False Harmonics #1: Nate Wooley’s Columbia Icefield (feat. Mary Halvorson, Susan Alcorn & Ryan Sawyer), MV Carbon

Columbia Icefield is music that attempts to balance opposites: lyricism and spiky dissonance, highly personal improvisation with a defined compositional sound world, and a still minimalism with a spontaneously ecstatic quality. Made up of some of the most interesting improvisors in America today, trumpet player and composer Nate Wooley has gathered guitarist Mary Halvorson, pedal steel player Susan Alcorn and drummer/singer Ryan Sawyer. Inspired by the difficult quiet of the location that gives this band its name, Columbia Icefield will work through a new set of compositions and improvisations that move each player in a new direction, toward stillness.

MV Carbon is an artist and composer whose work encompasses live performance, sound art, painting, sound for film, and multi-media installation. Her current work explores interchangeability, the human mechanism, perceptive states of consciousness, habitat, animism, and the empirical force of nature. In live performances, a non-traditional approach to music is embraced with the use of electric cello, sculptural sound objects, gongs, amplified objects, oscillators, and hand constructed instruments. Carbon reinterprets the physical form associated with virtuosity, and challenges the way a musical instrument is defined, and approached. She is interested in the psychological effect of sound and works to heighten our senses through spatial, psychic, and temporal based explorations.

About the Series
False Harmonics is a monthly series of new music meant to explore alternative approaches to composition, improvisation and performance. Each installment of the series will feature two unique performances meant to contrast, yet compliment each other.