Meridian presents an evening featuring four solo electronic works by Sam Ashley, Tom Bickley, Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Tim Perkis.

"Squinty Eyed Envy" by Tim Perkis

Tim Perkis has been working in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, performing, exhibiting installation works and recording in North America, Europe and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of life-like properties in complex systems of interaction.

In addition, he is a well known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with hundreds of artists and groups, including Chris Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Frank Gratkowski, Luc Houtkamp, Yoshi Ichiraku, Matt Ingalls, Joelle Leandre, Gino Robair, ROVA saxophone quartet, Elliott Sharp, Leo Wadada Smith and John Zorn. Ongoing groups he has founded or played in include the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub -- pioneering live computer network bands -- and Rotodoti, the Natto Quartet, Fuzzybunny, All Tomorrow's Zombies and Wobbly/Perkis/Antimatter.

His occasional critical writings have been published in The Computer Music Journal, Leonardo and Electronic Musician magazine; he has been composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland California, artist-in-residence at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, and designed musical tools and toys at Paul Allen's legendary think tank, Interval Research.

His checkered career as a researcher and engineer has brought him a variety of interesting projects: designing museum displays for science and music museums in San Francisco, Toronto and Seattle, creating artificial-intelligence based auction tools for business, building scientific experimental apparati, consulting on multimedia art presentation networks for the SF Art Commission and SF Airport, writing software embedded in toys and other consumer products, and creating new tools for sound and video production, research and analysis.

Recordings of his work are available on several labels: Artifact,Limited Sedition, 482, Lucky Garage, Praemedia, Rastascan and Tzadik(USA); EMANEM(UK); Sonore and Meniscus(France); Curva Minore and Snowdonia(Italy); XOR(Netherlands); Creative Sources(Portugal).

He is also producer and director of a feature-length documentary on musicians and sound artists in the San Francisco Bay area called NOISY PEOPLE (2007).

"A Coincidence of Insects, Birds and Weather" by Tom Bickley

Field recordings by Nancy Beckman of cicadas in Dallas, TX, synthetic bird calls and insect-like sounds, and heavily processed audio from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather radio coincide to yield a four-channel active environment. Controlled random processes determine the placement of each sound in both acoustic space and time. Elements of this piece began as separate sections of electronic music composed by Tom Bickley for NATURAL HISTORY: a performance inspired by Pliny the Elder's writings on insects and birds developed by Heloise Gold, Nancy Beckman and Tom Bickley.

Tom Bickley listens to the world always hoping to hear more and more fully. He grew up in the semitropical soundscape of Houston, sojourned in Washington, DC (studying music, religion, and information science) and came to California as a composer in residence at Mills College in Oakland. He performs using recorder, voice and electronics, teaches music at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training, and is on the library faculty at Cal State East Bay. He holds the Certificate in Deep Listening from Pauline Oliveros. He performs with shakuhachi player Nancy Beckman as Gusty Winds May Exist and with recorder players David Barnett and Judy Linsenberg as Three Trapped Tigers. He co-founded and directs the Cornelius Cardew Choir.

"A Proposal for the Elimination of Science" by Sam Ashley

"This piece is part of a larger work called The Oracle Project. It features the use of an electro-mechanical oscillator that is built from just speakers, batteries and wire, and that is pretty much impossible to control. The instrument generates a complex noise, occasional subtle just-tuned melodies perhaps, and every now and then sounds that might be curiously like speech. In general though the contraption has a mind of its own, and that's why I like to use it in divination. The performance consists of me trying to just stand still; the involuntary movements of my body are what play the apparatus. The performance is a "psychic reading" in the genuine sense, except that here the "fortune" is presented directly to the audience rather than being interpreted, and the catalytic agent is an audio device rather than a visual one (as it is when when using tea leaves, crystal balls, etc.).

The Oracle Project
The idea of divination connects with the modern idea of hypnosis. But hypnosis is just "sleight of hand" and so it suffers from an important political error: in hypnosis there is always the "hypnotist" and the "subject", even in self hypnosis the "induction" always abstractly reflects this setup. In this situation the hypnotist remains firmly rooted in "reality", and this limits everything. Even when we introduce conceptual gimmicks like the notion of an "unconscious mind" the experiences tend never to cross over into the realm of something transcendental, an extending of reality. This is a serious flaw. The practice of divination has therefore lost a lot of credibility in recent centuries, and modern experiments tend to miss the boat even when their intentions are good. But we can start fresh, can reinvent and can explore. A democratic oracle, one with no rules and no priest caste, should facilitate that.

"A Proposal for the Elimination of Science" and the instrument it features were developed thanks to four artist residencies: in 2009 at Skolska Gallery in Prague; in 2008 and 2009 during two residencies at okno in Brussels; and initially during a residency at Tesla e.V. in Berlin, 2005-2006." - Sam Ashley

Sam Ashley has devoted his life to the development of an experimental, non-religious mysticism, one rooted in a "find out for yourself" attitude, an attitude that he advocates in direct opposition to so many traditions. He has been a modern-day witch-doctor for more than 40 years.

For over three decades Sam has been using this mysticism in the creation of music and art. His pieces are mostly about luck, hallucination and coincidence. Usually they include direct presentations of magic events, objects or phenomena. Sam's performed pieces often feature the use of authentic spirit possession, something he has been working with for more than 30 years. One could say that Sam's installation and "sound art" work is about finding ways to amplify imaginary sound. Almost all of what Sam does relates directly to trance.

Sam Ashley offers simple windows onto things that occur in-between the "real world" and that which transcends it.

"Culture of Fire" by Scot Gresham-Lancaster

"In June of 1994 David Tudor was in Amsterdam preparing for a performance of "Oceans" with Merce Cunningham's company at the Amsterdam Opera House. He had shipped all his equipment to STEIM and it was stored in the studio there. I just happened to be working in the studio they chose to bring all his equipment to. So once again I was meeting up with one of my great mentors having worked with him at Mills several times and then shared performance venues in Berlin and New York over the preceding years. I remember him lighting his cigarettes with a lighter that looked like a small Thompson machine gun. I was prowling around the Amsterdam guitar shops looking for pedals with him and Matt Wand of Stock Hausen and Walkman. On his hand and knees on the floor with a ZVEx fuzz factory and an Ibanez delay hooked up in a direct feedback loop into a Marshall cranked up to 11 ... Beautiful. The guitar salesman in their leather pants and Motley Crew tee shirts had been casting eye rolled side glances to one another until David turned it on then ... what I will call "the Culture of Fire". They exchanged startled looks back and forth and were wondering how to get this old guy to stop this tremendous wall of noise that filling the music shop and ringing everyone's ears. All acoustic instruments were resonating right along with these flames of sound ...

David had given me an introduction to Forest Warthman and Mark Holler who had helped him build the instrument of his last double CD album on Lovely called the Neural Net Synthesizer. It was made for three ETANN (electronically trainable analog neural net) chips. The instrument was stored on a desk at Forest's technical writing firm in Palo Alto and with a note for Maestro Tudor, I was given the opportunity to spend and an afternoon "playing" the instrument. I put quotes around playing because there was no real way to play this other than to turn knobs and furiously jack and rejack the little mini plugs in and out the 128 various outputs looking for a sustained signal. I kept the DAT rolling and eventually got some 2 hours of material. Some of that material will be played tonight." - Scot Gresham-Lancaster

Scot Gresham-Lancaster is a composer, performer, instrument builder and educator with decades of professional experience. His recent work is for IMéRA in 2nd order sonification of scientific information with a specific focus on astronomical data. As a member of the HUB, he is one of the early pioneers of "computer network music" and cellphone operas. He has created a series of "co-located" international Internet performances with remote dancers and musicians

He was a student of Philip Ianni, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, John Chowning, Robert Ashley, Terry Riley, "Blue" Gene Tyrany, David Cope and Jack Jarrett among others. He has been a composer in residence at Mills College. At STEIM in Amsterdam he has worked in the live performance of electro-acoustic music. He is an alumnus of the Djerassi Artist Residency Program. He has toured and recorded as a member of the HUB and Room, Alvin Curran, ROVA saxophone quartet, The Club Foot Orchestra , and NYX.He has performed the music of Alvin Curran, Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, and John Cage, under their direction, and worked as a technical assistant to Lou Harrison, Iannis Xenakis, David Tudor among many others.