About the Musicians
Bilwa is a Philadelphia-based musician, curator, producer, and visual artist. He is a member of NEXUS/foundation for today’s art, where he curates the performance series “paraphrase/NEXUS.” Bilwa is also currently co-director of Perpetual Mvmt<>Snd and a member of Mascher Space Coop. Past projects include Hoopty Heaven, an ambient dub duo whose CD Elements was released in 2001 by the Slought Foundation, and VERSIONsound, a roots/reggae/dub sound system. Bilwa is also co-founder of the Rashomon Effect Performance Project, an electronic music series turned improvisational dance and music series, inspired by the storytelling method employed in the 1950 film by Kurosawa. He has also co-produced The Floor and <opensource> music series with Perpetual Mvmt<>Snd’s Mikronesia.
Mikronesia (Michael McDermott) is a producer, composer, musician and sound artist. He has performed at theaters, clubs, parties and galleries along the U.S. East Coast as a multi-instrumentalist and laptop based performer. Mikronesia has been doing collaborative production and performance, concentrating on lending his ambient and DSP skills to artists from all musical genres. His main group, Gemini Wolf, is a seven piece electronic/chamber/rock band for which Mikronesia plays keyboards, laptop and arranges, including traditional rock instrumentation and a string trio. Mikronesia is an original member of the multi-disciplinary improvisation music / dance ensemble Perpetual Mvmt< >Snd. He has also worked with modern classical music collectives like Arts in Motion and The Philadelphia Composers Forum. In April 2007, he was part of a deep listening ensemble with Pauline Oliveros who performed at the Annenberg Center for The Performing Arts in Sound Exchange 2007. Mikronesia has released two albums with ambient label Gears of Sand. Tissue Paper Ghosts (2006), is an ethereal glitch album about the psychic remains of a car crash and Iris Or Comfortable Too (2007) is a breath taking work of minimalist piano and warm electronics.
Dan Scholnick is the resident tabla player for the contemporary kathak dance ensemble Courtyard Dancers. He is also responsible for the creation of site specific theater works in the group Kaibutsu, and is refining the use of tabla on the cutting edge of jazz in the ensemble Pro Viso. He trained in tabla in Philly under Lenny Seidman, in India on a Fulbright Fellowship under Pandit Arvind Mulgaonkar, and at Wesleyan University under Ray Spiegel.
Photo © Jacques-Jean Tiziou / jjtiziou.net
