My partner guitarist-composer Julian Mock and I will be on a multi-state book and music tour during the month of April. We will be performing/reading at small venues, salons, and house concerts in New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, and California, sometimes separately and sometimes together. Please check Julian's blog for the latest schedule.
Alyce Santoro is a conceptual and social/environmental practice artist, activist, and writer with a foundation in marine biology and scientific illustration. Best known as the inventor of sonic fabric, an audible textile woven from recorded audiocassette tape, Santoro refers to her multimedia works as philosoprops – devices used to demonstrate a concept or spark a dialog. Alarmed by what she sees as the direct relationship between the detached mindset cultivated in scientific research (and widely adopted by Western culture) and the destructive propensity of the technology that results from it, her works often offer subtle and deceivingly playful critiques of the foibles of dualistic thinking. Santoro's visual and sound pieces have appeared in over 50 exhibitions around the world related to smart textiles and fashion, innovative musical scores, and social action and ecology. A regular contributor to Truth-out.org and the author of Philosoprops: A Unified Field Guide, her written works often focus on the notion that by shifting some common assumptions about "the way things are" we can create a more just, healthy, and peaceful world. http://www.alycesantoro.com
Born into a musical family, Julian Mock is a perpetual student of the guitar as an instrument as well as the sounds it can produce. Having played in classical, jazz, and improvisational ensembles on both electric and acoustic instruments, designing listenable études for practicing difficult maneuvers led him, somewhat inadvertently, to create new compositions for solo guitar. Exploring old and new techniques, tonalities, and rhythms, and combining textures and ideas from different eras and places, Mock creates intricate, innovative, polyphonic mosaics of sonic possibilities. Sound Travels, Mock's 2002 album of solo compositions, was recorded on an acoustic steel stringed guitar. For the works on Ecstatic Mechanism, released in late 2013, he returned to his first instrument: the nylon stringed guitar. The compositions draw inspiration from Mock's diverse musical background, weaving together elements of dissonance and melody, tradition and experimentation, ranging from minimal to complex in rhythm and texture. http://www.julianmock.com
