Group Name: Open Music Ensemble

When/Where playing this week? Thursday March 30 at 5pm, UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, University at Buffalo North Campus.

Band Members/Names/instrument…

Jenece Gerber, Voice; Rob Phillips, Speaker/Mime/Trombone; Todd Whitman, Saxophones; Steve Baczkowski, Low Reeds; Andrew Walsh, Contrabassoon; J.T. Rinker, Trumpet; Will Redman, Percussion; Casey Farina, Percussion; Otto Muller, Accordion/Piano; Bill Sack, Electric Guitar/Oboe; Ben Harris, Violin; Leah Muir, Voice/Piano/Violincello; Josh DeScherer, Contrabass; Chris Reba, Contrabass

When did the band form? The original band started off as “Augenmusik” in 2002. There were some changes made to the band as it switched its name to the Open Music Ensemble in 2004. Now the group consists of over a dozen performers and composers working in the Western New York area.

You might like our music if you like… John Cage, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Bill Dixon, Milford Graves, John Zorn, free improvisation, avant-garde classical music, silence and/or noise.

List of Recorded Releases

OME 1; MoWeR; Bird with Strings; Elephaant.

check out our record labels and order from:

www.erierecordings.com

http://openmusic.us/parabiosis/

Upcoming events: If anyone is in the Boston, Portland or Bennington region the first week of April they might be able to catch a show from the Open Music Ensemble annual tour. The OME is playing in Portland, Maine at Local 188 at 8pm on April 2, Tufts University in Boston on April 3, and Bennington College on April 4 at the Carriaige Barn 8:30pm. Later in the month in Buffalo, Will Redman’s “Book” will be performed at Hallwalls on April 28 at 8pm.

Worst show the band ever played: At the Burchfield-Penney Arts Center we played an improvisation show in which our only audience members were the wives of members of the group. But the recording of the show was terrific.

Best show the band ever played: The Carnegie Arts Center Eyes and Ears show. We interpreted time-based visual scores in the form of video and film projections in a collaborative project set up by Joanna Racynska and Will Redman with the Carnegie Arts Center. Twelve filmmakers from WNY were commissioned to create these scores for our ensemble, and the installation was set up in the gallery for the month of October 2005.

Anything else you would like our readers to know about the band? The Open Music Ensemble is supported by the Open Music Foundation, a not-for-profit organization for composers and artists dedicated to the promotion of artistic expression based on unconventional, experimental, open-form, and especially graphical, forms of communicating musical ideas. By this, we refer specifically to music that explores the relationship between the visual and the musical: how new forms of visual expression on the page can lead to previously-unknown forms of musical expression.

Contact information: Contact us through mail at 453 Auburn Ave. Floor 2 Buffalo, NY 14213 or via e-mail omf.dirs@openmusic.us