Saturday, April 22, 2023
7:00 – 8:00 PM
Mauch Chunk Opera House | 14 W Broadway Jim Thorpe
FEATURING SOPORUS
Soporus is the musical duo of Matthew Stone and William Stichter, childhood friends who have written and performed together for over 25 years. Formed in 2003 to explore their shared interest in ambient music and honed after-hours while playing together in instrumental rock group Saxon Shore, Soporus combines shifting drone with shimmering glacial melody that builds into dense layers of enveloping sound. Stone and Stichter craft songs primarily on guitar and bass, using careful techniques that often obscure their origins, and add accents of keyboard, electronics, and field recordings to create a deceptively soothing soundtrack for our current apocalypse.
NICO DOMINGUEZ
(visuals for Lady HD and Soporus)
Nico Dominguez is a Philadelphia based artist working in mixed media and digital formats. For the last 20 years, he has performed live video projections for musicians and DJs across the US and Europe. He works with a combination of original and sampled videos to improvise his compositions, including analog feedback, filters and hardware manipulations. Nico regularly performs with Philly studio Klip Collective.
GRANT BOUVIER
(visuals for Manna)
Grant Bouvier is a Philadelphia-based video artist whose work centers on the use of analog video synthesizers, circuit bent video processors, dead media formats, and glitches, to explore art and technology - not as codependent hyperobjects marching together toward techno-capital singularity, but rather as mutable feedback loops that can often become nonlinear and very strange. And in this strangeness, as Bouvier sees it, is our chance to imagine a different technological future, more humane than the one laid out before us.
GRANT BOUVIER
(visuals for Manna)
FEATURING MANNA
Manna Pourrezaei is a Philadelphia-based electronic musician and composer who uses modular synthesizers to explore the experimental spirit of the avant-garde. She treats the creative play and full participation these mutable and highly expressive musical devices offer as a form of self-healing. While the ability to conceptualize and construct instruments that shape and arrange soundwaves according to her own design provides a certain artistic agency, modular synthesis also asks that the creator relinquish control through randomization and probability. It is this dialectic between control and randomness that appeals to Pourrezaei’s need for a creative medium that challenges ego-driven approaches to art and life in favor of mindful detachment and engagement.