Composers from five countries will convene for the 27th Other Minds Festival, an international annual showcase for composers held this year at San Francisco’s Taube Atrium Theater November 15-18, 2023 and at Gray Area on November 19, 2023.
The Festival opens with a performance by Swedish sound artist and composer Ellen Arkbro, whose chordal textures spread out like invisible sculptures—diamond formations for the listening mind. Arkbro will be followed by an improvised set by the American pianist and composer Craig Taborn, whose music melding the complexity of Iannis Xenakis with the sweetness of Francis Poulenc has been hailed by the New York Times for its “proud refusal to cater to expectations about what jazz, or even music, should be.”
On Night 2, electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick performs As I Live and Breathe alongside German video artist Lillevan and Canadian-American composer Linda Bouchard performs music from her Live Structures Project with Ensemble TriOcular +.
Night 3 opens with the first live performance of Mary Kouyoumdjian's They Will Take My Island, a string octet about the life of Armenian-American abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky with film by Atom Egoyan, world and American premieres by leading Armenian composer and pianist Artur Avanesov, and a performance of works by American composer Carl Stone by Sarah Cahill, Paul Dresher, Ned Rothenberg, and the composer.
On Night 4, Other Minds presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work for Friction Quartet by Norwegian composer and polymath Eivind Buene. Bora Yoon performs a multimedia set for live electronics, voice, and violin with visual collaborator Joshue Ott. We celebrate the conclusion of our festival with a performance of Neil Rolnick‘s monumental Lockdown Fantasies, a work for piano and electronics performed by Geoffrey Burleson, which was included on Rolnick’s recent Other Minds Records CD release.
For our final night, we move over to Gray Area for the world premiere of Carl Stone's Re:gendo. Stone will perform live computer-based electronics with sounds distributed throughout the space, utilizing field recordings of the urban soundscape in Tokyo combined with his unique take on music from Japan as well as other parts of Asia. The music shares the immersive space with multi-channel video using specially commissioned drone footage shot over Tokyo. Featured as part of the performance will be Akaihirume, the Japanese singer whose ear is always tuned to the world’s sounds which she keeps as material in what she calls her shell. She has a wide range of vocalizations ranging from the angelic to the demonic, with lupine growling alternating with vocal etherea.