Ars Nova Workshop
presents
Aster
Ashley Paul, reeds + guitar
Eli Keszler, percussion
Join Ars Nova Workshop for a free double-header at The Rotunda featuring a performance by the duo Aster and a solo set by guitarist/electronicist Mario Diaz de Leon.
“Once in a while something gets slapped in the tape deck that just utterly, completely nails you to the underpinnings of heavens dripping maw,” wrote Byron Coley and Thurston Moore about Ashley Paul's 2010 cassette, if only goodnight, which earned the top spot on their “Tongue Top Ten” for Arthur Magazine.
A composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist currently residing in Brooklyn, Paul is a graduate of the New England Conservatory and has worked with a wide-range of experimental artists, including Loren Connors, Roscoe Mitchell, Joe Maneri, Greg Kelley, Satoshi Takeishi, Bill Nace, Joe Morris and Charles Cohen. Aster is her duo project with multi-instrumentalist, New England Conservatory graduate and fellow New Yorker Eli Keszler, who has performed with Jandek, Phil Niblock, Joe McPhee, C. Spencer Yeh and Tony Conrad. His 2011 ESP-Disk release, Oxtim, was named one of the Best Jazz & Improvisation albums of the year by The Wire. The two have worked together for roughly five years, and have released three albums for Rel Records. From scrapes, splatters, whirrs, shimmers, drips, tears, rips and drones, the duo will make your inner-ear work harder than it ever has before.
Mario Diaz de Leon, guitar + electronics
“Aside from Iannis Xenakis, I can't think of a composer who's pushed harsh noise like young New Yorker Mario Diaz de Leon,” writes Chicago Reader's Peter Margasak about the emerging composer and multi-instrumentalist.
Diaz de Leon, also a member of metal band Mirrorgate, released an album of classical works called Enter Houses Of on John Zorn's Tzadik label in 2009. It was praised by The New York Times for its “hallucinatory intensity” and by Time Out New York for its “abrasive mix of modernist integrity and anarchic noise.” He will be the guest curator of The Stone in January, 2012, and plans to release an album of live recordings called Hypnos on the Shinkoyo label early this year.
Admission is FREE