About us
This group is for people who appreciate music and other forms of art beyond the mainstream, with a particular focus on the avant-garde or otherwise odd. Free Jazz, Musique Concrete, Atonality, Noise Music, Outsider Art, Surrealism, Dada, Junk Art, ...you name it! Not all events will necessarily be "weird", but simply off the beaten mainstream path.
This is intended to be an oasis from crass commercial banalities.
I'll post events that interest me, but I am also interested in hearing from artists, musicians, and other creative types about their events that I can share with members. Post your events and ideas in the "Discussions" section. I want this group to also be a vehicle that helps support artists and organizations that are doing interesting creative work.
The only requests are that we keep things friendly and civilized. MAGA not welcome.
Upcoming events
6
MONDAY EVENING CONCERTS: MORTON FELDMAN "ROTHKO CHAPEL"
Zipper Concert Hall, 200 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA, Los Angeles, CA, USDate: MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2026 | 8 PM
Venue: ZIPPER HALL at the COLBURN SCHOOL
200 S GRAND AVE, LOS ANGELES, CA 90012Tickets: $41.50 G/A
https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/rothko-chapel-1-1PROGRAM
Morton FELDMAN – Something Wild in the City (1960)
JOSQUIN des Prez – Magnus es tu domine (1504)
Morton FELDMAN – King of Denmark (1965)
JOSQUIN des Prez – Nymphe des Bois (1497)
Morton FELDMAN – Something Wild (reprise) (1960)::: intermission :::
Morton FELDMAN – Rothko Chapel (1971)PERFORMERS
ECHOI soloists:
Jan WILLIAMS, conductor
Laurel IRENE, soprano (of Hex Ensemble)
Amy WILLIAMS, celesta
Andrew McINTOSH, viola
Jonathan HEPFER, percussion
David HARRIS, choir directorABOUT THE PROJECT
“I feel that I listen to my sounds, and I do what they tell me, but not what I could tell them. Because I owe my life to these sounds. Right? They gave me a life.” (Morton Feldman)“I was very close with Rothko in the last years of his life, and he was working on the Rothko Chapel…and I saw those pictures live…and he had this fantastic studio […] And he would always say, all the time, it was actually his song: ‘Is it there? Is it there? I think it’s there.’ That’s what happens when you work abstractly…You gotta pray.” (Morton Feldman)
Celebrating the centenary of Morton Feldman, one of the giants of twentieth-century music, Monday Evening Concerts presents his 1971 magnum opus, Rothko Chapel. A figure whose opinions and physical presence were famously larger than life, Feldman created music of extraordinary quietude and sublime beauty, shaped in dialogue with an extraordinary circle of artists, writers, and musicians that included Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, Samuel Beckett, and John Cage. MEC’s resident ensemble ECHOI performs Rothko Chapel under the direction of Jan Williams, Feldman’s close collaborator at SUNY Buffalo, in a program that places the work alongside rarely heard early compositions by Feldman and choral music by the Renaissance master Josquin des Prez, a composer to whom Feldman returned frequently in conversation.
ARTIST BIOS & MORE: https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/rothko-chapel-1-1
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3 attendees
FREE! PIANO SPHERES - CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE
619 N Western Ave, 619 N Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004, USA, Los Angeles, CA, USFREE CONCERT, BUT YOU MUST RSVP. READ INSTRUCTIONS BELOW. SUGGEST YOU RSVP ASAP!
Date: October 7 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Possible dinner before TBD
Venue: The Brick temporary annex
619 N. Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004 + Google Map
Phone (323) 848-4140Tickets: Free, but you must RSVP here: https://pianospheres.org/tickets/
I suggest you do this ASAP!“GRADUALLY MY ARPEGGIOS BEGAN TO BECOME STRUMMMMMSSSSS AND STRUMMMMINGGGGSSSS”
Charlemagne Palestine returns to Los Angeles for a rare performance of his monumental Strumming Music, which he has been developing since the early 1970s and describes as an approach and technique that is always different. “It is not a ‘composition’ as such” he says, “it is an evolutionary liquid sound continuum process that I have presented hundredsss of versions that I have performed over the last 50+ years.”NOTE:
Piano Spheres is pleased to partner with The Brick to offer this season kickoff as a free concert.
Tickets required, limit 2 per patron.
Ticket holders must be present 30 minutes before start time, or seating is not guaranteed.
Please make careful note of venue address: The Brick temporary annex – 619 N. Western Ave, LA CA 90004Born in 1947, Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine, known as Charlemagne Palestine, came from a Russian Jewish family who left Odessa and Minsk at the dawn of the twentieth century to settle in Brooklyn, New York. He began his musical training singing traditional synagogue musics. From the age of 7 until 14, he was a member of the Stanley Sapir traditional chassidic music choir singing in synagogues all over the east coast of America. Later he enrolled at the High School of Music and Arts in upper Manhattan and studied voice, accordion, piano, drawing, painting and sculpture, and immediately developed an interest in the composers who were creating sounds using recording tape techniques and generating sounds by electronic music machines as well as non-western musics from all over the world that he discovered listening to disks from the Folkways label founded by Moses Asch. In 1963, he became the bell ringer at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York City, located next to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Every day for six years, he played traditional Protestant hymns as well as inventing an experimental sound approach using the large resonant church bells as his sound source and devised a soap opera sequence of hundreds of variations of complex bell sonorities every day at 5pm for several years. His performances resonated throughout the church’s surroundings and attracted the attention of thousands passersby each afternoon, including artists, choreographers and composers like Alwin Nikolais, Len Lye, Moondog, John Cage, Tony Conrad, and Ingram Marshall.
He took advantage of the geographical proximity to MoMA to become a regular visitor of the museum and explore all the museum’s collections, where he discovered French Impressionists and American Abstract Expressionist painters who were a revelation and inspiration to him. The color explorations of Monet, Seurat, Rothko, Albers, Still and others became one of the catalysts for his own aesthetic quest. He imagined inventing a continuous sound form that paralleled the visual artists canvases and structures and imagined created sound canvases and structures that continued to exist nonstop and always present as visual art works were.
During this period, he associated with numerous figures of the artistic avant-garde and counterculture: Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Anger, Richard Serra, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, Gordon Matta Clark, Philip Glass, Jean Dupuy, La Monte Young, Sol LeWitt, Terry Riley, and many others.
Following a meeting with electronic music composer Morton Subotnick at his New York University electronic music studio in 1967 he began to compose numerous electronic sound works using continuous synthesized sounds made with a Buchla 2000 electronic music synthesizer that was the sound source for Subotnick’s electronic music studio. In 1968-69, he deepened his knowledge of electronic synthesizers and especially the changing timbre spectrum possible with multiple sound oscillators and electronic filters at night at this NYU music studio. There he met other experimenters, Eliane Radigue, Rhys Chatham, Serge Tcherepnin, Maryanne Amacher, Ingram Marshall, and many others. In 1969, at Subotnick’s invitation, he and Ingram Marshall moved to Los Angeles, California, and began experimenting and teaching at CalArts, where he discovered large pipe organs in downtown Los Angeles and a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano with an extra lower octave in the enormous concrete ultra resonant cube of the new Cal Arts building in Valencia that he named The Temple but that would eventually become the celebrated Modular Theatre of Cal Arts Valencia. From 1971 he began creating long continuous works for piano and organ that he named “Spectral Continuums,” often lasting as long as five hours for the piano and 48 hour works for church organs. Simultaneously, he worked on a synthesizer prototype with Don Buchla and Serge Tcherepnin and developed with them a synthesizer he called The Spectral Continuum Drone Machine.Around this time, he met the dancer Simone Forti, with whom he began a sound and movement ritualistic collaboration that they called Illuminations. Their first performance in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1971 was greatly appreciated by the then large avant-garde group of artists, dancers, and musicians from Los Angeles and the many who had now been imported from all over the art world as members of the faculty of the new California Institute of the Arts and especially Alan Kaprow the dean of arts then and convinced them to continue and develop this Illuminations ritual performance form. From then on for nearly 50 years Simone and Charlemagne were invited worldwide to present Illuminations.
Charlemagne Palestine was also interested in Javanese and Balinese gamelan. He traveled to Indonesia in 1971 with Ingram Marshall to study this music. He was also introduced to Hindustani music by Pandit Pran Nath.
A champion of sonic continuum, drone, and trance, Charlemagne Palestine is particularly renowned for his strumming technique, a term that can be translated as “struck music.” Derived from flamenco and the chime technique, strumming is based on repetition and the physicality of playing, but also on the idea that the instrument has its own voice and can, depending on how it is played, produce a series of harmonics that seem to emerge spontaneously. Thus, in his works (primarily improvised), Palestine plays on resonance and the layering of sounds to sculpt sonic masses in a perpetual quest for the “golden sound.” By extension, during his concerts, he seeks to engage in a dialogue with the performance space by saturating the available sonic space in such a way as to make it vibrate.
Marked by spirituality, tradition and shamanism, his performances are ritualized: he drinks cognac, smokes Indonesian clove cigarettes, and places a multitude of teddy bears (his “deities”), scarves and other fabrics on the concert venue and on the instrument.
Although associated with the minimalist music movement, he rejects this label in favor of “maximalist,” a term which, according to him, allows one to set no limits.Charlemagne Palestine was also a video artist pioneer (Body Music series, 1973-74, Island Song, 1976, and Ritual in the Emptiness, 2004) creating an audio visual form that became classics of early video art performance works and also invented and developed a multimedia form of installations merging his sounds, rituals and the inclusion of the stuffed animal toy as a modern shamanic divinity totem and created Gesamtkunstwerks (total art works) for MoMA NYC, 356 Mission in LA, The Kunsthalle Vienna, The Museum of Art and History in Paris, Documenta Kassel Germany and many other installation venues all over Europe and the US.. He deploys his teeming universe of stuffed animals and sacredly charged rags in site-specific installations, often monumental in scale. He began as an artist of the Sonnabend Gallery in NYC in the early seventies and then became represented by the Toselli Gallery Milano, Oppenheim Gallery Cologne, Lara Vincy Gallery Paris, and most recently by the Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York City. Though born in Brooklyn, for years he lived in Soho, Tribeca, and Dumbo in NYC while settling from time to time in Paris, Lyon, Rotterdam, Geneva, and now has lived in Brussels, Belgium since 1999.
4 attendees
ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL - LUCIAN BAN & MATT MANERI
2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057, USA, Los Angeles, CA, USI've seen these two play and have one of their albums. Recommended!
Date: Monday, October 12, 7:30
Venue: 2220 Arts+Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
(213) 277-1987
Free parking in the church lot across the streetTickets: $16.85
Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri Transylvanian Dance - a multimedia performance |Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri Transylvanian Dance – a multimedia performance
Video: https://youtu.be/3G7orY9teKk?si=YohMOI54s4BWJpAL
7:30pm – Jazz and Creativity, The Secret Codes Embedded in Béla Bartók Field Recordings.
Free PresentationLucian and Mat will talk about this multimedia project and play audio from Bartók original wax cylinder recordings from the early 20th century. This portion of the program is free to attend.
8:30pm – Transylvanian Dance
In this multimedia performance, Transylvanian Dance invites audiences into Bartók’s remarkable journey across the villages of Transylvania while revealing the timeless emotional power of the music he preserved.Named one of the Best Albums of 2024 by El País, All About Jazz, and PostGenre, Transylvanian Dance is an immersive concert experience inspired by Béla Bartók’s legendary field recordings from Transylvania.
Drawing on their acclaimed ECM Records release, Transylvanian Dance, pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri transform the century-old folk songs collected by Bartók into living contemporary music through improvisation, unfolding alongside video projections of rare archival film footage, Bartók’s own photographs, handwritten manuscripts and excerpts from the original Edison wax-cylinder recordings.
More than a concert, Transylvanian Dance invites audiences into Bartók’s remarkable journey across the villages of Transylvania while revealing the timeless emotional power of the music he preserved.Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri performance and presentation are part of Retracing Bartók – Reimagining the Béla Bartók Field Recordings project supported by The Tulipán Foundation.
Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri
Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri are internationally recognized for their unique musical partnership, combining Transylvanian folk music, jazz improvisation, 20th-century European classical traditions, and contemporary chamber music. They first collaborated in 2009 on Enesco Re-Imagined, a celebrated reimagining of the music of Romanian composer George Enescu that received multiple Best Album of the Year honors and international acclaim. Their partnership has since produced a series of acclaimed recordings—including ECM’s Transylvanian Concert and Transylvanian Dance, Transylvanian Folk Songs, Oedipe Redux, and Cantica Profana—earning worldwide recognition for revealing unexpected connections between folk traditions, jazz, and contemporary creative music. The Guardian praised their music for its “original voice and unorthodox beauty,” while the Financial Times wrote that they “compress folkloric bacchanals, atonal mysteries and the unmistakable cadences of the blues into a singular aesthetic.”> “Romanian folk meets Brooklyn jazz”ll quote here”
> — Financial Times> “It’s not quite folk music. It’s not quite Western classical music. It’s not quite jazz. Ultimately, it is human music, and that is what makes it so beautiful”
> — PostGenre> “This beautiful album is made up of arrangements of various folk songs collected by Béla Bartók in Transylvania, performed with enormous complicity and respect by the duo, who imprint their personality on old Romanian folklore and bring it into the 21st century without removing its essence. The result is magical.”
> — El Pais5 attendees
MOVIE: CHRISTIANE F.
The Frida Cinema, 305 E 4th St, Santa Ana, CA, USDate & Time: Tuesday, Nov. 24, 8:00
Dinner TBD 6:30Venue: Frida Cinema
305 E 4th St #100, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Phone: (714) 285-9422Tickets $13.00
https://thefridacinema.org/purchase/1971984/Trailer https://youtu.be/PQmWI5UIPHs?si=iQc_DoYrJtzphEfK
Director: Uli Edel Run Time: 131 min. Rating: R Release Year: 1981 Language: German
Starring: David Bowie, Jens Kuphal, Natja Brunckhorst, Rainer Woelk, Thomas Haustein
Plunging into the 1970s Berlin underground, this unforgettable portrait stands as one of the most harrowing films ever made about drug addiction. Based on the true story of Christiane Felscherinow, whose shocking memoir made her the face of a generation of troubled German youth, this bracing dramatization follows the alienated thirteen-year-old Christiane (Natja Brunckhorst) as she goes from popping pills to shooting heroin amid West Berlin’s infamous club scene. An instant cult sensation on account of its authentically grimy location shooting and electrifying soundtrack by David Bowie, Christiane F. (original title: Christiane F.: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo) remains a haunting vision of a young life in free fall.
As part of our Unsung 80’s Soundtracks series, we will be presenting Janus Films’ new 4K digital restoration, approved by director Uli Edel, featuring a new 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The soundtrack album is essentially a David Bowie compilation created around the film, rather than a conventional original film score. Bowie also recorded the German-language version of “Heroes,” “Helden,” specifically for the German market/film connection. Bowie also appears as himself in concert footage, and his music is deeply woven into the film’s atmosphere and Christiane’s obsession with him.
This film contains mature themes and intense subject matter that may be triggering for some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.
4 attendees
Past events
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