Sonic Circuits at Pyramid Atlantic: 4 acts to catch at the avant-garde music festival in Silver Spring
By Dean Essner October 2 at 6:57 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2014/10/02/sonic-circuits-at-pyramid-atlantic-4-acts-to-catch-at-the-avant-garde-music-festival-in-silver-spring/
Jazz guitarist Anthony Pirog performs Saturday at Sonic Circuits.
If you’re a casual music fan, this weekend’s Sonic Circuits Festival may not be for you. “It’s intense music for intense listening,” says curator Jeff Surak, who helped organize the 13th annual avant-garde event. This year’s festival, which takes place Friday through Sunday at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, boasts a lineup of experimental musicians from all over the world. Assuming Surak’s warning hasn’t scared you off, here are four acts to catch.
Anthony Pirog, performing Saturday, is a D.C.-based jazz guitarist who has played in countless groups, such as the jazz act Underwater Ghost. On Oct. 14, he’ll release his debut solo album, “Palo Colorado Dream,” via the experimental, Silver Spring-based label Cuneiform Records. “He is a master of many genres,” Surak says. “He can make his guitar not sound like a guitar and then bring it around again and play very melodic music.”
Layne Garrett — who, like Pirog, is D.C.-based — won’t be performing a traditional set at Sonic Circuits. Instead, on Sunday, he’s turning the parking lot into a “giant, droning, stringed instrument,” as Surak calls it, using wires strung from the rooftop of Pyramid Atlantic, and gongs and Styrofoam boxes as amplifiers.
Extremophile — which will be making its live debut as a group on Saturday — is a New York-based improvisational quartet that creates chaotic quasi-jazz music centered around the nomadic beat poetry of vocalist Emilie Lesbros. “It’s totally spontaneous music,” Surak says. “It doesn’t sound like any genre, per se.”
The Swedish duo 100110, which plays Saturday, makes music exclusively from electric typewriters, but in a way that evokes avant-garde composer William Basinski’s urgent and unsettling “The Disintegration Loops” more than a cacophony of key-slapping. “They sort of create a drony, atmospheric soundscape,” Surak says. “They utilize typewriters in a way that creates sustained tones, and different timbres and colors.”
Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 8230 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring; Fri., 7:30 -11:59 p.m., $15; Sat., 5-11:59 p.m., $20; Sun., 5-11 p.m., $20; three-day pass: $50; dc-soniccircuits.org.
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