Event

JACK String Quartet: The Complete Xenakis Quartets

The JACK Quartet, praised for its "powerhouse playing" by the Chicago Sun-Times, is pleased to present its first in a series of exciting concerts at (Le) Poisson Rouge on August 9th. The program will feature two of Iannis Xenakis monumental string quartets, ST/4, 1-080262 and Tetora. (The remaining two quartets will be programmed at a later date.) ST/4 hails from a series of groundbreaking works in which Xenakis employed stochastic processes and the aid of a computer to determine nearly every aspect of tone production. This is not a work of personal expression, but of contention with chaotic forces and with limited definitions of what music can and should be. On the other hand, Tetora relies heavily on the expressive impact of block harmonic chords with nary an extended technique to be heard. The program will also feature one of Joan Towers powerful quartets and the premiere of dopamine by New York composer Jeff Myers.

Holoscene is an avant-garde instrumental band based in Toronto, Canada. Their sound combines orchestral-rock percussion, distorted bass guitar and open-tuned guitars to form pieces of sequentially structured wordless music. Themes in their music revolve around purposeful ambiguity, the natural world and the numinous. Formed in 2006 the band developed their sound during the making of their first EP "Nothing Is The End Of Everything" (currently available in North America and scheduled for release in Europe in 2008). Straddling an area of music most commonly known as "post-rock" due to its instrumental nature, Holoscene are hard to pin down to any one specific genre and have had their sound described as cinematic, ambient, industrial, post-metal, and orchestral-rock. The British writer Warren Ellis has described their music as "transcendental etudes", whilst the band members themselves refuse to rule anything out.