Steerage – Barry Chabala and A.F. Jones
A.F. Jones (electronics/guitar, Maryland)
Barry Chabala (guitar, New Jersey)
+Ethan Tripp
+Ian M. Fraser
+Jesse Kudler

A night of improvised music from near and far, featuring the Philadelphia debut of Steerage, the steely drone duo of Jones and Chabala, along with a trio set of locals and a quintet of everyone.

Barry Chabala (guitarist) (Born, 1961 Passaic, NJ) Guitarist/improviser who’s playing is informed as much by the history of blues, r&b, rock as it is by Cage and Feldman. Over the past several years, Barry has performed and/or recorded extensively the works of Wandelweiser composers Michael Pisaro and Antoine Beuger among others, and has released recordings on several labels, including Erstwhile, Winds Measure, Copy For Your Records, Pisaro’s Gravity Wave, and his own Roeba Records. His latest release is ‘unbalanced in (unbalanced out)’ on the Another Timbre label which features Toshimaru Nakamura, Bonnie Jones, Gabriel Paiuk, Tisha Mukarji & Louisa Martin alongside Barry’s acoustic guitar.

A.F. Jones (Dallas, TX, 1971) is an underwater acoustician and audio engineer. Years of extended exposure to and interaction with the undersea soundscape and the critical, professional analysis of that environment greatly influenced his concepts of music. This career has found translation to growing work as a sound artist and composer. His primary instrumentation are stringed instruments and analog devices, both hand-crafted and found. His most recent contribution to experimental music is Nick Hennies’ soon-to-be-released “Work”, on Quakebasket Records.”

Ian M. Fraser is a computer musician working in free improvisation and algorithmic based composition. His primary focus is generative structures, pseudo-artificial intelligence, and stochastic processes. With Reed Evan Rosenberg, he works with the continual development of Keroaän, a musical Artificial Intelligence designed to perform without any human intervention what-so-ever. In live performance they combine live generative works with real-time visualizations utilizing high intensity strobe lights and lasers.

Jesse Kudler improvises on guitar, electronics, radios, and tapes and makes solo performance pieces and the occasional sound installation. Kudler lives in Philadelphia. Current and past projects include: live music with film; sound installation; a duo with Chandan Narayan; a duo with Ian Fraser; HZL, an environmental electronics duo with Tim Albro; duos with Chris Cogburn and Christian Weber; Benito Cereno (with Dustin Hurt, Chandan Narayan, Tim Albro, and Ian Fraser); Tweeter, a treble-intensive noise trio with Alex Nagle and Eli Litwin; and various ad hoc groupings. Kudler is the co-founder and co-Director (with Ian Fraser) of the Philadelphia Sound Forum.

Ethan Tripp is an electro-acoustic improvisor whose work focuses on exploration of the materials of every-day sounds and silence. The principal devices for sound production are simple objects like radios and speakers, accompanied by junk like bicycle spokes and bits of discarded metal. Like Free Improvisation with no technique, Sound Art with no art, and playing sounds largely unwelcome in most areas of music, he seeks to formulate an experience out of the trash of the sonic world, the tension of expectation, and the certainty of unfolding time.

Ethan has been playing music in various forms since high school. After college, lost in the world of small apartments -where it’s hard to play typical “band” instruments- and bored with much of the music of his youth, he discovered the world of hacking noise out of second-hand children’s toys. With low-fidelity, limitless sounds and dirt cheap accessibility, this love-affair with the sounds of the discarded continues to evolve.

Links to music and videos may be found on the main Steerage page.