Elastro: Roger Clark Miller, Joy Guidry, Mountain Laurel

The Elastro series is incredibly excited to host the legendary Roger Clark Miller to present a solo electric guitar ensemble performance, a solo bassoon/electronics set from Joy Guidry, and an opening set from Mountain Laurel.

For this concert, Miller will be performing compositions from his newest album on Cuneiform Records "Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble". He currently uses a customized stratocaster 6-string electric guitar and three lap-steel guitars on stands, two of them loaded with alligator clips or bolts, the other tuned to a post-Glenn Branca unison E. Using bass and tenor guitar strings, this melts his previous prepared piano ideas into more portable guitars, resulting in percussive grooves and bass-lines. Combining advanced looping technology with new stomp- boxes, many in stereo, he truly creates a "solo ensemble" sound.

To organize the compositions, he turned to his "Dream Interpretation" technique. By tightly following and translating a specific dream into music, a new type of structure was available: organic and personal, yet universal. Realizing the essentially surrealistic/ psychedelic nature of dreams, the type of guitar sounds he was interested in now had an appropriate context.

On "Curiosity" he also revisited his "Natural Phenomena" composing technique, in this case using five photographs taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover to structure the music of a longer composition. Space Music indeed.

Joy Guidry’s Five Prayers, is an intuitive convergence of sound, spirit and radical self-expression. A celebrated voice in experimental and avant-garde music spaces, Guidry pushes sonic boundaries rooted in Black sonic traditions. With this new album, they shift away from free jazz and into a meditative, ambient realm. In the live performance, Guidry blends bassoon with low rumbling synths, warm electronic sounds and poetry that reflect the artist’s lived experience as a Black trans woman from the South.

Grace Papineau-Couture (Mountain Laurel) is a Canadian electro-acoustic sound artist working with low-tech and found objects as instruments. Inspired by the human tendency to mythologize the material world and environmental disaster, Grace creates haunting sonic meditations using tape loops and uncanny instruments. Her sound work exalts low fidelity as a method of listening that allows us to listen beyond what is being heard.

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