New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival — Three nights of music as part of the first retrospective gallery exhibition of works by the improviser, experimental composer, film-maker, writer, and installation artist John Berndt :: April 15 – 30, 2009 :: Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery :: 537 Broadway, 2nd floor, New York.

April 17, 7-10 pm, free :: Opening reception and free concert. three very different collaborations between John Berndt and four legendary experimental improvisers: John Berndt and Elliot Sharp — string delirium :: John Berndt and Lukas Legetti — polymetric kaleidoscope syncopation :: John Berndt, Peter Zummo, and Katt Hernandez — paradoxical dispersal music

April 24, 7-9 pm, $6 :: A night of music by John Berndt and THUS, his 17-year long project with Neil Feather to invent a new idiom of music on original experimental instruments, with special guests: John Berndt — solo acoustic and electronic saxophone :: THUS (John Berndt and Neil Feather) — original music on original instruments :: THUS with Michael Evans (drums) and special guests

April 25, 7-9 pm, $6 :: A night of solo and orchestral music featuring SECOND NATURE, a 15-person ensemble of virtuoso improvisers directed by Berndt, dedicated to the development of a new free improvisation musical ethic and aesthetic for the large group :: John Berndt — new electronic music compositions :: Second Nature — improvised music, orchestral scale.

About John Berndt:

One of the more active experimental music performers on the East Coast for the past decade, John Berndt began his musical career by composing wildly abstract electro-acoustic and conceptual tape music in 1978 at the tender age of 11. His first compositions in this mode premiered on the radio at age 14, and by his late teens, he was active in an international cultural scene that included some of the most radical cultural activists of the 80’s and 90’s. From the beginning his work was singular, ranging over the disjoint subcultures of sound art, improvised music, industrial, musical instrument design, and language experimentation. His solo CDs are available on Stereosupremo (Italy), HereSee (Baltimore), Abstract On Black (Pittsburgh) and he has many published recordings of collaborations.

Berndt began as a composer with a distinctly “inhuman” style and severe set of conceptual preoccupations, but in an unusual development process expanded his sensibility in a variety of contradictory directions, such that his work today is so aesthetically varied as to seem the work of a number of unrelated artists. In 1991 Berndt had heard saxophonist Jack Wright, who became his saxophone teacher, and as a result began to focus on developing his abilities in spontaneous instrumental performance to a high degree. His rigorously strange aesthetic then broadened to incorporate lessons from a variety of clashing modalities: jazz, Indian and African music, and extreme modernist instrumental technique. In this transformation, he was also highly influenced by another collaborator and teacher, the philosopher Henry Flynt, whose critique of the western computational mind-set greatly enabled Berndt’s own critical path.

Berndt has always had a wide range of intensive ensemble projects, many of which are only now receiving attention outside of Baltimore. Since 1992, his duo THUS with Neil Feather has produced an entirely unique idiom of “very strange” music on an orchestra of original instruments they invent. As a part of THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN, a quartet with Jack Wright, Michael Zerang, and Bob Marsh, Berndt participated in some of the most inspired “fast” free improvised music of the 90’s. Today, he performs regularly with his groups DEATH IN THE MAZE (a post-reductionist chamber improvisation ensemble), GEODESIC GNOME (a super-group performing Berndt’s “Impossible” conceptual compositions), directs SECOND NATURE (Baltimore’s 16 performer free improvisation orchestra) and recently participated in EXPLODING GARDENS (a post-jazz composers collective with Katt Hernandez, Gordon Beeferman, and Will Redman). He is also a hired gun performer occasionally with the well known electronic group MATMOS.