Reviewing

Woody Sullender: Experimental Banjo

Woody Sullender

Woody Sullender is a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz and drones. The performance takes place in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL WAVE(length)s concert series at New York’s historic St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan.

Woody Sullender: Experimental Banjo

WAVE(length)s ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Sunday, July 3, 2011, 8pm (together with TRANSIT)
Location:
THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL
St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Fulton St.
New York

Woody Sullender is a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz and drones. The performance takes place in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL WAVE(length)s concert series at New York’s historic St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan.

Woody Sullender: www.deadceo.com
Woody Sullender is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Over the past decade, Sullender has emerged as a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz, etc..

With technical advising from STEIM, Sullender has been developing an electro-acoustic banjo. Various parameters of computer synthesis and processing algorithms are controlled by sensors on the instrument. The computer-based audio is output to a transducer within the banjo (basically turning the banjo itself into a speaker). More recent work focuses on “erasing” existing known audio, by removing most of the frequencies from a recording via band-pass filters. This has manifested in a range of media from a lathe-cut record of an erased “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to an FM broadcast of erased radio stations.

Previously, he has worked with pioneering electronic composers such as Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher (incorporating his banjo recordings into Amacher’s “TEO! A sonic sculpture” which won the Golden Nica prize at the 2005 Ars Electronica festival). Among other activites, he is occasionally heard DJing on WFMU.

 

Woody Sullender

Woody Sullender is a media artist and musician based in Queens, NY. His
pieces encompass a myriad of media including sculpture, video games, performance,
theater, music, installation, architecture, origami, and sonic weaponry. His recent
work utilizes video game space as an arena to undermine specific modernist
ideologies and rituals of music reception. Previously, Sullender was recognized as a
pre-eminent experimental banjo improviser. Sullender has performed internationally
at venues such as the Kitchen (with Sergei Tcherepnin + Okkyung Lee), Issue Project
Room (Brooklyn, NY), the River to River Festival, the Schindler House (Los Angeles),
Knockdown Center (NYC), SculptureCenter (NYC), Abrons Art Center (NYC), Les Instants
Chavirés (Paris), Chicago Cultural Center, DNK-Amsterdam (with Seamus Cater), and
many others. He recently completed the Art & Code cohort at NEW INC (partnered with
Rhizome and the New Museum) and has been an artist in residence or visiting artist
at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), STEIM (Amsterdam), Harvestworks (NYC), Peabody
Institute at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (NYC) and
Brown University’s MEME program. His work has been reviewed internationally by such
widely disparate publications as Wire Magazine, Art in America, Fast Company, and
Maximumrocknroll. Other projects include the music album “Four Movements”
constructed in video game space, as well as a special music review issue of EAR WAVE
EVENT written entirely by AI. Additionally over the past few years, Sullender has
worked on re-interpreting the work of Maryanne Amacher at venues such as the
Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and REDCAT (Los Angeles) as a member of Supreme
Connections, as well as in collaboration with Daniel Neumann and members of
Yarn/Wire. Among other activities, he is founding co-editor (will Bill Dietz) of the
sonic arts publication Ear Wave Event.