Library Sounds is excited to announce:
Tim Kaiser and Paul Metzger.
Tuesday Nov, 6th. 8:00. @ The SMFA LIbrary.
Tim Kaiser:
Tim Kaiser has been producing experimental art at various venues for the past 30 years. His video, installation and performance art projects have been presented in Germany, Brazil, Sweden, Hong Kong, Cuba, Canada, Philladelphia, New York and Chicago.Tim has toured his live musical performances throughout the US including New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Detroit, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Providence, Columbus, Asheville, Portland, St.Louis, Nashville and Duluth (the hardest gig to get!)
He has received grants and awards from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, the Duluth Art Institute, the Tweed Museum of Art, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tim has served on the boards of the Duluth Public Arts Commission, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, Zenith City Arts and the Duluth New Music Institute. He has been a panelist for the Minnesota State Arts Board film and video review panel and a volunteer consultant to many arts organizations.
Articles and Reviews of Tim’s work have appeared in Make Magazine, Wired, the Associated Press, Time Out NY, Duluth News-Tribune, Northland Reader, CityPages, ArtPaper, EnGadget, Vinyl, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Daily Collegian, the Smaland Posten, Synthtopia, GigantiCo, MNArtists, StreetTech, Sonic State, BoingBoing, and the New Art Examiner.
Paul Metzger:
Paul Metzger continues to examine the very sinews of the creative process via his homemade 23-string banjo on his second solo album for Locust. Metzger seems concerned with evincing the more sensual aspects of the instrument – caressing the cross strings to provide a sympathetic bedrock of arpeggios while weaving more fractured, raga-ish figures over the frets. He uses the cross strings rhythmically as well as texturally, establishing alternating, upstroke-heavy grooves that are strangely reminiscent of Jandek at his most clip-clop stomping or even acoustic Dylan circa 1975.
It always feels like Metzger is alive to the moment during the six improvisations, or ‘meditations’ as he terms them, that make up this disc. Metzger is well endowed with a powerful, personally honed technique, but The Uses Of Infinity is no onanistic exercise in virtuosity. Far from being seduced by the sound of his own chops, as if the pieces would fizzle out if he wasn’t constantly interjecting, Metzger uses gulps of silence the way sculptors use negative space to shape the music through the tension of anticipation. In this respect, he uses the recording environment – the tracks were recorded live in the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Duluth, Minnesota – as an interactive agent. The pieces follow quiet, clearly intelligible streams of logic, often alighting on an idea as glorious and slight as a harmonic run or bowing the cross strings or abandoning the strings altogether and drumming the hollowed body with his fists.
The Uses Of Infinity feels closest to Sandy Bull’s banjo work at its most introspective, but this comparison might devalue what Metzger has achieved here – something that is all too rare among the deluge of solo guitar players – in creating a voice which is composed, forceful and resoundingly his own.
–Wire, Alex Neilson
