Gridlords is a narrative arts and performance-based monthly live experience. Its roots are in Portland’s underground and art comics community, starting in April 2012 at the Waypost. With a strong love of interdisciplinary performance and storytelling, and a desire to marry sound and vision in new ways, Gridlords inventor Sean Christensen felt a void of a live experience in the world he knew was possible. He felt its echoes from fragments in memories and saw its potential in his future. Gridlords wishes to be the lectures of Lynda Barry as an explosive inspirational devotional performance piece or the performance pieces of Laurie Anderson as a universe! The world has become used to facing a device that is feeding you animated images and audio messages while your friend is virtually talking to you and your other friend is talking to you in person while facing their own device with a whole other set of stimuli. Gridlords is the stimulus presented all at once for a unified audience with an attention span.
Jesse McManus
Have you ever coaxed a ghost out of a flat surface? Prodded your thick thumbs through a gremlin’s temples? Woken up in a nest of clockwork elves and felt eerily at home? Local basement-dweller Jesse McManus (along with a cadre of bardo-clinging brethren and bloodshot wish-me-nots) will invoke a zone where ungainly teeth overlap and useless limbs sprout like maggots in the compost. Fake names and stretched faces will be hucked at the giggling void’s rictus with the warped hope that something will stick in your cud, before it drips into the plumbing. But with what tools? Homespun comics and animation, tongue-waggling narration, inanimate objects (being broken or misused) and inevitably a sickly burst of sound and vision to bring your ears down to eye-level. if curious, please visit:
cartographyclub.tumblr.com
Mediums (Elysia Avery Nason, Daria Tessler, Sean Christensen A.B.T. & Aaron Dischner)
These 4 artists are presenting a space disco opera. Through sound & vision we follow 3 beings caught in a cosmic net who seem to have some connected purpose. What does space, and time, and fate hold for them in the homunculus? We will find out in the dance.
E*Rock
E*Rock is a multi-disciplinary artist and electronic musician based in Portland, Oregon, who runs the record labels Audio Dregs and Fryk Beat. Most often though his work finds itself home on various forms of music driven media such on the covers CDs, LPs, DVDs, concert posters, magazine covers, zines and also his contributions to music videos and animation have appeared on MTV2 as well as in The Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He has also toured the USA, Japan and Europe with a combination of his video performance and electronic music.
E*Rock will be performing live an Audio Visual set from his new piece called
The Great Underground Empire
for which a cassette was recently released by Gnar Tapes:
https://vimeo.com/70003838
Zach Erickson
Zach Erickson likes experimenting with paper cut outs from drawings or books, and making short sequences with audio. Erickson uses a three-layered glass table for animating which gives him three dimensions of depth for each layer. Erickson is inspired by low-fi '70's and '80's synth sounds and creepy sci-fi absurd funny imagery.
Zach Erickson will be debuting a series of mind expanding animations he made over the last year since his move to Portland, Ore.
MSHR
MSHR is a collaborative audio-visual project by Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy. The duo works across digital, analog and organic media to build synthesizers, installations, recordings and rituals. “A hand tracing a spiral in the wet sand, meshing with the sky to form a nano chip.”
JUDITH EVELYN HARPER ST. CLAIRE’s FIRST ANNUAL SCANDALOUS SPELLBINDING SPIRITUALIST SORCERY SPECTACULAR
Join Judith Evelyn Harper St. Claire and her esteemed nephew of superior breeding stock, Harlequinn Bradshaw St Claire, (along with their HORRID cook, Gertrude), as they evoke vengeful spirits and seek retribution from the town’s gossiping harlots! Converse with the spirits of yesteryear, or parish in the Heart of Merlin’s SHADOW!!!