Thomas Ankersmit

THOMAS ANKERSMIT
(solo piece for Serge modular synthesizers)
JASON LESCALLEET
(solo piece for tape, electronics, and laptop)

Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02116
8 p.m. / $15 gen admission/$12 students with ID
617.262.6050


Thomas Ankersmit is a musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. His main instruments are the Serge analogue modular synthesizer, computer and alto saxophone. He frequently works together with New York minimalist Phill Niblock and electroacoustic artists Valerio Tricoli and Kevin Drumm. At the time of the performance, he will have just completed a visiting artist residency at CalArts.

“Ankersmit constructs a musical world that feels alive and capable of going anywhere, and yet also manages to give the music a strong sense of structured purpose, a degree of compositional control unusual in this area of live performance. It is the fine balance between the sense of chaos that threatens to pull everything apart and the controlled formation of the music into clearly defined sections of differing intensities that raises the work above that of so many of Ankersmit’s contemporaries.” —Richard Pinnell, The Wire

JASON LESCALLEET makes his music using a collection of vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders and simple electronics, running loops of crumpled tape between machines. He blends layers of found sound, amplified silences, and artifacts of everyday noise, all transformed through various microphones and speakers. Lescalleet has built a reputation for delivering a visceral live experience in his concert performances. He lives in Maine.

“t’s hard to think of anyone else who can render the sound of nada with such physicality and make even the most barren sonic palette seem oddly expressive. This Is What I Do is a trip to the furthest extremes of sound and the kind of immersive sonic experience that is truly brain-bombing with a set of headphones and that takes over whatever space it plays out in.” — David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue