Kaki King, Lee Ranaldo, Buke & Gase and Twi The Humble Feather premiere scores to silent films by Buster Keaton
Merkin Concert Hall
Kaufman Center
129 West 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam) New York, NY 10023
212 501 3330
Tickets:
$25.00
Groundbreaking guitarists premiere original film scores for silent films by Buster Keaton.
Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth & Buster Keaton's Cops (1922)
Kaki King & Buster Keaton's The Scarecrow (1920)
Twi The Humble Feather & Fatty Arbuckle/Buster Keaton's The Garage (1920)
Buke & Gase and excerpts from Buster Keaton's The General (1926)
Co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo is #33 on Rolling Stone's list of “Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” He will perform the New York premiere of an original score (commissioned by the Krannert Cente for the Performing Arts) to Buster Keaton’s 1922 silent film Cops, a short comedy about a young man who gets on the bad side of the Los Angeles Police Department during a parade and is chased all over town. Keaton’s response to the 1921 Fatty Arbuckle scandal - the actor/director was accused of assaulting and accidentally killing a woman, a charge that ended his career even though he was eventually acquitted by a jury - Cops portrays a well-intentioned man who just can’t win, no matter hard he tries.
- "Normally I couple my abstract guitar explorations with equally abstract films, but in this case I'm really looking forward to applying the sounds I make to the magical world of Buster Keaton films and his distinctive brand of physical comedy. It should be an interesting and unexpected combination..." – Lee Ranaldo
The sole woman and the youngest artist in Rolling Stone's 2006 list of "The New Guitar Gods" list, Kaki King collaborated with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. She will perform an original score to Buster Keaton’s 1920 short comedy Scarecrow, in which Keaton plays a young man whose pursuit of a farmer’s daughter takes an unexpected turn when he falls into a hay thresher and ruins his clothes.
ABOUT LEE RANALDO
Member of Sonic Youth, now in 30th year; composer/visual artist/writer etc. Recent live performances with partner Leah Singer, Contre Jour, have been large scale, multi projection quadraphonic sound+light events, w Lee performing suspended electric guitar phenomena. A solo song LP was completed this summer and will be released in March 2012, with band tour at that time. Playing on the album: Steve Shelley, Nels Cline, John Medeski, Alan Licht, Jim OʼRourke and Bob Bert.
Leeʼs visual and sound works have been on view this year in gallery and museum shows in Bratislava Slovakia, Auckland New Zealand, Salt Lake City Utah and in Brooklyn and Manhattan, NYC.
Recent solo recordings include Les Anges Du Peche: Thurston Moore/Jean-Marc Montera/Lee Ranaldo: guitar duets [Dysmusie, 2011]; and Afternoon Saints: The Shirley Jangle (with Christian Marclay, Gunter Muller, David Watson) [Kraak, 2009].
His latest collection of writings, Against Refusing [2010, Waterrow Press], enlists internet spam as a springboard for poetry.
Lee Ranaldo en Santiago de Chile from alejandra paz on Vimeo
ABOUT KAKI KING
Katherine Elizabeth King, known by her stage name Kaki King, is an American musician and composer. King is known for her percussive and jazz-tinged melodies, energetic live shows, unique use of multiple tunings on both acoustic and lap steel guitar, and her diverse range in different genres.
In February 2006, Rolling Stone released a list of “The New Guitar Gods”, with King as the sole woman and youngest artist honored. In addition to a 10-year career that includes five LP and two EP albums, King has also spent significant time scoring music for television and film. She worked alongside Eddie Vedder and Michael Brook contributing the music for the soundtrack to Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, for which King, Vedder and Brook were nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
King was born August 24, 1979 in Atlanta, Georgia, the first of two daughters. While King was a small child, her father noticed her natural musical ability, and encouraged her interest in music. She was introduced to the guitar at the age of four and played for several years, but after taking up the drums a few years later, they became her primary instruments as an adolescent.
Convinced that her break in music would come from being a drummer, King played in bands in high school with classmate Morgan Jahnig, who would later become the bassist of Old Crow Medicine Show. Upon graduating from The Westminster Schools in Atlanta in 1998, the two friends made their way to New York University. During her time there, King picked up the guitar again, and revisited the finger-style techniques that intrigued her as a child. From there, King played a few occasional gigs and busked in the New York subways.
ABOUT BUKE & GASE
Brooklyn-based BUKE (byook) & GASE (gace) are Arone Dyer on the “buke” (a self-modified six-string former baritone ukulele) and Aron Sanchez on the “gase” (a guitar-bass hybrid of his own creation). Both of them play double duty, also mobilizing a small army of foot percussion. These instruments are then filtered through various pedals, amplifiers and homemade inventions to create a surprisingly complex sound. Dyer’s supermelodic vocal lines weave through the beautiful yet unwieldy musical matter, balancing light and dark, calamity and control. Their musical multi-tasking makes for live shows that are visually unexpected and sonically explosive.
In 2009, Brassland co-founders Aaron & Bryce Dessner of The National (well, technically, their sister) discovered BUKE & GASE when they played Sycamore, the basement venue down the street from The National’s home studio in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. They were blown away by how much noise and rhythm was emerging from this two-piece band.
Dyer and Sanchez had formerly been bandmates in the post-punk noise group Hominid who, after touring with The Fall in 2004, fell to their demise and disbanded. Sanchez went on to form Proton Proton (which opened for Deerhoof and Les Savy Fav) and Dyer took a three-year musical hiatus and became obsessed with racing her bicycle as a form of masochistic entertainment.
In 2007, pining for a new direction, the two regrouped. After much alchemizing they discovered their nascent sound while tinkering with their distinctive homemade gear: a bass drum with an integral snare drum and tambourine, ankle-played bells, toe-bourine, a cameo-ing homemade bulbul tarang and, of course, the eponymous buke and gass. For the geekly inclined: the buke and the gass both have multiple audio outputs that either go to their respective amps or are managed by various audio mixers, distortion boxes, and pitch shifters. (NOTE: no loop pedals are used, every sound is made live.)
Officially forming in 2008, BUKE & GASE self-released their debut EP +/- in late 2009. (It’s now available digitally via BandCamp and as a hand-stamped limited edition CD.) Since then they’ve received a stready stream of attention. They were on NPR’s nationally syndicated Radiolab (featured on two podcasts), New York scene rag The Deli Magazine named the group “local band of the month” and put them on their cover, and Stereogum covered them in a Quit Your Day Job piece about their interesting careers.
2010 kicked off with hibernating in Sanchez’s basement recording studio, Polyphonic Workshop, where they self-produced a full-length record for release on Brassland.
