Ambient Avenues is an expanded concert series that merges classical and electronic music inspired by the concepts and landscapes of visual art in various mediums with an emphasis on video and instillation art. Ambient Avenues is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. The first concert took place in July 2019 as a partnership with American Festival for the Arts Student Composer Program. For video of the first concert, CLICK HERE
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
Music by Chapel In The Sky and Projections by Michael Walrond / SHDWSOFDUST
October 12th
7:30pm
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
Chapel In The Sky
A cohort of creative forces from Houston, led by Meghan Hendley Lopez, have joined together to make a mix of danceable ambience that pushes the boundaries of music performance and visual art. Honing the skills of classical and contemporary music skills along with installation and video art, Chapel In The Sky looks to morph the concert and gallery experience one track at a time.
www.chapelinthesky.com
Michael Walrond/ SHDWSOFDUST
Waldron is a visual artist / photographer from Everett, Washington and was raised all over the west coast. Currently he is working out of San Diego and Los Angeles. His images are created without any Photoshop or image manipulation software. Instead he shoots through various objects, build sets, soak and freeze film, photograph things like textures, flowers, animals, and skulls along with double exposing them over his subjects. Sometimes he will even create filters to manipulate my images as well. By chance, he fell in love with photography about three years ago when a friend gifted me a camera. Film photography since has become a natural progression for him and he was hooked instantaneously. “There’s just a certain mystic you get with it that you don’t get anywhere else…” says Waldron. “Film has a beautiful hypnotic depth that mesmerizes and immerses you.”
www.shdwsofdust.com
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
RESCHEDULED DATE Nevember 16th - Chris Becker
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
The music of composer Chris Becker is equally inspired by rock and roll language, avant-garde jazz, dub compositional strategies, and musique concrète. He has created music for dance, film and mixed media installations and received grants and awards from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Meet The Composer, the American Music Center (now New Music USA) and the American Society of Composers and Publishers.
Becker’s music for dance includes the score for choreographer Rachel Cohen’s evening-length work If The Shoe Fits (2005), named one of the best dance performances of 2005 by New York Times dance critic John Rockwell. In 2017, Cohen and Becker’s Recidivistas was performed in New York’s Socrates Park, with a cast of 30 female dancers. Becker’s multimedia collaboration with painter and video artist Lillian Warren and dancer Annie Arnoult Who You Once Were was performed to sold out audiences August 23 and 24, 2019 at Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX. Becker has also composed music for New York choreographers Sasha Soreff (The Other Shoe, Ailey Citigroup Theater, 2009) and Adrian Jevicki (La Spectra, The Tank, 2009), Martha Graham company principal dancer Blakeley McGuire (Waterfall, video, 2011), and choreographer Rebecca French (The Rite of Summer, Cullen Theater, Wortham Center, 2015).
Becker’s recent projects include scoring artist Jil Guyon’s award-winning film Widow, which premiered February 4, 2014, at the Dance on Camera Festival presented by Dance Films Association and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Since its premiere, Widow has screened at several festivals and museums across the U.S. and Canada, including the Musée de la Civilisation, Quebec City, Canada. Becker’s second collaboration with Guyon, Vigil (2015), has screened widely as well. For their collaboration, WIDOW_Remix (2016), Becker created the score from over a dozen solo voice improvisations by singer Helga Davis, who sang and tracked her performances while watching the film. In September 2019, four of Guyon’s videos scored by Becker screened at the Cinédanse Ottowa, Canada.
Becker has been a guest lecturer at The Jung Center of Houston, Lone Star College at Kingwood, and Project Row Houses, and a guest composer at the NOW Music Festival at Capital University’s Conservatory of Music and the University of Louisiana at Monroe. As a laptop musician, he has performed live improvisations with jazz, rock, and noise musicians in Houston, New York, Columbus, OH, and Richmond, VA, often accompanying silent films. His music has been featured on John Schaefer’s WNYC radio series “New Sounds” and Helga Davis’ “Evening Music.”
Becker writes about music and visual art for Houston CityBook and has contributed articles and reviews to Acoustic Guitar, AllAboutJazz.com, The Jazz in M.E.E., Sequenza21, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz, a collection of in-depth interviews with 37 female musicians of all ages, nationalities, and races, who represent nearly every style of jazz one can imagine, and one of the contributors to Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies (Wesleyan University Press). Upcoming projects include an EP of music co-composed with soprano Misha Penton with poetry by Stéphane Mallarmé to be released in Winter 2019.
MORE ABOUT CHRIS BECKER HERE
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
November 2nd - Outspoken Bean
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
2017 Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs Artist in Resident and 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Idea Fund recipient, Emanuelee Outspoken Bean is a performance poet, writer, compassionate mentor, electric entertainer, and educator. Bean uses poetry to collaborate with other mediums and institutions such as being the first poet to perform on a main stage production of Houston Ballet’s PLAY. Also, creating his own festival, Plus Fest, the EVERYTHING plus POETRY Festival. That work ethic has taken him to perform in Trinidad to Miami to South Dakota to Off-Broadway, over 35 states, 200 universities, annually performing in front of thousands of people, and across the vast Houston Metropolitan where he inspires people from all walks of life. Also, Bean was commissioned to write and perform a national campaign on diversity for Pabst Blue Ribbon and VICE.
He was the 2011 Texas Poet Laureate nominee, ranked 9th in the Individual World Poetry Slam 2013, ranked 2nd in collaborative poetry at Group Piece Finals 2013, and ranked 9th at National Poetry Slam 2014. He started performing spoken-word in 2005. In his senior year at Prairie View A&M, Bean founded and coached the University’s first poetry slam team. In their first year, they won the title in their region and grabbed the 8th place ranking in the country at College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI ’08). Bean has also worked with many youth organizations from across the country such as, Inside Out in Detroit, Youth Speaks in San Francisco, and coach Tiger-Tail Production’s 2016 youth slam, WordSpeak in Miami. While balancing a very busy touring schedule, in Houston Bean serves as the Project Coordinator, Lead Coach, and mentor for Meta-Four Houston, a project of Writers in the Schools (WITS) that works with professional performance/slam poets and encourages self expression and literacy among Houston’s youth through creative writing and performance.
www.outspokenbean.wordpress.com
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
November 23rd - Texas New Music Ensemble: 3 short solo flute works by Marcus Maroney, Rob Smith, and Chad Robinson
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
Texas New Music Ensemble is dedicated to the enrichment of Texas communities through the performance of contemporary art music created by Texas composers and performed by Texas musicians.
Texas New Music Ensemble presents three annual concerts, multiple campus immersion concerts, and a number of smaller, more intimate performances in Houston, Texas. Additionally, TNME hosts an annual Student Composers Competition for student composers based in Texas, and commissions new works by established and emerging Texas composers. By stressing the artistic work of Texas composers and Texas performing musicians, we will instill a sense of pride in Texan art and heritage and spark interest in the current trends of classical music in local audiences.
www.tnme.org
November 30th - Lisa Harris
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and composer from Houston Texas, USA. Li is a trained classical voice/opera singer from Manhattan School of Music and is certified as a facilitator of DEEP LISTENING, the sonic philosophies of composer Pauline Oliveros, from the Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute. Li’s work focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. She uses voice, theremin, movement, text and new media to explore healing in performance.
Recognized by the Huffington Post as “One of Fourteen Artists that are Transforming Opera”, Lisa E. Harris is a creator. From Houston,Texas, this American soprano and composer who often creates with media, performance, and installation, is a filmmaker, singer/ songwriter, writer, educator, community organizer, environmental transformer and Mother Earth advocate as well. Harris clarifies her artistic voice through experimental film, improvisational performance and compositional practices, and further translates her music through the application of natural sciences, spirituality, popular song, melody, harmony, ritual and ceremony. She recently performed “Work Songs” at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
In 2007, Harris founded Studio Enertia, a multi-media production collective and in 2013 began the artists run Studio Enertia Artist Residency Program in Houston. A collaborative artist with Jason Moran presents A Fats Waller Dance Party, Harris is a featured vocalist along with Meshell N'degecello on the Grammy nominated album All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller. She is a 2015 Valiante Award recipient, a 2016 inaugural artist in residence at The New Quorum and a 2017 MANCC Forward Dialogues Fellow at FSU. Her two new opera films “Cry of the Third Eye” and “Children of the Lost” use vocal composition and film to amplify the quelled voices of youth and displaced people due to rapid gentrification in Houston’s Third Ward. Harris attained a Bachelor of Music Degree from the Mannes College and a Master of Music Degree from Manhattan School of Music.
www.lisaharris.com
Music by Chapel In The Sky and Projections by Michael Walrond / SHDWSOFDUST
October 12th
7:30pm
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
Chapel In The Sky
A cohort of creative forces from Houston, led by Meghan Hendley Lopez, have joined together to make a mix of danceable ambience that pushes the boundaries of music performance and visual art. Honing the skills of classical and contemporary music skills along with installation and video art, Chapel In The Sky looks to morph the concert and gallery experience one track at a time.
www.chapelinthesky.com
Michael Walrond/ SHDWSOFDUST
Waldron is a visual artist / photographer from Everett, Washington and was raised all over the west coast. Currently he is working out of San Diego and Los Angeles. His images are created without any Photoshop or image manipulation software. Instead he shoots through various objects, build sets, soak and freeze film, photograph things like textures, flowers, animals, and skulls along with double exposing them over his subjects. Sometimes he will even create filters to manipulate my images as well. By chance, he fell in love with photography about three years ago when a friend gifted me a camera. Film photography since has become a natural progression for him and he was hooked instantaneously. “There’s just a certain mystic you get with it that you don’t get anywhere else…” says Waldron. “Film has a beautiful hypnotic depth that mesmerizes and immerses you.”
www.shdwsofdust.com
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
RESCHEDULED DATE Nevember 16th - Chris Becker
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
The music of composer Chris Becker is equally inspired by rock and roll language, avant-garde jazz, dub compositional strategies, and musique concrète. He has created music for dance, film and mixed media installations and received grants and awards from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Meet The Composer, the American Music Center (now New Music USA) and the American Society of Composers and Publishers.
Becker’s music for dance includes the score for choreographer Rachel Cohen’s evening-length work If The Shoe Fits (2005), named one of the best dance performances of 2005 by New York Times dance critic John Rockwell. In 2017, Cohen and Becker’s Recidivistas was performed in New York’s Socrates Park, with a cast of 30 female dancers. Becker’s multimedia collaboration with painter and video artist Lillian Warren and dancer Annie Arnoult Who You Once Were was performed to sold out audiences August 23 and 24, 2019 at Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX. Becker has also composed music for New York choreographers Sasha Soreff (The Other Shoe, Ailey Citigroup Theater, 2009) and Adrian Jevicki (La Spectra, The Tank, 2009), Martha Graham company principal dancer Blakeley McGuire (Waterfall, video, 2011), and choreographer Rebecca French (The Rite of Summer, Cullen Theater, Wortham Center, 2015).
Becker’s recent projects include scoring artist Jil Guyon’s award-winning film Widow, which premiered February 4, 2014, at the Dance on Camera Festival presented by Dance Films Association and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Since its premiere, Widow has screened at several festivals and museums across the U.S. and Canada, including the Musée de la Civilisation, Quebec City, Canada. Becker’s second collaboration with Guyon, Vigil (2015), has screened widely as well. For their collaboration, WIDOW_Remix (2016), Becker created the score from over a dozen solo voice improvisations by singer Helga Davis, who sang and tracked her performances while watching the film. In September 2019, four of Guyon’s videos scored by Becker screened at the Cinédanse Ottowa, Canada.
Becker has been a guest lecturer at The Jung Center of Houston, Lone Star College at Kingwood, and Project Row Houses, and a guest composer at the NOW Music Festival at Capital University’s Conservatory of Music and the University of Louisiana at Monroe. As a laptop musician, he has performed live improvisations with jazz, rock, and noise musicians in Houston, New York, Columbus, OH, and Richmond, VA, often accompanying silent films. His music has been featured on John Schaefer’s WNYC radio series “New Sounds” and Helga Davis’ “Evening Music.”
Becker writes about music and visual art for Houston CityBook and has contributed articles and reviews to Acoustic Guitar, AllAboutJazz.com, The Jazz in M.E.E., Sequenza21, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz, a collection of in-depth interviews with 37 female musicians of all ages, nationalities, and races, who represent nearly every style of jazz one can imagine, and one of the contributors to Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies (Wesleyan University Press). Upcoming projects include an EP of music co-composed with soprano Misha Penton with poetry by Stéphane Mallarmé to be released in Winter 2019.
MORE ABOUT CHRIS BECKER HERE
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
November 2nd - Outspoken Bean
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
2017 Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs Artist in Resident and 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Idea Fund recipient, Emanuelee Outspoken Bean is a performance poet, writer, compassionate mentor, electric entertainer, and educator. Bean uses poetry to collaborate with other mediums and institutions such as being the first poet to perform on a main stage production of Houston Ballet’s PLAY. Also, creating his own festival, Plus Fest, the EVERYTHING plus POETRY Festival. That work ethic has taken him to perform in Trinidad to Miami to South Dakota to Off-Broadway, over 35 states, 200 universities, annually performing in front of thousands of people, and across the vast Houston Metropolitan where he inspires people from all walks of life. Also, Bean was commissioned to write and perform a national campaign on diversity for Pabst Blue Ribbon and VICE.
He was the 2011 Texas Poet Laureate nominee, ranked 9th in the Individual World Poetry Slam 2013, ranked 2nd in collaborative poetry at Group Piece Finals 2013, and ranked 9th at National Poetry Slam 2014. He started performing spoken-word in 2005. In his senior year at Prairie View A&M, Bean founded and coached the University’s first poetry slam team. In their first year, they won the title in their region and grabbed the 8th place ranking in the country at College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI ’08). Bean has also worked with many youth organizations from across the country such as, Inside Out in Detroit, Youth Speaks in San Francisco, and coach Tiger-Tail Production’s 2016 youth slam, WordSpeak in Miami. While balancing a very busy touring schedule, in Houston Bean serves as the Project Coordinator, Lead Coach, and mentor for Meta-Four Houston, a project of Writers in the Schools (WITS) that works with professional performance/slam poets and encourages self expression and literacy among Houston’s youth through creative writing and performance.
www.outspokenbean.wordpress.com
Ambient Avenues Concert Series @ Sculpture Month Houston
November 23rd - Texas New Music Ensemble: 3 short solo flute works by Marcus Maroney, Rob Smith, and Chad Robinson
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
Texas New Music Ensemble is dedicated to the enrichment of Texas communities through the performance of contemporary art music created by Texas composers and performed by Texas musicians.
Texas New Music Ensemble presents three annual concerts, multiple campus immersion concerts, and a number of smaller, more intimate performances in Houston, Texas. Additionally, TNME hosts an annual Student Composers Competition for student composers based in Texas, and commissions new works by established and emerging Texas composers. By stressing the artistic work of Texas composers and Texas performing musicians, we will instill a sense of pride in Texan art and heritage and spark interest in the current trends of classical music in local audiences.
www.tnme.org
November 30th - Lisa Harris
3PM (after the artist talk at 2PM)
SITE Gallery
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007
Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and composer from Houston Texas, USA. Li is a trained classical voice/opera singer from Manhattan School of Music and is certified as a facilitator of DEEP LISTENING, the sonic philosophies of composer Pauline Oliveros, from the Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute. Li’s work focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. She uses voice, theremin, movement, text and new media to explore healing in performance.
Recognized by the Huffington Post as “One of Fourteen Artists that are Transforming Opera”, Lisa E. Harris is a creator. From Houston,Texas, this American soprano and composer who often creates with media, performance, and installation, is a filmmaker, singer/ songwriter, writer, educator, community organizer, environmental transformer and Mother Earth advocate as well. Harris clarifies her artistic voice through experimental film, improvisational performance and compositional practices, and further translates her music through the application of natural sciences, spirituality, popular song, melody, harmony, ritual and ceremony. She recently performed “Work Songs” at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
In 2007, Harris founded Studio Enertia, a multi-media production collective and in 2013 began the artists run Studio Enertia Artist Residency Program in Houston. A collaborative artist with Jason Moran presents A Fats Waller Dance Party, Harris is a featured vocalist along with Meshell N'degecello on the Grammy nominated album All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller. She is a 2015 Valiante Award recipient, a 2016 inaugural artist in residence at The New Quorum and a 2017 MANCC Forward Dialogues Fellow at FSU. Her two new opera films “Cry of the Third Eye” and “Children of the Lost” use vocal composition and film to amplify the quelled voices of youth and displaced people due to rapid gentrification in Houston’s Third Ward. Harris attained a Bachelor of Music Degree from the Mannes College and a Master of Music Degree from Manhattan School of Music.
www.lisaharris.com
