UPEND  presents

PHIL MINTON & AUDREY CHEN (London/Berlin)
SWINGING CHANDELIERS
COREY FOGEL

doors 8pm
sound 9pm
donate $10

PHIL MINTON /  AUDREY CHEN DUO
✶ Los Angeles debut ✶

Phil Minton (b. 1940, Torquay, England) is a improvisor whose contorted vocal emissions have pushed beyond the boundaries of genre. The past four decades have heard his glossolaliac gurgles, squeaks, and deconstructed operatic flights operate within the realms of Free Improvisation, the body of Jazz itself, and varied electro-acoustic activities. Over the eras, he’s collabbed live and on record with an epic list of ace improvisors including Fred Frith, John Butcher, Bob Ostertag, and Joëlle Léandre. To this day (at the end of his 70s!) Minton is a mainstay of London’s Café OTO scene, and regularly parries in an acoustic vocal duo with Berlin-based improvisor Audrey Chen (b. 1976, Illinois). With compatible palates, and complimentary instincts they engage in an instant interplay of queue and chase, gesture and spittle. Chen herself hyperextends voice, mining material in between – and beyond – previous utterance. Finding sound via microtones of larynx squeak, blowing wind turbulence with lip-flip flutters, and plumming the corporeal with full throated phonation! She has worked with Maria Chavez, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh among many others. Though Minton and Chen have toured in Europe and U.S. and have cut a couple records together – including a fine duo outing on Sub Rosa – this date marks their first performance in Los Angeles.

SWINGING CHANDELIERS

Swinging Chandeliers is the life-duo of reel-to-reel master Joseph Hammer and hypno-visualist Sayo Mitsubishi, and together they divine a liminal zone of total art and perpetual weirdness. Previous swings have seen Mitsuishi improvise visuals via overhead projector, unfurling a stream of subconsciousness – drawing simultaneously with each hand. The transparency that scrolls across her platten is more of a match than a metaphor for the looped tape traveling over the heads of Hammer’s rig.

COREY FOGEL

Corey Fogel is a artist and drummer who has clear control over percussive rudiments as well as the will to disrupt the flow. Setting and breaking expectations, breaking out of rhythm, and finding ways to surprise with what-to-hit and what-to-drop, whether it’s a beat or a wrench – either in the system or, yes, literally a wrench – Fogel is continually active locally and across the country and the pond improvising and on recent tours with the versatile unit that is Julia Holter’s band and the Tasha Wada Group. Fogel’s solo outings in town, however, are curiously infrequent, and on this auspicious occasion he’ll share some of his instant art idioms.