Here’s an audio file of this entire amazing night:

Discontense

An evening of experimental improvised music
8pm on Saturday, January 22nd
At The Home Of
RSVP to contact@thehomeof.org for our secret location.

Discontense includes: Constance Cooper (piano/vocals), Ed Davis (violin), Mike Dick (drum set), Jamie Paul Lamb (acoustic bass), Edward Schneider (also saxopohone), and Wendy Ultan (violin).

Discontense is a newly formed collection of musicians who share an interest in unstructured experimental improvisation. We begin each performance without a set roadmap or score, instead the process becomes our goal. Through these means we seek both discontinuity and continuity, creating a musical language that incorporates past, present, and future “tenses.” Within each performance we seek to look backward and forward by references various styles of music, while also creating webs that connect our initial thoughts to our last.

Biographies of the musicians:

Mike Dick is a percussionist currently attending the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, where he is involved with the Jazz Studies program. He performs with various jazz combos in both Connecticut and New York.

Jamie Paul Lamb is a bassist and composer currently living in Connecticut. Before his recent move, he was the founder of the Minneapolis Free Music Society, a large collective of musicians engaged in experimental and free improvisation. Lamb is now an active member of the New Haven Improvisers Collective and is an actively performing in both Connecticut and New York.

Wendy Ultan is a violinist who frequently employs electronics to expand the palate of her instrument. She has performed with William Parker, Bern Nix, Elliot Sharp, Evelyn Blakey, Dj Carnage, Valerie Naranjo, Alva Rogers, Charles Burnham, Rufus Cappodocia, Jemeel Moondoc, Ahmadou Ngom, and many others. She has been commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, Minnesota Composers Forum, Intermedia Arts, the National Gallery of Art (Canada), the Dia Foundation, and the Mcknight Foundation.

Edward Schneider is an improviser, composer, and educator currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Before his recent move to New York, Schneider lived in Minneapolis. During this time he co-founded the quintet Process is the Goal and was an active member of the Minneapolis Free Music Society. In 2009 Schneider received a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum to produce the compact disc (Again) Against/Because. . . That same year his new electronic composition, the tree that was a bird, was performed as part of the Conny Purtill performance at the Blinky Palermo puppet theater at the Pompidou in Paris. Recently, Schneider was the subject of a new documentary by filmmaker Mark Nye.

Ed Davis was a Ruth Close Musical Fellowship scholar of violin and viola at the University of Oregon. Easily moving from classical to jazz, folk rock to electronic music, he’s played with Jennifer Brunetti’s Mercyside and toured with members of Modern English and Jesus Jones, has played for ABC’s Good Morning America studio opening for Suzanne Vega and Sugar Ray, with Sky Cries Mary, and at the Seattle Opera House, ACT Theater, ABC Studios, B.B. King’s Times Square, Detroit’s Royal Oak Theater, CBGB’s, Galapagos Art Space, and Monkeytown. He has scored for TV, live cinema and films, including work premiered at Cannes and Sundance, as well as for BBC Television and Pinnacle Studios. He has recorded on Mi5, Aeterna, SubPop, Sony and Warner and is a founding member of BomberGirl, an electronic music, dance and animation group.

Constance Cooper (piano, vocals) received first prize in the 2002 Gustav Mahler Competition (Austria). Her reflections about string instruments led to her invention of new hand-positions and notation for Coming From Us, commissioned by the American Composers Forum (Cadence Recordings). Her Divertimento for String Quartet is available on the Princeton CD label. Amoroso for orchestra was recorded by Harold Farberman in 2001. Her improvisatory pieces for organ, synthesizer, and bass Repaying Sin-Driven Senators by Not Thinking About Them were completed during a residency at ArtOMI. She has appeared as composer, pianist, and singer at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors and with the Princeton University Composers Ensemble, Continuum, and the American Microtonal Festival; and produced her own contemporary vocal recital series for 7 years. She received her doctorate in composition from Princeton University in 2003.