world with a charged dreamy glow.
April 17th – Vishwanath_GI, Chaka Benson, Don Slepian
Vishwanath_GI, aka Italian-born Gianni Intili, has been involved with the fine arts throughout his life. Starting as a painter, color theorist, sculptor and poet, he would infuse his art into architecture, planning and interior design. As a teen, Hendrix guitar riffs and distortions were music to GI; the sound of the Moog as played by Keith Emerson, ecstasy. Jazz Rock Fusion, Prog Rock and Electronic Music, was the music he enjoyed and transmitted in his radio show at FDU 440 AM College Radio. He wanted to play an instrument, but it was not until his early 50’s that he got his first Yamaha keyboard. Guided by many of his seasoned musician friends, that he jammed and learned improvisation. Then he started learning Music and Piano under the tutelage of Andrew Kadin. GI played with SPARSE, an Avant-garde Abstract Quartet who played the MusiXplore Summer Solstice Concert in Paterson NJ, along with ATONAL, Symmetry and ArtCrime. And other side projects like the ‘NONAME’ Trio, the duets of Bellagio and Tremezzo. Gianni is currently involved in a new collaboration ’LA ELECTRONICA‘ with Mario-Enrique Paoli, ‘CANOPUS RESONANCE’ with Ed Clark Cornell, and ME! Aka MONTCLAIR ELECTRIC! with Simon Pride. Gianni is also a founding member and the president of TE-MP0 aka The Electro-Music Performers Organization, a non-profit 501c3 which fosters and promotes the Development of the Electro-Music ethos through the organization and presentation of Live Performances, Seminars, Lectures, Exhibits and gatherings.
Chaka Benson is well known around the Philly electronic and experimental music scene, having many live and recorded appearances in venues such as ICA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fire Museum, Philly Contemporary and Bowerbird. His sound leans toward ambient and cinematic, with a huge Hip Hop influence.
Born into a scientific family, music technologist Don Slepian showed both musical and technical talent early in life. He was a tester on the early internet as a member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Synthesizer Soloist with the Honolulu Symphony and Musical Director of the Honolulu Theater For Youth. He has been presented by WNYC’s “New Sounds” in New York’s Lincoln Center and performed at the Pompidou Center in Paris. He is currently living in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania where he writes and builds instruments.
Novermber 29th – Bad Electric. Ethan Helm, David Berends
Drawing from the hum of rhythmic beeping sounds and the ethereal wash of manipulated recordings, Bad Electric forges soundscapes that exist on the fringes of monotony and intrigue. The New Jersey Pine Barrens based musician creates an immersive world that is both unsettling and beautiful, using sonic textures as a primary language.
Ethan Helm plays the saxophone, writes music, leads Cowboys & Frenchmen,drinks a responsible amount of coffee, works with dancers, wakes up early, releases albums, improvises, wanders through old neighborhoods, collaborates, plays the flute, listens, writes books, teaches at NYU, holds a PhD, came from Southern California, attended Eastman School of Music, lives in New York City, and daydreams often.
From the age of four when he first heard the grannies in Sunday school plunking out hymns on a beat-up old upright, composer David Berends has been spellbound by the harmonies, melodies and structures of this mystical aural artform we call music. Classically trained in piano at Peabody Conservatory and the Westminster Choir College and in music theory at UPenn and Princeton, his informal training came though countless gigs and jams with artists ranging from guitarist Stanley Jordan to Rock’n’Roll pioneer Chuck Berry to prog rockers Tank and New Wave band The Name. Over the years, Berends has released four CDs of his original piano compositions on classical labels Albany Records and I Virtuosi Records while also briefly leading a straight-ahead piano trio performing many of his jazz charts. Recently, much of his musical focus has been on recording and performing with numerous jazz, fusion, and electronica musicians throughout the Northeast, including guitarist Karl Fury, keyboardist Neil Alexander, the late, great Tony “TNT” Jones [bass] and legendary Philly drummer G. Calvin Weston. Berends is also a founding member of Two Bald Wizards (ongoing) featuring the brilliant hand percussionist, Michael Mironov. As a solo electronica artist, Berends creates music both challenging and pleasing, be it tonal or not, with elements of jazz, rock, classical, cinema, ambient and experimental.
Bill Fieger is a local composer and performer of electronic and acoustic music and the host of The Event Horizon Concert Series. He has recorded electronic music under the name Oblivious Solitude and has also recorded and performed as part of Stares to Nowhere and Mayakara. This performance will be an all acoustic set of improvisations loosely based on the Raga musical form.
The goal is always to create a music of mystery (tone-magic). An example of Bills acoustic work can be found here.
Bill will be performing on Fretless acoustic Guitar.
The Time Merchant weaves sparse, atmospheric compositions that resist easy categorization. Preferring to stay in the shadows, the artist focuses on crafting sound environments that challenge and invite, creating moments of quiet intensity and open-ended reflection. With a minimalist setup and a singular vision, the work is a personal exploration of space, mood, and sonic texture.
Guitar Pilots (Art Cohen & Harrison McKay) was formed to perform electronic space music on guitars. Their music consists of long structured improvisational pieces which transport the listener to the depths of space while focusing on each precious unfolding moment. Art Cohen’s sequencer-like echoed guitar figures provide rhythmic propulsion while Harrison McKay’s synthetic pads and loops build a foundation for both guitarists to soar in melodic flights. Singing glissando blends seamlessly with plucks and twangs and sonic blasts from interstellar space. Following the trail blazed by Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Prog, and the Berlin School, Guitar Pilots carve out their own sonic territory that is both organic as the ground underneath and as far-reaching as a distant pulsar. Art Cohen has been a fixture in the Philadelphia music scene for over 35 years as both a performer and an audio engineer. Fluent in guitar, bass, and keyboards, he has performed at concert venues and radio studios throughout the Delaware Valley and brought his music to Toronto, New York and other cities in the Northeast. He has released CD’s with Guitar Pilots, The Ministry of Inside Things, Delicate Monster, CubiZm, Lessick & Lincoln & Cohen, Waves of Violet, Men from When, and as a solo artist. His music ranges from electronic space to ambient to folk-rock to psychedelic rock to traditional folk to experimental to spoken word and beyond – sometimes within the same performance. Art has cultivated a unique guitar style drawing on influences including Garcia, Gilmour, Hendrix, Gottsching, Fripp, and Pinhas. Harrison McKay is perhaps best known as the guitar half of The Tangent Project, the Philadelphia area synth & guitar duo who over the past decade have graced the stages of all the region’s important electronic spacemusic venues. He coaxes an extended pallet of sounds from his guitar through the use of synths, effects processors and loopers. In addition to his work with The Tangent Project and as a solo electronic musician, McKay has performed extensively with local pop and progressive rock bands.
Friday, October 3rd – Richard T. Hill, PYXL8R and Planet Y
Richard T. Hill is a self-described “blue collar composer” and guitarist from Philadelphia and has worked as a semi-pro musician locally, regionally and nationally for over 30 years. He studied Music Composition at Community College Of Philadelphia and West Chester University under Jimmy Bruno, Drs. John Dulik, Larry Nelson and Robert Maggio. In addition to instrumental and vocal music, he also has a deep appreciation for electronic music and has previously performed at The Rotunda combining electronics and guitar. His style fuses aspects of minimalism, aleatoric techniques, musique concrète, granular synthesis and soundscape with his distinctive guitar style.
PYXL8R is the ongoing musical project of Ken Palmer, who is an artist and graphic designer, and the creator of trippy live visuals for Cosmic Crossings, Event Horizon, and other live events. Atmospheric, otherworldly, and always dense with unusual sonic textures, PYXL8R’s long-form synthesizer compositions are always performed completely live with no backing tracks. To achieve all of this on stage, Ken is joined by his talented spawn, Kyle and Sage, performing as a trio. His wife Ruth provides the live visuals, so the whole clan has come to embrace the nickname “the Partridge Family of Electronic Music,” so c’mon, get happy!
Planet Y is completely improvised space music featuring WAIL members Yanni Papadopoulos and Pete Wilder. Yanni Papadopoulos relies heavily on his Casio DG20 guitar synth and a handful of effects pedals to create the space scape.
There is no looping or sampling involved, all sounds are created in real time. Yanni is joined by musician Pete Wilder, who adds to the mix with guitar, Theremin, and a Casio DG20 guitar synth. (yes, sometimes there will be 2 guitar synths!)
Friday, May 30th – Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and Elliot Sharp
Jair-Rohm Parker Wells is an electric bassist and experimental music artist known for hiswork with Embryo and prominent experimental musicians. Drawing inspiration from Lockwood,
Feldman, Braxton, and Cage, Wells’ pursuits encompass the Chapman Stick, computer aided
composition, and ambisonic mixing. Compositions from his “Liberation” cycle are featured as
part of res·o·nant, the light and sound installation by artist Mischa Kuball at the Jewish
Museum Berlin. He graces stages across the world, performing at renowned venues such as
Vahdat Hall in Tehran, Iran, the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou, China, the
Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York, the iconic Globen Arena in Stockholm, Sweden,
the vibrant Saxophone Jazz Pub in Bangkok, Thailand, the avant-garde Cafe Oto in London,
England, and the prestigious Domicil Jazz Club in Munich, Germany, among many others.
Wells’ commitment to innovation shapes the trajectory of experimental music.
Elliott Sharp (e#) is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who leads Orchestra
Carbon, SysOrk, Tectonics and Terraplane and whose compositional strategies encompass
fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithms, genetic metaphors and new graphic notation
techniques, catalyzing a synesthetic music making approach. In 2015, he won the Berlin Prize
and Jahrespreis from Der Deutscher Schallplatten Kritiks. Sharp received a Guggenheim
Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Center for Transformative Media in 2014. He’s been featured in such festivals as Darmstadt, Huddersfield, and the Venice Biennale. His book, “IrRational Music” published in 2019, blends memoir, cultural discussion and music theory. Sharp’s works include a composition for Hilary Hahn’s Grammy-winning album “In 27 Pieces” and operas “Filiseti Mekidesi” and “Port Bou”. Collaborators include Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Cecil Taylor, Debbie Harry, Hubert Sumlin and more.
Saturday April 26th – WeirdSmith, Dimension Step & Ombient
WeirdSmith, aka Dan Gray, is a retired Navy Aviation Electronics Technician who repaired audio technology, amongst many other systems, involved in the hunting of submarines, now seeks to provide journeys of aural crevasses he calls “Sonic Spelunking”. He looks for interesting sonic spaces and shares the exploration of them. Having never played the same thing twice, each journey is a new and hopefully enjoyed shared experience.
Dimension Step is the synth focused version of Dorety Brothers. It is much about moods, atmospheres, some noise and melodies too, deriving our sounds from standard synths, modular analog synths, digital piano and even some electronic percussion. Ambience to syncopation and arpeggiation, we tend to improvise within a loose framework of tempo, key, mode and time signature or maybe absence of time signature and tempo. Collective influences come from the spacier moments found in prog giants like YES, ELP, Genesis, Pink Floyd and King Crimson as well as textures and moods from Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, Eno and even some jazz rock space jammers like Ozric Tentacles. Even more we find we influence each other when we jam. That’s the root of the creativity which stems into ideas we can use as a basis to recreate, yet it is never exactly the same music produced even if the base idea remains the same. It keeps it fresh for the audience and us.
Ombient, aka Mike Hunter, focuses on ambient/drone/experimental music that is improvisational in nature, representative of the feeling of the moment in which it is performed and of the subtle feedback between the audience and the performer. He uses various vintage and contemporary analog synthesizers, and modular synthesizers. Mike is also the host of the radio show Music With Space on WPRB 103.3 FM out of Princeton, NJ, the vice-President of The Electro-Music Performers Organization (TE-MPO) and the current President of the Board of Directors at The Electronic Music Education and Preservation Project based in Montgomery County, PA.
Saturday, March 29th Dolmino, Errant Space and Ritchie DeCarlo
Domino – Besides Improvised composition and production, Irman is an “Outsider Musician” and has played some version of every genre of music since 1977. Currently, Irman performs on, but is not limited to; Prepared and Processed Acoustic Cello, Electric Bass Guitar and various Electronics.
Errant Space is a project of composer/recordist Craig Chin. Its goal is spatio-temporal dilation through sound. Performances are site-specific, spontaneous compositions influenced by both the physical characteristics of the space they are performed in and the occupants of that space. Recent Errant Space projects include the soundtrack for the documentary Baato, and soundtracks for the tabletop adventure card game Dark Venture and its sequel, Battle of The Ancients. Craig has also produced the monthly Errant Space Podcast since 2015, which often features interesting experimental and electronic musicians. Additionally, Craig has curated several music series, including a monthly electronic and experimental night and the Space Out, Outside series. He also has a weekly radio show, The Space Program, on Vassar College’s Station WVKR.
Ritchie DeCarlo is a well-known drummer in the Philadelphia area. He is currently playing with ONE NOW AGO, Michael Bernier, Percy Jones, Scott McGill & also teaching drums. Released the first solo album in 2013 titled WEEK. The album features many guest musicians: David Fiuczynski, Michael Manring, Pat Mastelotto, Michael Bernier, Percy Jones, Markus Reuter & MORE! The past decade he produced over 10 additional albums. In 2009 the modular synthesizer appeared in his studio & this changed his direction immediately. Today Ritchie is incorporating all of his 40 years experience into his solo live performances. Electronic percussion, loops & all types of synthesizers come together in his excursions for your ears.
ROTUNDA COVID POLICIES AND BEST PRACTICES
- 50 people MAX will be permitted in the venue during an event. This includes audience, staff, and performers.
- Everyone over the age of 2 will be required to wear masks indoors, regardless of vaccination status.
- Performers and attendees will be asked to stay home if they feel unwell or have been in contact with someone diagnosed with Covid within 10 days of the event.
- We will engage in contact tracing. We will register attendees at the front desk, and will require them to alert us if they become sick after the event.