William Hooker
William Hooker is one of New York’s most important band leaders, an avant-garde drummer and poet who has been performing with various cutting-edge ensembles, bridging the gap between the jazz of the past and the possibilities of the future and taking jazz composition to new levels for over 25 years. He has led bands which included David Murray and David S. Ware, has toured and recorded extensively with Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and has worked with artists as diverse as Christian Marclay, DJ Olive and Jim O’Rourke. He has released records on Silkheart, Homestead, RGI, Table of the Elements and Knitting Factory Works.
Highly regarded in both the alternative rock and avant-garde jazz circles, Hooker has always placed himself beyond catagory, creating sounds and making music which makes quick work of the earth-bound semantics used to describe it. A product of New York’s loft scene, he has recently done live scores to films of avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. Hooker’s latest recordings are Black Mask; Complexity 2 and The Gift all available at finer record stores. A collection of Hooker’s poetry and images, as well as interviews and discography, can be found at
www.williamhooker.com.
Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay is a New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, he studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York. As performer and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique “theater of found sound.” Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsh, Christian Wolff, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth among many others. His sculptures and video installations display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Tim Barnes (b. 1967) is a Sound designer, percussionist, composer, archivist, and record label operator living in New York City. His gesturalistic drumming style reaches for the pause in music through textural possibilities, as well as pointillist punctuations. He has performed solo and group works in Japan and in the U.S. with such visionaries as Jim O’Rourke, Ikue Mori, Toshimaru Nakamura, Nagisa Nite, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, and Neil Michael Hagerty (to name a few). Since 1998, Tim’s record label, Quakebasket, has released records by Angus MacLise, Minamo, On Fillmore, Michael Schumacher, and Glenn Kotche. His sound design work has been heard around the world in television commercials, and in the film Hearts In Atlantis. In January of 2002, Tim Barnes started the year off by presenting 4 of his first conceptual compositons in a concert at TONIC in NYC (a recording of these compositions will be released in May on Quakebasket).
Other recent projects include drumming for Tzadik recording artist Raz Mesinai, releasing a duo cd of percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and the late bassist Peter Kowald, releasing a trio cd of Marina Rosenfeld, Toshio Kajiwara, and Barnes himself, recording music for both the Avant and Erstwhile record labels, and editing/mastering archival recordings of Henry Flynt and the “American Avant-Garde’s best kept secret”, Christopher Tree. Time Out magazine has called Tim “the missing piece of the New York avant-garde puzzle.”