live in concert

ROBERT BEATTY
JOHN WIESE / MITCHELL BROWN
SMOKEY EMERY

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Robert Beatty (Lexington, Kentucky)

Concurrent to crushing noise-rock norms and jockeying shattered electronics in Hair Police, Robert Beatty has – over a decade and a half – also cut a solo path of pulses and tricks under the guise of Three Legged Race. These underground sounds have been spooled by tape labels crucial to their times: Gods of Tundra, Night People, NNA, and Vitrine. More frequent live appearances and Beatty’s Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata have brought his sounds to more ears and his name to more lips. An apparent insistence on cassette and vinyl for physical releases hint at the technology-stretch at play in all of his work. Like the globally recognizable album art Beatty has created for others, his own electro-sonics blur the line between analog artifact and digital method. And this ambiguity is intrinsic to his era-less weirdness: mystery mindscapes that can evoke The Residents or alternately offer a fully twisted take on contempo fake-techno. This is Beatty’s first show in Los Angeles in three years and his first in town since shedding the Three Legged Race moniker for live performances in favor of his own name.

John Wiese / Mitchell Brown

Cuts and folds and layers of sound; abstractions that suggest referent but defy recognition. Words fail, but still these here do loosely approximate audio aspects of two perennial figures of experimental music activity in Los Angeles. Mitchell Brown’s seemingly ubiquitous presence performing live has brought his analog alchemies and head expansion techniques to the front of the class as Professor Cantaloupe and as a next-gen LAFMS exponent. John Wiese’s digital incisions and perpetual bricolage have laid a concrète path from the extremities of the American underground, around the earth, and to the studios of INA-GRM. Duo collaborations are core to each of these system-riggers, and – of course – they are no strangers: the Superstitious cut on Wiese’s mid-career chronicle Deviate from Balance documents an early aughts meeting between the two, and they have collabed live with each other in various Spacek ensembles and Smegma connected jams. Yet, the two haven’t paired up for a live action in nearly a dozen years. Come hear the air tear.

Smokey Emery

Barely within sight, darkness swallows a shadow at the far end of a long corridor, leaving only a cascade of echoes. Such are the dank dreamstate atmospherics conjured by Smokey Emery, a long running project of Houston-born artist Daniel Hipólito. An itinerant accumulator of sound, he coaxes a mix of soundscape fragments and material decay from prepared tape loops snaking through a apparatus of vintage dictaphone, reel-to-reel, and cassette decks. Synthesis and rhythm also work their way into the flow, as has been captured on recent releases on Holodeck and Chondritic Sound. With Hipólito’s re-location to Los Angeles from Texas, Smokey Emery has begun to be more readily visible diffusing sound into rooms around town.