rebreather - free improvised live electronics

rebreather

Abrasive, sparse, ethereal, abrupt, and wistful, rebreather (Alex Keller and Christopher DeLaurenti) improvise live electronic music from the digital glossolalia of sabotaged consumer electronics, homebrew circuits, and obsolete devices.

To book rebreather for a show, presentation, or a multichannel performance installation, contact me.

Culled from live performances, these excerpts have not been edited or processed. Except for the Seattle Art Museum (which is available on the SoniCabal2 cd) and Locus Productions clips full-length versions of all of these tracks were on the (now out of print) rebreather cd compiled by Carl Farrow of Partial Records.

Live at the Rendezvous September 9, 1999 mp3

Chris and Alex crouched by speakers on a sunny day in Ballard. This photo by Josh Keller is the cover of the rebreather cd.

At the gig, the police were quite perplexed by the man in men's bathroom who had piled all his earthly possessions into a corner, dropped his underwear to his ankles, and stood before a urinal for almost an hour. "Taking a long leak is not illegal."

Live at Locus Productions August 10, 2001 mp3 coming soon; this performance was bootlegged...

Chris and Alex
photographed through an outside window by John Bain of the Mutant Data
Orchestra.

rebreather and the Mutant Data Orchestra played a webcast-only double bill. It was hot, cramped, and humid, but we had enormous fun. Good things happen when you drink beer with the MDO!

Live at On the Boards April 3, 2000 mp3

Chris and Alex whirled into a corroded neon vortex at On the Boards; photo by Carl Juarez.

Thanks to Earshot Jazz who books adventurous improvisors for their Voice and Vision series and to the audience who listened carefully and silently to a very, very quiet opening set.

Live at the Zeitgeist Cafe November 3, 1999 mp3

Chris and Alex hard at work in the Zeitgeist Cafe; photo by Troy Swanson.

We performed two lengthy sets for Resonant/Circuit, a now-defunct biweekly series devoted to creative music curated by Paul Hoskin, Angelina Baldoz, and Troy Swanson. Behind us you can see tiny sculptures mounted on sticks poking out from the walls.

octophonic at the Seattle Art Museum February 17, 2000 mp3

Chris and Alex mixing beneath aqueous light at the Seattle Art Museum; photo by Jennifer Keller.

Going octophonic entails bringing lots of speakers (and speaker cable!). Wide-angle mixing and subtle panning enable us to create an immersive sonic environment where the position of the sound means as much as the sound itself.

Some of our guiding principles

Neither opposites nor absolutes, sound and silence comprise a dynamic continuum of musical mass, velocity, and space.

Basking in the danger of live performance, rebreather probes the frontiers of free improvisation with no predetermined sections or foreordained compositions. Prerecorded sounds will be perverted in real time by unpredictable means.

Avoid state of the art sound generating gear. We do use quality mixers and record direct to DAT to document our performances. Resulting recordings remain untouched by compression or other compromising processes.

We coax and exhume whichever sounds we find, fusing them into a sonic conversation of shared solos, duets and, of course, silences.

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