Rick Walker
www.looppool.info

Rick Walker's looppool brings found sound, live looping.digital sound design, lo fi toy video 'animations' and lighting/theater elements to create a fascinating romp through the world of unusual sight and sound.
He has appeared as a solo artist in 15 different countries.

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, he has been on the cutting edge of music for over thirty years as a chief instigator of the World Beat movement in the early1980's and the International Live Looping Movement
in the Naughties.. He also produces the world's largest annual live looping festival in California.

He also designs innovative hardware and software technology in the digital sound. live looping world for the LOOPERLATIVE Looper and his own digital effects company, OUT OF THE BOX FX.

Currently, he's trying to kick start a tiny grass roots, lo fi toy digital abstract video movement and is obsessed with manipulating noise for some odd reason.

David Grollman and Valerie Kuehne

David Grollman and Valerie Kuehne are a duo of cello and drums who play freely improvised music. Both musicians are from New York City. They have played in various performance spaces in New York. They excel in bowing, scraping, slapping, rubbing and hitting their instruments.

Johanna Kirk
www.jojomovingservice.com

Johanna Kirk danced with Balance Dance Company before attending Columbia University. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with degrees in Dance and Visual Art. Until recently, she lived in New York, working as a free-lance dancer, journalist and choreographer. Research for her art and writing took her deep into the NYC ballet community, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Centre National de la Danse outside of Paris, and to Guinea. Joh currently works for Drop Dance Collective.

Heidi Kraay
http://theboisepicayune.blogspot.com
http://heidikraayfortheboisepicayune.blogspot.com

Heidi is thrilled to be writing a play for B-CIMF, collaborate with Jared and other talented artists and see ROBOTS come alive. She earned a BA in Theatre Arts at Boise State University, focusing on dramatic writing and design. She has been a craftsperson and technician for Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Shakesperience Tour for ISF, Boise Contemporary Theater, Velma V. Morrison Center, Texas Shakespeare Festival and New Heritage Theatre. Beyond the stage, Heidi braved military simulation exercises in the wardrobe tent and helped the scenic artists create a Masaii Village in Zoo Boise's African Exhibit. Most recently, Heidi stage managed the Visual Arts Collective's Rotating Tongues: 2 music festival and performed a self-written piece at the Gallery Alexa Rose. She gets to promote local arts and music for The Boise Picayune. Excited to write and make theatre all life long, Heidi is eager for her next creative adventure

Gretchen Jude

I enjoy playing with sounds & images in space & time. My works explore the boundaries of natural-artificial, human-machine, near-far, me/you/us. Recently, someone defined improvisation for me as simply "having fun trying new things." I'm trying to learn how to do that more and more, with a bigger & more open heart

Triptet
www.triptet.com

A cataclysmic meeting of universal forces: John Cage and Sun Ra perform together at Coney Island in 1986. This explosion of matter created an un-earthly fertile ground for sound. 22 years later, Triptet arrives. This bi-coastal group had its earthly debut at the IS THAT JAZZ festival in January, 2009.

The group spends most of their time inventing modes of flight, and trying to get lift. They practice and practice, working on the length of the running start, size and texture of the wings, the speed and rate of acceleration of the flapping. They have enjoyed momentary freedom from gravity, and vow to keep trying for sustained orbit. Meanwhile, they also play music, exploring the space between Sun Ra and… Space. Triptet is a meeting of minds and spontaneous electrical impulses between Michael Monhart (saxophones and percussion), Tom Baker (guitars and effects), and Greg Campbell (percussion and cheap electronics).

Rob Wallace / Colter Frazier
website

FORMED IN 2005 IN SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, THE DUO OF COLTER FRAZIER (TENOR SAX) AND ROB WALLACE (PERCUSSION) CREATES FREELY IMPROVISED MUSIC DRAWING ON A WIDE RANGE OF INFLUENCES, FROM JAZZ TO ELECTRONIC NOISE. THEY HAVE PERFORMED THROUGHOUT THE U.S. AS A DUO AND AS MEMBERS OF LARGER ENSEMBLES, INCLUDING FRAZIER'S DISTINCTIVE QUARTET. IN 2008 THEY MADE THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE AT THE BOISE EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC FESTIVAL, PLAYING IN A TRIO WITH BASSIST JIM CONNOLLY.

FRAZIER BRINGS YEARS OF EXPERIENCE IN A WIDE RANGE OF MUSICAL GENRES TO HIS ROLE AS CURATOR OF THE SANTA BARBARA NEW MUSIC SERIES, A MONTHLY CONCERT PROGRAM SHOWCASING MUSICIANS FROM AROUND THE WORLD, INCLUDING VINNY GOLIA, BILLY MINTZ, ALICIA MANGAN, EUGENE CHADBOURNE, AND COSMOLOGIC.

WALLACE CURRENTLY RESIDES IN CANADA, WORKING AS A MEMBER OF THE INNOVATIVE IMPROVISATION, COMMUNITY, AND SOCIAL PRACTICE PROJECT BASED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH. HE WILL DISCUSS THIS PROJECT, AND THE ROLE OF IMPROVISED MUSIC IN SOCIAL CHANGE, ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON AT THE FESTIVAL.

THE DUO’S EPONYMOUS ALBUM WAS RELEASED IN NOVEMBER 2007 ON pfMENTUM RECORDS.
"Possesses musical challenges and intrigue at every turn"--Exclaim! Magazine
for more info visit www.colterfrazier.com and www.pfmemtum.com

Strangelet (Lucio Menegon)
www.kingtone.com

Strangelet is the soothing cacaphony of Oakland, CA based improvisational sound artist Lucio Menegon. Lucio has performed and collaborated with a plethora of renowned rock, experimental and new music artists including Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Moe! Staiano! Carla Kihlstedt, Jonathan Segel, Mark Degli Antoni and Devin Hoff.

Strangelet: If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This "ice-nine" disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

Jim McAuley
website

Once described as “the only guitarist who has played with both Frank Sinatra and Nels Cline”, Jim McAuley has been integral to the LA creative music scene for over 30 years.

After a brief stint as a commercial session musician in the early 70’s, he began focusing on his original solo material, quickly landing a contract with John Fahey’s Takoma label in 1976. In the eighties he gravitated toward “outside” jazz improv and was honored to perform and record with such LA legends as John Carter, Horace Tapscott and James Newton. He earned his MFA at CalArts in ‘91 (mentored by Frederick Rzewski, David Behrman and others) and in ‘94 formed a collective called Gongfarmer whose revolving roster included Alex Cline, Jeff Gauthier, Marty Walker, David Johnson and other new music stalwarts. 2001 saw the release of “Acoustic Guitar Trio”--Nels Cline, (the late) Rod Poole and Jim McAuley--on Derek Bailey’s Incus imprint. Wire Magazine hailed the album as “displaying the range, strength, boundary crossing and genre-melding fertility of contemporary improv” and “high on the list of favourite releases for this year.”

McAuley’s first solo outing, “Gongfarmer 18” (Nine Winds Records) received a similarly warm reception from critics, landing on the “Best of 2005” lists in numerous major publications. Cadence Magazine called it “a mood-altering and mind-bending album...He makes his instrument hum with excitement while stepping away from rigidity and into an open and free world of music” , while the Wire simply declared it “great stuff.”

A double-CD set of duets is scheduled for a June ‘08 release from Canada’s Drip Audio. It features (the late) Leroy Jenkins, Nels Cline, Alex Cline and Ken Filiano. Like all of McAuley’s music, it promises to deliver what the LA Times has called “genuinely evocative and refreshingly cliche-bashing work.”

Floomdorm
myspace.com/floomdorm

Emily Hay & Motoko Honda
www.emilyhay.com/
www.myspace.com/motokohonda

Emily Hay is a flutist, vocalist and pianist who extends the traditional roles and capabilities of her instruments. She combines complex contemporary classical technique with the spontaneity of improvisation from the amygdala to form startling interpretations of sound and intense ensemble interaction. Her explorations on the flute and alto flute embody unusual tone colors and soaring rhythmic structures, augmented by electronically generated effects and often overlapped by unusual vocalizations ranging from primal to operatic with lyrics and sounds from the stream of consciousness.

Hay is an active member of the Los Angeles and "left coast" music communities, and has performed in avant garde, art rock, free improvisation, electro-acoustical and contemporary classical ensembles such as U Totem, The Motor Totemist Guild, The 5 UU's , Otherparts, I Am Umbrella, Adam Rudolph's Go Organic Orchestra, The Emily Hay Collective, The Rich West Ensemble, The Jeff Kaiser Okodektet and The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble. Recordings of her work have been released on Cuneiform Records, Recommended Records, Nine Winds, Meta, pfMentum, Public Eyesore and Dragnet Records. She has toured and performed throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S. with concert highlights at the Bimhuis/Amsterdam, the Ottomat/Italy, New Music America Festival/Montreal, Art Rock Festival/Frankfurt, Kulturni Dom/Yugoslavia, Staion de Art Sankt Peter/Cologne and the Reithalle/Switzerland.

Hay has also worked in music business and legal affairs with a specialization in contract and copyright law. She has represented prominent music talent as a paralegal for several top Los Angeles entertainment law firms, supervised film and television soundtracks and held executive positions at major film studios.

Emily Hay co-hosts the radio show, "Trilogy", on KXLU 88.9FM Los Angeles (and at www.kxlu.com) which features music of the avant-garde, free jazz, improvisation, experimental and electronic music genres. Hay was formerly music director for the Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice, CA where she curated and promoted live experimental music events for many years.

Born and raised in rural Virginia, Emily Hay received a BFA in music from Bard College in New York and an MFA in music from California Institute of the Arts.

Motoko Honda was born in Yokohama, Japan, moved to Sendai, Japan, and began studying both piano and transcription at age four. She showed interest in anything artistic, and received the first silver medal from the city for her painting, as well as the national government prize for the Japanese Calligraphy, and numerous awards for music compositions. She transcribed by ear many folk and pop songs and made arrangements for her school ensembles, also organized the theater group called “Aozora” which had public performances of her first musical theater script while she composed and improvised all the sound effects and music live.

Motoko currently lives in downtown Los Angeles, CA, she is a founding member of Los Angeles Piano Unit, a group dedicated to perform all kinds of piano music from classical to experimental. She is also a member of M. Rare Trio, and a founder of Okiro music Series and Ensemble. She is currently working on the “Sound Escape Project", an experimental collaboration with some of the greatest improvisers in the world.

Ted Killian
www.pfmentum.com/flux.html

For over four decades Ted Killian has explored his own personal approach to guitar playing and music-making in both solo performance and in ensembles alongside such luminaries as John Bergamo, Dick Dunlap, Jim Connolly, Bob Sterling, Garen Horgen, Josef Woodard, Richard Fernandez, and Jeff Kaiser. Ted's playing spans the distance from the tender to the brutal, and his CD Flux Aeterna has achieved a surprising amount of worldwide airplay and critical acclaim.

Kribophoric
www.kribophoric.com

KRIBOPHORIC EVOLVED AS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN DRUMMER/PERCUSSIONIST BOB STERLING AND ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC GUITAR PLAYER KRISPEN HARTUNG. LIVING IN DIFFERENT CITIES, THEY DECIDED TO EXCHANGE SOUND FILES BASED ON SPONTANEOUS IMPROVISATIONS AND THEN DEVELOP SOUNDSCAPES, SONGS AND TONE POEMS BASED UPON THEIR SHARED IDEAS. AS EACH PIECE DEVELOPED, THEY WOULD ADD IMPROVISATIONS AND AURAL MODIFICATIONS IN ORDER TO DEVELOP A FULLY-REALIZED COMPOSITION. OVER THE COURSE OF SEVERAL MONTHS THEY ACCUMULATED A SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF WORK WHICH THEY INTEND TO RELEASE AND SHARE WITH YOU. THEIR FIRST COLLECTION, 'VISCERAL,' IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A CD OR AS INDIVIDUAL MP3 FILES.
BOB AND KRISPEN HAVE NOT LIMITED THEMSELVES SOLEY TO THEIR PRIMARY INSTRUMENTS AND HAVE MADE USE OF A NUMBER OF OTHER INSTRUMENTS AND TECHNIQUES IN ORDER TO ENHANCE THE COMPOSITIONS AND PRODUCE WHAT THEY HOPE IS AN INTERESTING EXPERIENCE FOR THE LISTENER.

CONSTANTLY EVOLVING, THE INSTRUMENTS AND IDEAS WILL CHANGE AS THEIR EXPERIENCE AND IMAGINATION ACCRUE AND GROW.

Erin Van Engelen

Erin has been working in various theatre roles in Boise for almost ten years and is very excited to be part of her very first Creative and Improvise Music Festival. She holds a Bachelors degree in Theatre from Boise State and enjoys the life that theatre is bringing to the valley on a regular basis. She would like to thank Kevin for encouraging and supporting her everyday.

Christian Asplund
http://christianasplund.net

Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer (on viola, harmonium and piano) based in Utah where he is Composer-in-Residence at Brigham Young University. He co-founded Seattle Experimental Opera which has produced seven of his operas. He has performed with
such musicians as Christian Wolff, Eyvind Kang, Larry Polansky, Daniel Good, Francois Houle, Michael Bisio, Robert Reigle, Tom Baker, Greg Campbell, Jessica Lurie, Amy Denio, Gino Robair, and Phil Gelb in a variety of venues and recordings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His scores
are published by Frog Peak Music. He appears on CDs on Tzadik, Present Sounds, Sparkling Beatnik, Maritime Fist Gleeclub, and Comprovise Records.

Of his music, Stuart Dempster has said, “Asplund, in his well-crafted compositions, delightfully teases us on those slippery slopes between composition and improvisation,” while a jazz reviewer has said Asplund’s music “walks a squiggly line that passes through jazz…, free improv, rock, funk and a whole spectrum of ‘modern classical’ styles, including minimalism, serialism and a handful of other ‘isms’...” Other words used by reviewers to describe his music include: passion, panoramic power, pure pointillist, plaintive, painstaking, rhythmically toothy, rocking, remarkable, rollicking, searing, subdued, soothing, submersive, splendid, unique, enjoyable, ethereal, mesmerizing, mind-blowing, otherworldly, absorbing, intelligent, idiosyncratic, distinctive, captivating, bewitching.

Loren Reed (Visual Artist)
www.myspace.com/lorenjosephson

Loren Reed is a native of Idaho

Aaron Davis

Aaron Davis has been involved in all three previous versions of B-CIMF, not as a performer, but engaged in the attempt to make the performances sound as good as possible, by doing all of the live sound-engineering and recording. Aaron particularly enjoys the challenges involved in running live sound for experimental and improvised music, where a performance played on grand piano may be followed by someone playing a powered miter-saw or a microwave oven. Aaron has also chosen the song excerpts from previous festival performances that are available for purchase on commemorative CD's of each festival.

Aaron has been a musician since the age of six, playing primarily piano and keyboards, but also being fairly accomplished in hand-drumming, and barely-competent on the guitar. In the past, Aaron has played keyboards in a fusion group with the festival coordinator, Krispen Hartung, and has also played with many other musicians in various projects. He is, however, a somewhat agoraphobic misanthrope who doesn't get out much.

Aaron listens to music of almost all types, and dreams of one day starting a non-theistic hedonistic religion which seeks to increase people's level of pleasure through intensive sessions of listening to music in darkened rooms on high-end stereo equipment.

In this year's festival, Aaron will be playing piano, accompanied by Krispen Hartung, and there's no telling what it will sound like. He will also again be running sound for the festival - so he apologizes in advance for any screw-ups that may occur.

C. K. Forest

LIGHTSTALKERS.ORG/C4EST

Visual artist Charles Forest is an active artist working and living in the Boise Idaho area. He has a strong foundation in photography, video and mixed media art. Forest is well versed in many aspects of visual arts and has extensive experience and a diverse skill set for his young career. Forest has a passion and love for the arts that compels him to submerge himself into his projects with complete dedication in a many different mediums. Forest's love for imagery has allowed him to complete a great deal of projects and work with many artists and production companies; this has also allowed Forest to excel quickly obtaining positions of responsibility early in his career. Forest has a keen photographic eye, a sense of anticipation and the patience needed to capture compelling images at exposure. He has the ability to covey feeling and emotion through properly orchestrated imagery. Forest has demonstrated a track record of initiative and achievement while seeking out projects and obtaining private/commercial industry and art project experience. He is consistently expanding job description boundaries, volunteering, learning fast and being selected for positions of responsibility within the commercial film, photography and media industry.

In the early summer of 2008 Forest was diagnosed with Crohns disease. This de-habilitating disease took Forest close to death and into the hospital. Abandoning western medicine, with extreme determination and discipline Forest is overcoming his disease, wining his remarkable battle for good health on a daily basis. This experience has changed the way in which Forest views life, love, values and his art for the better and has opened a new level of intimacy with his work that promises to be riveting. Forest wishes to compel his audience to experience the joy for life that he has, and hopes his life and art will be an example and inspiration for all to enjoy.

Forest is a second generation photographer, following in his mothers footsteps, he has had a camera in his hand since he was a small child. Forest enjoys, adventure, the outdoors, the arts and music, the value of relationships as well as the simple pleasures and joys found in everyday life. Forests love for the outdoors and passion for humanity has propelled him into a life of activism. Forest is currently engaged in an ongoing environmental awareness campaign (Earth is Ill project) shedding light on glacial recession, global climate change and international health issues.