2013: Fuzzybunny

Chris Brown: electronics
Scot Gresham-Lancaster: electronics
Tim Perkis: electronics

Fuzzybunny is a high-powered electronic improvisation and composition trio consisting of Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Tim Perkis. All-out “carnallectual” electronic improv, rocky-roaded with pop-music fragments and sonic gags define some kind of new style, difficult to describe. Edwin Pouncey in The Wire called them “a total meltdown of the senses...a trio of smartarses with nothing to say.”

Chris Brown, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. Collaboration and improvisation are consistent themes in his work, as well as the invention and performance of new electronic instruments. These range from electro-acoustic instruments ("Gazamba," 1982), to acoustic instrument transformation systems ("Lava," 1992), and audience interactive FM radio installations ("Transmissions," 2004, with Guillermo Galindo). As a performer, he has recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, José Maceda, John Zorn, David Rosenboom, Larry Ochs, Glenn Spearman, and Wadada Leo Smith; as an improviser, he has recorded with Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Ikue Mori, Alvin Curran, William Winant, Biggi Vinkeloe, Don Robinson, Frank Gratkowski, and many others. Recent recordings of his music include Rogue Wave (Tzadik); Talking Drum (Pogus); Cutter Heads with Fred Frith (Intakt); and Suspension with the CBD Trio (Rastascan). He is also a member of the pioneering computer network band The Hub, which has just released Boundary Layer, a box set recording celebrating over 20 years of music on Tzadik. He is also a Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.

Scot Gresham-Lancaster (b. Redwood City, Calif. 1954) is a composer, performer, instrument builder and educator with over three decades of professional experience. Since fall of 2012 a professor of sound art with ATEC at the University of Texas at Dallas, his most recent research has been on the boundary between science and art specifically developing advanced techniques in sonification. He is also dedicated to research and performance using the expanding capabilities of computer networks to create new environments for musical and cross discipline expression. As a member of The Hub, he is one of the early pioneers of “computer network” music which uses the behavior of interconnected music machines to create innovative ways for performers and computers to interact. He has recently performed in a series of “co-located” performances collaborating in real time with live and distant dancers, video artists and musicians in network based performances. For over two decades, he has worked with multimedia prototyping and user interface theory and its relationship to new markets as an independent consultant and at Interval Research, SEGA-USA, and Muse Communications. He has toured and recorded as a member of The Hub and Room, Alvin Curran, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, the Club Foot Orchestra, and the Dutch ambient group NYX. He has performed the music of Alvin Curran, Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, and John Cage under their direction, and worked as a technical assistant to Lou Harrison, Iannis Xenakis, and David Tudor, among many others.

Tim Perkis has worked in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, and has performed, exhibited installation works, and recorded in North America, Europe, and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of life-like properties in complex systems of interaction. In addition, he is a well-known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with hundreds of artists and groups, including Chris Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Frank Gratkowski, Luc Houtkamp, Yoshi Ichiraku, Matt Ingalls, Joelle Leandre, Gino Robair, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Elliott Sharp, Leo Wadada Smith and John Zorn. Ongoing groups he has founded or played in include the League of Automatic Music Composers and The Hub -- pioneering live computer network bands -- and Rotodoti, the Natto Quartet, Fuzzybunny, All Tomorrow's Zombies and Wobbly/Perkis/Antimatter. His occasional critical writings have been published in the Computer Music Journal, Leonardo and Electronic Musician magazine. He has been composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland California, artist-in-residence at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, and has designed musical tools and toys at Paul Allen's legendary think tank, Interval Research. His checkered career as a researcher and engineer has brought him a variety of interesting projects, including designing museum displays for science and music museums in San Francisco, Toronto, and Seattle; creating artificial intelligence-based auction tools for business; building scientific experimental apparati; consulting on multimedia art presentation networks for the SF Art Commission and SF Airport; writing software embedded in toys and other consumer products; and creating new tools for sound and video production, research, and analysis. Recordings of his work are available on several labels: Artifact, Limited Sedition, 482, Lucky Garage, Praemedia, Rastascan and Tzadik (USA); Emanem (UK); Sonore and Meniscus (France); Curva Minore and Snowdonia (Italy); XOR (Netherlands); and Creative Sources (Portugal). He is also producer and director of the 2007 feature-length documentary Noisy People, about musicians and sound artists in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Artist (photo by Photographer)