Woody Sullender is a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz and drones. The performance takes place in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL WAVE(length)s concert series at New York’s historic St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan.
Woody Sullender: Experimental Banjo
WAVE(length)s ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Sunday, July 3, 2011, 8pm (together with TRANSIT)
Location:
THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL
St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Fulton St.
New York
Woody Sullender is a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz and drones. The performance takes place in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL WAVE(length)s concert series at New York’s historic St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan.
Woody Sullender: www.deadceo.com
Woody Sullender is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Over the past decade, Sullender has emerged as a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz, etc..
With technical advising from STEIM, Sullender has been developing an electro-acoustic banjo. Various parameters of computer synthesis and processing algorithms are controlled by sensors on the instrument. The computer-based audio is output to a transducer within the banjo (basically turning the banjo itself into a speaker). More recent work focuses on “erasing” existing known audio, by removing most of the frequencies from a recording via band-pass filters. This has manifested in a range of media from a lathe-cut record of an erased “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to an FM broadcast of erased radio stations. Previously, he has worked with pioneering electronic composers such as Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher (incorporating his banjo recordings into Amacher’s “TEO! A sonic sculpture” which won the Golden Nica prize at the 2005 Ars Electronica festival). Among other activites, he is occasionally heard DJing on WFMU.