CON-MYTHOLOGY #183
Doors: 19:30 / Start time: 20:00
Entrance 7-10 euro (based on your offer)
An evening of audio and video celebrating Schnitzler’s life and work
Gen Ken Montgomery, Wolfgang Seidel, Chris Penalosa and Doron Sadja
Gen Ken Montgomery is a New York-based artist whose involvement in the cassette-culture and mail-art movements of the late seventies led to the creation of the label Generations Unlimited in 1987 and Generator Sound Art Gallery in 1989. Generations Unlimited was a collaborative project with Conrad Schnitzler and David Prescott. Generator’s wide scope and novel approach toward sound made it a vector-point for many artists around the world. Generations Unlimited was re-launched in 2014 at MoMA PS1 in New York with Chris Penalosa and Sean Julian. After working with Schnitzler in Berlin in the eighties Montgomery became a performer and CONductor of Schnitzler's multi-speaker Cassette CONcerts. Montgomery performed Schnitzler's Cassette CONerts weekly at Generator in total darkness playing cassette sent through the post from Berlin. Montgomery also composes octophonic compositions using amplified appliances, field recordings, voice and electronic instruments. Montgomery continues to create immersive listening experiences in many forms.
Chris Penalosa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Queens, New York. He performs improvised modular electronics. He uses modern signal processing as an improvisational tool to sculpt sounds in real time. Penalosa has performed collaboratively and solo in New York at Microscope Gallery, MoMA PS1 Print Shop, Experimental Intermedia, Silent Barn, and Panoply Lab. Penalosa will use Conrad Schnitzler's breadth of media, smearing boundaries of Schnitzler's sculpture, recorded media, moving image, and improvised electronics.
Wolfgang Seidel, a native of Berlin, first met Conrad Schnitzler at the infamous Zodiak Free Arts Lab in 1968 and in 1969 joined Schnitzler’s improvisation ensemble Kluster - Eruption, a collaboration that would last until Schnitzler’s death in 2011. Seidel was a founding member of Ton Steine Scherben in the 1970s and played with Populäre Mechanik during the 1980s. Under the name Sequenza he played on albums with Schnitzler. Seidel has remained active in the underground Berlin scene, most recently as a member of the improvisational duo “Five Eyes” with Alfred 23 Harth whom he also first met in the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in 1968. Recordings of his improvised synthesizer collaborations with Gen Ken Montgomery will be released by Generations Unlimited in 2016. In Europe Seidel conducts Conrad’s Schnitzler’s multiple source Cassette Concerts and has organized film screenings and nights celebrating Schnitzler’s life and work.
Doron Sadja is an American artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Often working with multichannel spatialized sound, smoke machines, and high intensity lights, Sadja combines pristine electronics with lush romantic synthesizers, dense noise, and immersive light projections to create hyper-emotive sonic architecture. Sadja founded Shinkoyo Records and the West Nile performance space in Brooklyn (RIP), and currently runs the Sound Portraits lecture/listening series in Berlin.