5th Annual Transmodern Festival Live.Art.Action

Brooklyn-based artist may be best known for her musical theatrics with band the Tuna Helpers described this way by Westword in Denver, Colorado: “Operatic, piano-anchored spells of art rock that imagine Azure Ray taking up residence in a Neil Gaiman graphic novel: all mystery, melody and magic.”

Adrienne also creates maniacal, frenzied performance art addressing topics such as zombies, brains, love, lesbian sex, and more. Her amazing, edgy work continues to dazzle audiences across the US.

“Though Adrienne may race around stage, kicking and screaming, her piercing eyes bulging out of her head as she releases a glorious yowl, you’d somehow feel at ease leaving her with your children.” — Bitch Magazine

Kevin Blechdom, born Kristin Erickson, is an experimental electronic musician/performance artist from San Francisco, California. She attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she founded Blectum from Blechdom with Blevin Blectum, an experimental electronic group. In 2001, Blectum From Blechdom won an Award of Distinction for digital music at the Prix Ars Electronica.

Kevin also played in an art-rock band, Adult Rodeo, with her brother lumberob, a.k.a. Rob Erickson, and his wife mephany stankins. They released records on Shimmy Disc and Four States Fair.

Kevin Blechdom continues to pursue a solo project. Her latest album, called Eat My Heart Out, was released June 2005, on Chicks on Speed Records. Featured a short 13-minute musical movie called Countdown to Nothing, a collaboration with Lucile Desamory.

Despite her typically masculine first name, she is female.

Blevin Blectum is an electronic musician. Recently relocated from the industrial armpit of Oakland, California, to the humid lovecraftian greenery of Providence, Rhode Island, Blevin releases her soon to be classic fourth solo album, GULAR FLUTTER, on an unsuspecting public via the AAGOO label (New York). Blevin is alternately known as one half of the recently reformed and reunited groundbreaking digital duo Blectum From Blechdom, recipients of the 2001 Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Musics (for their album “The Messy Jesse Fiesta”). Blevin moonlights with audio/video band SAGAN alongside her husband and fellow e-musician Lesser, keyboardist Wobbly, and video artiste enfant terrible Ryan Junell. SAGAN released their debut CD/DVD, “Unseen Forces” on the Vague Terrain label (Matmos’ vanity label) in 2004, and followed it up with limited edition green vinyl 7″ and mini-CD on Oakland’s 333 label (the ‘Resting Pleasures’ EP, 2006). http://blevin.lsr1.com/

Blevin produces continued electronics with a more oblique slant on the basic BFB sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, clanking, creaking grooves and anti-grooves as a coal-powered spacecraft from some steampunk parallel universe potentiality, puffing and straining as it struggles to reach escape velocity, chopped, noise-reduced and timed/stretched to the breaking/boiling point, generally fucked-with samples of everything from hand-slapped rain-drenched leaves in courtship gardens and antique broken Beatnik banks to ProTooledFree classic utterly danceable disembodied-blissful-transvestite-stand-up-comic vocals.

Blevin holds degrees in music from Oberlin Conservatory (B.A., Ohio, USA) and Mills College (M.F.A., California, USA). She was the recipient of a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California. She has toured extensively through the United States and Europe since 1998. In 1999 she was the winner of the 1999 New Langton Arts Music award for her first solo CD “Pirate Planets” on the Phthalo label out of Los Angeles. Her second and third albums, “Talon Slalom” (2004) on Deluxe Records, and “Magic Maple” (2006) on the Praemedia label, were greeted with much critical acclaim.

photo credit: Vinciane Verguethen

Gobolux (Andrew Nelson and KimSu Theiler) is an art collaborative that is interested in the meeting of sound and image. Gobolux formed in 2001 and is still active today. Gobolux makes both single channel video and video installations.

Thus far, Gobolux has had solo shows in the Oslo Open 2003, Norway: General Store, Milwaukee: Bamboo Theater, Milwaukee. Gobolux has also participated in both national and international group shows.

Andrew Nelson is a photographer and studied filmmaking at Mason Gross School for the Arts: Rutgers, New Jersey, USA. In the 90’s he was most active in music bands from the raunchy metal of The Thing, to the experimental folk music of Azalia Snail, and the art punk of Poem Rocket.

KimSu Theiler is a filmmaker of all genres and mediums which is to say she makes everything from narrative film to experimental video. She has made experimental 16mm documentary shorts that have screened at international film festivals and has had solo video exhibitions in the United States and Korea. She received her art education at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York City.

Dynasty Handbag is the solo music/video/voiceover/
comitragic performance vehicle created and executed by Jibz Cameron.

http://dynastyhandbag.com 

Katastrophe (aka Rocco Kayiatos) is a genre-busting, emo-hop mc, whose stunning lyrical skills merge with beats that slide from slick to raw to solid to eccentric, creating a sonic otherworld that snags you in a dance-trance while teasing your head with rhymes that snap, pop and educate.

Recently crowned producer of the year by out music awards, Katastrophe’s beats rev and surprise, inspired by the grime craze and emo scene as well as both traditional and underground hip hop. a hybrid sound that challenges genre, Katastrophe fills his layered beats with lyics that rif on pop culture, slide into personal revelation, call bullshit on contemporary culture, offer a ragged hope for revolution and flirt with a pretty girl on the dance floor, all in the course of a song.

Using his struggle as a trans man and his contested place in contemporary queer and hip hop culture as a springboard to discuss and express larger issues of community, space, privilege, sex and self-worth, katastrophe occupies a singular place in the music underground — brainy and playful, defying genre, keeping listeners on their toes with lyrics that hook and beats that set you moving.

Born in England 1972, Kemp has persisted as a self-taught artist-musician, using prepared/bowed guitar, piano, trombone, vocals, electronics, cassettes, field recordings and turntables. Based in deepest darkest Devon UK, she is a member of London sonic performance group Uniform, co-director of online gallery/forum The Lazarus Corporation, Conductor of Poltergasmic Frequencies for the Performance Thanatology Research Society and has collaborated in various forms with Dual, 2nd Gen, Bark Psychosis, DEFEATIST, the Body Cartography Project, Leechwoman, Vatican X-ray Dept, Hilary Jeffery and Ringo Christ. She is also known as Germseed and has performed in Europe and Japan. For more [dis]information about this person please visit:

http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/v4/galleries.php
http://www.youkneeform.com

Anna Oxygen is a multi-media artist and musician. She has extensively toured Europe and the United States, performing dance pop recitals and fantasy-science pieces. Her audio and video works often deal with interactivity, movement and semiotics in forms of narrative, performance and installation. She has released several albums of electronic music, most recently “This is an Exercise” on Kill Rock Stars. Her solo work has been presented at The Seattle Art Museum, Telic Arts Exchange (LA), NYU, The Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Rohsska Museet in Gothenburg, Sweden. She is also in the multimedia performance group “Cloud Eye Control.” http://www.annaoxygen.com/

Anna Oxygen Press & Reviews:

Seattle Weekly
Portland Mercury
Pop Matters
Pitchfork

DJ Rapid Fire is one of San Francisco’s most adored, and in demand, queer female DJs. Her original style mixes disco, 90s hi-nrg, hip-hop, electronic and dance-pop and continuously sets nightlife trends. Rapid Fire is one of the co-creators and resident DJs of Stay Gold, San Francisco’s favorite dirty queer dance party, as well as resident DJ at Sucker Punch, the city’s popular Monday night hot spot. This fierce femme has heads turning, booties shaking and dance floors begging for more.

Adam Robinson is a writer and musician who lives in Baltimore, MD and works as a technology buyer in the financial industry. He is the founder of the chapbook press Publishing Genius, an editor for the literary journal JMWW, and his poems have appeared in several journals and on numerous stages. He has written a dozen or so articles about Christian rock bands for HM Magazine, and his feature-length slasher-play, The Professor , was staged in Milwaukee in 2005. At the third Transmodern Festival he performed an HL Mencken bioperetta as cARDINAL, which also features Stephanie Barber. Adam currently plays bass in Baltimore’s newest What-Is-It, Hexie Johnson.

Melissa Scherrer grew up in Milwaukee, WI and attended the Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she studied Theatre Arts and mime. After receiving her BFA from UW-Milwaukee in 1999, she worked collaboratively with Milwaukee artists and performed as a mime in the traveling musical “Chaza Show Choir”. During her MFA studies at the University of Illinois Chicago she created a body of photographs narrating her experience of the Midwest landscape. In Chicago she also ran a small gallery out of her living room called “The Greenhouse”. Scherrer now lives in Brooklyn, NY with artist Mike Pare and teaches art and design. Her work has been exhibited at several museums and galleries in the United States and is part of the permanent collection at The Ulrich Contemporary Museum of Art. Currently she writes, makes videos, and takes photographs of the spiritual geography of towns in America. Her latest video piece, Genesis, can be seen at www.mscherrer.com and http://www.myspace.com/melissascherrer

Snacks are Dan Breen and Tom Boram. we built the south beach audio to light modulator but it kept breaking, probably ’cause the integrated circuits were shit. the optocouplers went shit. when it was working it was beautiful. we’d have an invisible kick drum driving a green incandescent right under dan’s drum stool. dan’s snare mic would be driving a blob of blue christmas lights wrapped in 12 feet of saran. tom’s left out would be a randomized patch blinking like a psychopath’s naked pendulous kitchen bulb. tom’s right out would split in the signal multiple made out of an anchovy tin, then one going to the amp, the other driving a blacklight fluorescing a gin and tonic with marshmallows in it.