Jason Kahn
Born 1960 in New York, Jason Kahn is a artist, musician and writer. He lives and works in Zürich.
His work with electronics involves chaotic feedback systems and placing his body in the circuit flow. Grabbing open leads with the hands makes and breaks circuits, causing the synthesizer to overload or momentarily collapse. Various contact microphones, electromagnetic inductors and the synthesizer’s own output via a mixing board are used to modulate the parameters of the synthesizer. This results in a very dynamic system, often difficult to control, but allowing great expressivity—much like any acoustic instrument, but electronic.
Live radio captures during the concert and recordings made beforehand in the performance space and its environs provide further working material for each concert. In the end, these performances are site-specific works, improvising with the space at hand, both in the sense of its physicality and the sounds found there. Every performance is different, not only because the music is improvised but also because the source material used pertains directly to each space being played in.
https://jasonkahn.bandcamp.com
Ben Bennett is a Philadelphia-based percussionist. He typically plays a compact pile of self-made drums, stretched membranes, and other objects which are continually rearranged in the course of playing, and sounded with techniques of the hit, rub, and blow varieties. A branching path of musical de-materialization has led to other forms of performance, including self-vitiating monologues, and the long and repetitive YouTube series, Sitting and Smiling and Walking and Talking. His work tends toward themes of pointlessness, paradox, and stupidity.
Josef Kaplan is the author of Loser, recently out on Make Now Books. His other books include Poem Without Suffering; All Nightmare: Introductions, 2011-2012; Kill List; and Democracy Is Not for the People. He lives in Philadelphia.
