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work by Karen Gallagher

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New drawings and works in print by Bay Area artist Karen Gallagher confuse written comprehension by altering the structure of text and its collapsing dissolve into pattern; reemerging at the threshold where pattern begins to describe form itself. While fashioning text type into formed towers and reinventing monotonous tapestries as discolorations, the line and the written word become obscured by breaking the boundary of presentation; the original, barely clear explanation is left hidden and indecipherable.

Provocative multi-media duo Growing creates a quadraphonic installation with strategically placed amplifiers and visual projections. Otis Hart described the nature of the band’s music in Dusted: “Reach for an initial word, a label – say Doom Metal – then watch, as the demonic guitars slowly morph into demonstrative bliss. Drone may come a bit closer to the truth, but only slightly, as silence plays an equally significant role in the proceedings. Alas, Growing’s anomalous sounds dwell in perpetual nigh-fidelity, permeating the gaps between equalizer settings with evasive intent, frustrating any attempt at optimization, and therefore, classification.” With Tom Carter (Charalambides), Noel Von Harmonson (solo analogue assault from Comets on Fire’s echoplex destroyer), and Patrick Mullins.

ETTRICK
San Francisco’s Ettrick is a self-destructive free jazz/black metal assault featuring two multi-instrumentalists rotating through every permutation of their drum and sax duo. In their brutal free improvisations, Jacob Felix Heule and Jay Korber explore the extreme sounds that can be wrenched from their instruments through brute force, screaming through saxophones, throwing drums and other such impolite extended techniques. The doubled instrumentation provides a situation to explore playing contrasting and complimentary styles on like instruments.

SWORD & SANDALS
from the reeds from the traps this is the sound of …………….

WOMAN’S WORTH
Collapsing the boundries between punk and freedom jazz, San Francisco’s saxophone/trumpet/drums trio Woman’s Worth performs dense yet melodic improvised outbursts with a strong focus on dynamics and forms while disregarding the notions of harmonic structure and time-keeping resulting in a fractious performance more akin to Assuck & EPMD than stuffy academic theaters. Woman’s Worth loves music.

ALEE KARIM
Evocations of swampy resonance and psychotropic mappings…