Anne La Berge - flute and electronics
Tom Baker - guitar, theremin, and electronics
Sand is the first duo album from Anne La Berge and Tom Baker. These two electronic artists began recording and performing together in 2013, setting the stage for this deeply collaborative project. Recorded in both Amsterdam and Seattle, the album melds their unique performance and compositional styles into a sound experience that is strange and exciting, reflective and raucous, direct and expansive, all at the same time.
With Baker on electric guitar, theremin, and a suite of analog and digital effects in his live-performance rig, and La Berge on flute, voice, and live electronics including Kyma and Max, the music flows with international and intergalactical good vibes.
Anne La Berge
“La Berge is a precursor the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean.”
– The Wire
Anne La Berge’s passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to the fringes of storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. She performs as a multimedia soloist and in projects both live and online and is one of the composer/performers in the Amsterdam based ensemble MAZE.
She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt, Data, verz, Real Music House, Relative Pitch, Carrier and Splendor Amsterdam labels. Her music is published by Frog Peak Music and Alry Publications; and her Max-patch based compositions are available from her privately.
Anne is a founding artist of the Splendor Amsterdam collective of musicians who have transformed an old bathhouse in Amsterdam into a cultural mecca, where she regularly produces and shares small scale concerts with international guests.
Anne is the Managing Director of the Volsap Foundation that produces innovative music projects. She works as an improvisation and live electronics coach worldwide and is currently coaching at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague.
Tom Baker
“Think of Baker’s music as the acoustical rendition of a Jackson Pollack painting.”
— Twenty-First Century Music
Tom Baker is a composer, guitarist, improviser, and electronic musician who has been active in the Seattle new-music scene since arriving in 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), and founder of the new-music recording label Present Sounds Recordings.
Tom’s compositions have been performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. He writes chamber music, opera, and electronic music, as well as music for percussion, chamber orchestra, dance, film, and chorus. His work traverses themes of grief, loss, redemption, and perseverance, through a combination of sound exploration, electronic improvisation, and musical form and structure. He has been in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Art and the Montalvo Arts Center, and his music is published by Frog Peak Music.
Tom is also a scholar and educator and has recently presented work to the Society for Minimalist Music in Wales UK, and to the International Conference on the Arts in Society in Vancouver BC. He is a Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts where he teaches composition, music theory, and electronic music.
As a performer and improviser, Tom specializes in fretless guitar and live-electronics. His band TRIPTET recently released its fourth album, Slowly, Away, on Engine Records, and the Tom Baker Quartet will release its third album in 2023. His electronic-interactive-arts collaboration with visual artist Robert Campbell, Manifold2, was included in the MoxSonic festival, and excerpts from their new opera-in-progress called The Language of Change were featured in the Current’s New Media festival.
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