Alessandro Perini

Gilad Cohen

Francesco Maggio

enn{kdog

Juan Carlos Vasquez

Jerod Sommerfeldt

Mitchell Herrmann

Keith Patchel

Speak Onio

Immigrant Breast Nest

“What would you do if you discovered a secret that changed everything?”

This is how I usually introduce people to Immigrant Breast Nest, the net-label Dan Abatemarco (Speak Onion) and I founded in 2009. In a recent e-mail, a newly initiated listener claimed that spending a weekend with I.B.N.’s catalog, all freely available online, incited the pleasurable sensation of multicolored fluid leaking from her pores while all the uncles in America brawled in an antechamber just behind her eyes. No one comes out of that experience the same as she went in.

It’s become commonplace to note that there’s now “too much” music being produced and released. Achieving comprehensive knowledge of even the most elusive and occult micro-genres has become an impossibility. So why yet still more? Because we, too, were doing “too much,” dipping into genres and unexplored timbres, abandoning good taste, slamming composition and improvisation together until they both oozed vital juice. What happens when an elephant constructed from kick drums and distorted bass sits on a black metal track? Thanks to I.B.N. I have a pretty good idea. Countless other equally unrealistic scenarios appear on each of our releases. It’s difficult music for interesting people.

In addition to providing highly flammable digital releases, I.B.N. has been committed from its inception to producing live events in the model of the autonomous zone. Removed from the constraints of a typical electronic concert, perhaps with a DJ sequestered in a booth with her laptop, shows featuring I.B.N. artists always clear a space for the unexpected. Catharsis or disaster? The possibility for one creates the possibility for the other. Frequently performing from the floor amidst the crowd, the musicians who represent I.B.N., or who otherwise find their way into its orbit, enter into a zone together with the audience. A bond of trust and expectation appears. When the bond coalesces, unprecedented energy erupts into the present. A body must be there to have this experience. The crowd’s piranha frenzy devours the musician who appears again, unharmed, instantaneously. Everyone in the room reaches Level 2. This intoxicating elevation cannot occur unless we enter into an arena where events occur in real time and the risk of humiliating failure constantly looms. Checking out a YouTube video after the fact just can’t cut it, no matter how high-res. Also, I.B.N. is committed to the good feeling of super loud bass hitting your chest.

Neither digital releases nor ecstatic shows would be possible without people to participate. Immigrant Breast Nest is an open-door nest. Everyone’s welcome to listen for free, join in, interact. Even so, it’s not a handicraft market. Our standard for creativity and quality in the music we release and perform is astronomically high. Over the past five years, a small hoard of artists who exceed even our expectations have come knocking. It’s a privilege to have their sounds associated with I.B.N. and to share a stage with them as often as possible. Check out our site, come to our shows, dance, devour, cohere, contemplate, rage, freak, puke, enjoy. We are building up slowly forever.

-David B. Applegate
immigrantbreastnest.com

Alessandro Perini was born in 1983 in Italy. He studied Composition (with Luca Francesconi and Ivan Fedele among others), Electronic Music and Science of Musical Communication in Italy and Sweden. His artistic production ranges from instrumental music to audiovisual and light-based works with a particular focus on the relationship between the sonic and the visual perception. His compositions have been played in Italy and abroad in festivals such as Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Festival Futura (France), Open Spaces (Germany), Connect Festival (Sweden), Procesas (Lithuania), UNM 2012 (Iceland), Moscow Forum (Russia), Tempus Fugit (Argentina).

Pubblico D is one of the outcomes of my research about the relationship between man and machine nowadays; not only machines are more and more perfect, being able to behave almost like humans, but people themselves are sometimes acting like machines, maybe influenced by machinery itself. This behavior is also present in the feedback between music market and audience: the ritual of the concert, marked with the "art" label, elicits everytime the same reaction from the audience, making the audience look like a robot. This fact contributes to the lowering of the quality of the music, in an endless, destructive loop.

Praised by the Israeli Prime Minister Award Committee for “creating a personal language fusion that has a unique dimension” in music that is “fascinating, vibrant and drawing the ear as well as the heart”, Gilad Cohen is an active composer and performer of concert music, rock and musical theatre. Gilad’s music was performed at numerous venues in the US, Europe, Asia, and Israel, and he is currently a PhD candidate in Composition at Princeton University. A graduate of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, Gilad is also active as music theorist and performer, playing piano, bass and guitar.

A Letter for Jimi: Many composers have written musical letters to legendary composers from the past. Likewise, my short electro-acoustic letter is compound solely of processed guitar recordings and addressed to Jimi Hendrix.

Julie Fotheringham has been performing her movement based works and improvisations in NYC since 2006, making appearances in various downtown venues including Dixon Place, Roulette and Judson Church. In the past she was a dancer/acrobat in Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. Julie has recently taken an interest in psychoanalysis and is interested in the therapeutic integration of the psyche and soma.

Francesco Maggio was born in Lecce (Italy) in 1986. He studies composition with Ivan Fedele and Giorgio Nottoli. He followed several masterclasses with Bussotti, Hosokawa, Stroppa. His works have been selected for the performance by Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali di Milano, Roma Sinfonietta, Grupo de Musica Contemporanea de Lisboa, Sanremo Orchestra, Contempoartensemble, Musikfabrik, Minguet Quartett, Vocalconsort Berlin, Margit Kern, Patrik Kleemola, Andrea Pestalozza, ecc... Since 2010 is also a composer in residance at Brinkhall Summer Concerts in Turku (Finland). Maggio is living in Stuttgart (Germany).

Aus dem Meer: The song has a sort of growth material that starts from the minimal sound of sound (the sea) until you reach the growing vehemence ''rhythm'' of the aggression of the effects used, the tonal variety of virtuosity and lyricism of the instruments in question, going steadily towards the final with a great expansion in terms of timbre, dynamic and virtuosic.

enn{kdog is a Brooklyn based noise group started in 2013. Peter Seligman and James Mercer are the backbone of the group, with contributions by David B. Applegate. enn{kdog began with collaborative remixes of raw Peter Seligman material, but has evolved to a greater specificity through live shows and endless variations on a handfull of pieces.

Peter Seligman currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and plays experimental techno under his own name.

James Mercer is a visual and sound artist also Living in Brooklyn, NY. Mysterious House is his solo digital noise project

Juan Vasquez: London-based composer and sound artist from Colombia More than 200 performances within the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Ireland, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Commissions by the Westminster and Chelsea Hospital / Museum (UK) in partnership with Royal College of Music (UK), the Arts Council through the Wiltshire Museum (UK), Polish Artists in London “PAiL” (UK), the Hilltown New Music Festival (Ireland) and the FEast 2013 (Florida International University, USA). Record deals with Important Records and Ablaze Records. Other spaces supporting the diffusion of his work include the University of Kent, Wesleyan University and Leeds College of Music.

Collage 1 is part of a series of experiments conducted to prove the digital capabilities of tone expansion in a single acoustic instrument. In these particular piece, the composer recorded an original performance of The Great Gate of Kiev (Pictures of an exhibition, Modest Mussorsgky) in the version for solo guitar, and then reinvented the recording by de-­constructing the piece as a collage, using different and complex kinds of digital audio processes to create a entirely different work, expanding the usual guitar timber into deep and rich atmospheres that uses the entire range of frequencies.

Jerod Sommerfeldt’s music focuses on the creation of algorithmic and stochastic processes, utilizing the results for both fixed and real-time composition and improvisation. His sound world explores digital audio artifacts and the destruction of technology, resulting in work that questions the dichotomy between the intended and unintentional. An active performer as both soloist and collaborator in interactive digital music and live video, he currently serves as Assistant Professor of Electronic Music Composition and Theory at the State University of New York at Potsdam Crane School of Music, and as director of the SUNY-Potsdam Electronic Music Studios (PoEMS).

A Wondrous Number: The wondrous number algorithm - outlined by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach - has a simple set of rules: A number is chosen at random and "if it is odd, we triple it and add 1. If it is even, we take half of it." The process produces a beautifully cascading series of numbers that both increase and decrease.

Setting this into RTcmix produced strings of numbers to determine various musical parameters: Lengths (in seconds) of sections, formal layout, frequencies, amplitudes, and other intrinsic elements of signal processing were all derived, creating a glitchy, biting, and intensely delicate sound world.

Mitchell Herrmann is a student currently attending Oberlin College and Conservatory, majoring in Music Technology and Cinema Studies. His work has explored the intersections between experimental film and electroacoustic music, with a focus on combining influences from digital animation and acousmatic sound. He currently studies composition with Peter Swendsen, and film with Geoff Pingree.

Kettledrum Organ was conceived of as a musical translation of Paul Klee’s 1930 cubist painting of the same name. The piece explores the physical causality of musical sound, deconstructing the timbral envelopes inherent in instruments such as the organ, marimba, and vibraphone to create a series of transformed gestures combining characteristics from each of the source sounds.

Keith Patchel: Composer Producer Recording Artist. 2010 Composer for Emmy nominated HBO documentary ""Finishing Heaven"" Winner Best Composer 2011 Manhattan Film Festival for "Crumble" Winner Best Composer 2010 New York International Film Festival for "Crumble"

Ophelia's Dream: Synthesis and Sample Processing are combined in this musical rendering of Ophelia's descent in madness in Act 4 of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Betrayal and grief are described in polyphonic narration, structured in 5 phrases, which waver between intelligibility and sonic metaphor.

As Speak Onion, Dan Abatemarco treads on, then completely explodes, the line between producer and noisician. He spews seething noise, giant deformed beats and absolutely wrong atmospheres in fits and starts until nothing sounds like what it sounds like anymore. Breakbeats and basslines enter innocently but end up processed beyond recognition and drowning in feedback. Synth sounds are stretched, manipulated, and left ruined as chilling shrieks. The resulting sonic abomination slips between the dimensions of experimentalism, harsh noise, and beat-bashed breakcore. Dancefloor? Maybe. Slaughterhouse floor? Yes, definitely.

Bruce Drummond (bruzed) is an artist and musician based in NYC, currently developing software at Potion. He works with a variety of different tools and programming languages to create engaging sensory experiences. He has also taught as Part-Time Faculty at the MFA D+T program at Parsons the New School for Design. He has done live audio/visual performances with Analogue Transit, Speak Onion, and exhibited his work at Parsons, MIT and UCLA.