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Prismatic Xtychs: Meditations on Chance, Choice, and Action

Christina Wheeler

Prismatic Xtychs: Meditations on Chance, Choice, and Action is the second in a series of structured improvisation performances works meditating on chance and choice through gestural and sonic action. The audience hears an invocation/incantation to which they can choose to respond by a series of chance gestures that determine the structure of this premiering sonic performance work. The instrumentation is voice, Array mbira, autoharp, QChord, Theremini, virtual synthesizers, and electronics.

Dates And Times:

Performance Friday June 23, 2023 @ 7 pm

Location:

Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island

FREE

Excerpt from the performance:

Christina Wheeler Photograph by Barron Claiborne

Artist Bio:

Composer, vocalist, multi-instrumental electronic musician, and multimedia artist  Christina Wheeler’s sonic explorations include forays in a myriad of styles and forms. She blends an amalgam of improvised electronic music from an array of sources: processed vocals, vocal loops, hand-triggered sampler, theremin, Q-chord, autoharp, electric mbira, and glass armonica. Previous band projects include Wiremouth, Floating People, and BlowOut, and current and past projects span solo song-cycle series, solo instrumental improvisational compositions, immersive solo and ensemble-based multimedia performance and generative installation projects, and collaborations with Nicole Mitchell, Laraaji, Vernon Reid, Hprizm/Priest, Roscoe Mitchell, and The Bakol, with Greg Tate and Satch Hoyt.

A Los Angeles native, Wheeler is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Manhattan School of Music. She has performed and recorded internationally with numerous artists, including John Cale, Jamie Lidell, Murcof, A Guy Called Gerald, Swayzak, DJ Logic, DJ Olive, Marc Ribot, Chris Whitley, Zeena Parkins, John Carter, Fred Hopkins, and Andrea Parkins. Wheeler was a featured artist with David Byrne: the band toured internationally and performed on The Late Show with David Letterman, and on PBS’s Sessions at West 54th Street. Wheeler performed at Central Park Summerstage’s Joni’s Jazz concert, featuring Joni Mitchell’s music, with Chaka Khan, PM Dawn, Ravi Coltrane, and Vernon Reid.

Wheeler has presented at many New York venues, including Issue Project Room, P.S. 1, Roseland, Bowery Ballroom, Irving Plaza, The Anchorage, The Kitchen, Joe’s Pub, Knitting Factory, Soundlab, Unity Gain, Roulette, and Tonic, where she also curated. At Lincoln Center, she premiered Randall Woolf’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing and reprised the piece with the Sirius String Quartet. The New York Underground Film Festival commissioned her and DJ Olive’s live score for Japanese silent classic, A Page of Madness. She was featured on the New York episode of Tvframes, (Citytv, Toronto). Wheeler collaborated with choreographers Sally Silvers and Jodi Melnick. Wheeler performed with Ryuichi Sakamoto for his Chasm album release, presenting a new solo set remixing the album, and also performing collaboratively with Sakamoto.

She debuted at the Berlin Philharmonie with their Jazz Chamber Ensemble and performed with Murcof at Berghain. Leonardo Music Journal featured her work in their 20^th anniversary “Improvisation” issue. Recordings include work with Vernon Reid, Mocky, Jamie Lidell, Fred P, Benjamin Brunn, Shinedoe, and solo work on Elliott Sharp’s State of the Union. MTV featured her music on their electronic program AMP.

Wheeler collaborated with Laraaji, Vernon Reid, Abdou Mboup, and HPrizm: this concert aired on Roulette TV. Issue Project Room commissioned Part I of her multimedia performance/generative installation work, The Magical Garden: Wheeler is a two-time awardee for Harvestworks Digital Media Center’s Artist Residency program for technology development. She opened JazzFest Berlin in Matana Roberts’ Sextet and performed at 2017 Ableton LOOP Technology Summit. In 2019, Wheeler and Nicole Mitchell opened the Angel City Festival, and Wheeler joined Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago for their 50^th Anniversary album and concert season. The Bang on a Can Marathon commissioned A Coda to the Totality of Blackness Trilogy, and CTM Festival commissioned Surrender to the Totality of Blackness online. MärzMusik Festival/Bang on A Can Festivals commissioned and premiered Wheeler’s piece Missing/Still. Recent featured performances include Rob Mazurek’s opera The Book of Sound at Sons d’Hiver Festival, and the premier of Krists Auzniek’s concerto Four Angles at Ventspils Concert Hall, Latvia. CTM Festival Berlin 2023 premiered Wheeler’s multimedia immersive performance work, The Totality of Blackness Trilogy. Wheeler has released the EP, That Was Then, This Is Now, the album Songs of S + D, and next, will release the album Tres Es un Número Mágico: Kaleidoscopic Triptychs. Wheeler continues to develop and present new, immersive, multimedia works, and to write for her latest instrument, the glass armonicatilia, Brian Harnetty, Phill Niblock, Carolyn Chen, Patricia Alessandrini, Nomi Epstein, Quentin Tolimieri and Christian Wolff, among many others. She can be heard on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Gravity Wave / Erstwhile (US), Edition Wandelweiser (DE), FTARRI (Japan), Infrequent Seams (US), Karl Records (DE), and Editions Verde (US). Katie is working to record a giant multi-year project for solo clarinet in Nancy Holt’s land artwork, Sun Tunnels, in the remote Utah desert. www.fromkp.com

PRESS QUOTES

“…Wheeler is deft at deconstructing sound and form, only to build them back up into aching appeals of spirit…resulting in a a heady tight rope that walks the line between cacophony and bliss.”—Music Fiends

“…Wheeler’s performance charts an evolving praxis catalysed by an unintended moment of resonance, and realised through unwavering engagement with the deepest-seated human impulses.”—CTM Magazine

“…it’s a beautiful thing that Christina Wheeler is using her journey and artistry to not only remind us of all that chaos and its varying after-effects but to let us all know that expressing yourself can be healing as well.”—Global Texan Chronicles

• WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS: website, Facebook, Twitter.

https://www.christinawheeler.com

https://christinawheeler.bandcamp.com

https://www.instagram.com/thechristinawheeler

https://www.facebook.com/ChristinaWheelerMusic

INTERVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE

“Essay: Christina Wheeler on Intersectionality in the Music Industry and Beyond,” Atwood Magazine, 30 March 2022, https://atwoodmagazine.com/whm2211-christina-wheeler-essay-womens-history-month

“CTM 2021: Christina Wheeler – Surrender to the Totality of Blackness” Fact Magazine, February 3, 2021: https://www.ctm-festival.de/magazine/christina-wheelers-totality-of-blackness

“Christina Wheeler’s Totality of Blackness: How Do We Get to Where We Want to Be?” CTM Magazine, February 2021: https://www.ctm-festival.de/magazine/christina-wheelers-totality-of-blackness

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Past performance

Jun 23 · 7:00pm

Harvestworks Studio

596 Broadway #602, New York, NY 10012

Website Bandcamp Instagram Facebook Twitter

Christina Wheeler

Composer, vocalist, multi-instrumental electronic musician, and
multimedia artist Christina Wheeler’s sonic explorations include forays in a myriad
of styles and forms. She blends an amalgam of improvised electronic music from an
array of sources: processed vocals, vocal loops, hand-triggered sampler, theremin,
Q-chord, autoharp, electric mbira, and glass armonica. Previous band projects
include Wiremouth, Floating People, and BlowOut, and current and past projects span
solo song-cycle series, solo instrumental improvisational compositions, immersive
solo and ensemble-based multimedia performance and generative installation projects,
and collaborations with Nicole Mitchell, Laraaji, Vernon Reid, Hprizm/Priest, Roscoe
Mitchell, and The Bakol, with Greg Tate and Satch Hoyt. A Los Angeles native,
Wheeler is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Manhattan School of
Music. Wheeler continues to develop and present new, immersive, multimedia
works, and to write for her latest instrument, the glass armonica.