Moogfest presents “Human and the Machine” featuring Michael Stipe (audio/visual work), Kishi Bashi, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Author & Punisher to close a2ru conference

The closing event of the 2018 a2ru national conference at the University of Georgia is an evening of performance and art curated by Moogfest with the theme “Human and the Machine.” The event takes place Nov. 3 at the Georgia Theatre, 215 N. Lumpkin St. in downtown Athens, beginning at 8 p.m. Tickets are free but limited, and priority admission will be offered to registered conference attendees. Follow the link to reserve tickets in advance.

The evening will feature musicians working with new performance technologies and inventions, modular synth performances, spatial sound compositions and more – all exploring the relationship between human and machine.

An audio/visual work by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, originally created for Moogfest in 2017 and never before shown in Athens, will be featured in the event. The piece, titled “Jeremy Dance,” combines Stipe’s original music and video of the late Athens artist Jeremy Ayers.

Music performances will include Author & Punisher, the one-man industrial metal project of mechanical engineer Tristan Shone, Lauren Sarah Hayes, a Scottish musician and sound artist who builds and performs with hybrid analog/digital instruments, Deantoni Parks, an American new wave/avant-garde/experimental drummer, songwriter, film director, actor and record producer, and a loop battle between acclaimed violinist/multi-instrumentalist Kishi Bashi and banjo innovator Tall Tall Trees.

Shone designs and constructs what The New Yorker has called “frightening homemade machines that seem at once futuristic and medieval,” creating a unique brand of doom metal that is both otherworldly and organic; colossal and intimate. Author & Punisher’s new album, Beastland, will be released in October 2018 by Relapse Records.

Hayes is on the faculty of the School of Arts Media and Engineering at Arizona State University and is an associate of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Her often-improvised experimental music combines pop, techno, and noise and, according to her website, “she has developed and honed a deliberately challenging and unpredictable performance system that explores the relationships between bodies, sound, environments, and technology.”

Parks is the founder, producer and drummer of the New York band KUDU, and one-half of the writing duo Dark Angels with producer and keyboardist Nick Kasper, also a member of KUDU.

Kishi Bashi is a singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter who studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music before becoming a highly in-demand violinist. He released his solo debut, 151A, in 2012, and has subsequently issued two live albums and two studio albums. His current project is Omoiyari, a “songfilm” exploring the history and legacy of Japanese incarceration in the United States during World War II. He has frequently collaborated with Tall Tall Trees, a songwriter and experimental musician whose last album, Freedays, was conceived and recorded in the mountains of North Georgia.

Also featured will be Éric Marty’s “Loci,” an immersive spatial audio installation integrating field audio, simulated biology, and real-time human influence in one complex system. Marty is a composer, media artist, and data visualization professional and researcher in the Odum School of Ecology at UGA.

Other performers include Sarah Belle Reid, Ultrabillions, Triple X Snaxxx, and Charlotte Von Kotze.

Moogfest began in 2004 as a concert in tribute to electronic music pioneer Robert Moog, inventor of the revolutionary line of Moog synthesizers. It has evolved into a large annual electronic music festival and tech conference in Durham, NC that serves as an international platform for futurist innovation and exchange of ideas in technology, engineering, and theory in the arts.

The 2018 a2ru conference is affiliated with the Spotlight on the Arts festival at UGA.